Phase 2: Progress on Cords

I have been working on my cords, pretty diligently considering how tedious they are. But progress is admittedly slow. Since I described the process in my last post, I won't go into much detail here. I'll mainly show some pictures of my progress — as evidence that I haven't just been mucking about. 😂

To begin with, that first cord bothered me too much, so I went back and removed the few stitches that had ended up slightly frayed and redid them. It turned out not to be as much of a chore as I thought it would be. And though it doesn't look perfect, it looks better:

I think the transition looks a little smoother now. I still need to work on my transitions, but I have plenty more to do in this piece, so I'll get lots of practice.

Once this was fixed, I moved on to the cords to the lower left of these first ones and did the foreground cord, which is a continuation of the one above, in the soft purple flat silk, using diagonal layer stitches:

I think this curve was much more successful than my first one. So that's some progress.

Next, I moved to the cords to the right side of the fan. I'll show you the padding step here because I took a picture of it this time:

Both the last cord and this one were done with 12 strands of cotton padding, tapered down to 6 strands, then 3, and then snipped off.

Now because of the way the cords swoop around behind the fan, I decided that, on this side, they actually switched position. It looked to me like the purple cord went below the other one. Since the other cord will be in silver and silvery blues, I decided to do this foreground cord in the darkest shade of silvery blue:

Then I did the padding for the foreground cord at the bottom of the fan, again with 12 strands of cotton padding:

Once this was done, I was on a padding kick, so I decided to do the padding for the background cords for the other three sets. Here you can see the top two:

And here's the one on the right:

That's where I stopped. And unfortunately, I sprained my ankle pretty badly yesterday, so I'm having some trouble moving about. I hope I will be able to get back to this soon, but it may be a day or two before I can hobble over there and get set up for a nice long stitching session.

But in the meantime, here's a progress photo showing everything up to this point:

I really love the look of the swirling cords behind the fan. I think they will be even more amazing when they're done, but having this much completed gives me a good feel for how they'll look in the end. It's the motivation I needed to keep going with them. (They really do take a terribly long time to stitch.)

Depending on how I'm feeling when I get back to this, I will either stitch the color onto the bottom foreground cord that's already padded and then pad the final background cord, or I will stitch the color on the background cords at the top. I have options, and options are always good when it comes to JE.