Phase 2: Round and Round Couching, Part 2

I've been working on my round and round couching every day, but I'm afraid it is a very slow process. I have a little progress to show, but I'm nowhere near done. Here is how many rows I had completed by the start of last weekend:

The second and third rows on the bottom, circular section are not as close as I would like them to be, but I was struggling a bit with the technique, and that was the best I could achieve at the time. I'm hoping that when the piece is hung up on a wall, the slight gap won't be that noticeable from a regular viewing distance.

If you look closely at the photo above, you can see that on the fourth row of the circle, I skipped a stitch while doing the bricking because my 2.5mm stitches were getting too close together. I was worried about doing this technique, but it's actually much more subtle than I thought it would be. And the subsequent rows are now much closer to the 2.5mm.

For the straight lines, I kept using the measuring templates because it's actually quite hard to keep the stitches 2.5mm apart, even when I'm just placing the stitch halfway in between two stitches on the previous row:

The templates help me place stitches more evenly, so I use them most of the time. On Sunday and after work this week, I made a bit more progress. Here's everything I've completed on that segment up to this point:

I'm reasonably pleased with how my bricking is turning out. I think it looks rather nice. Unfortunately, I never did get the right angle on the corners between the upper fan blade and the circular part at the bottom. Mary Alice told me to just keep going after my fourth try, but you can see in this closeup photo that it's forming more of a teardrop shape than a circle:

I still think I can make it look nice — the shape in that section won't be exactly how it's supposed to be, but I think it will be pretty. And this isn't the last time I'll be doing this technique, so hopefully next time I can improve on it. I think I have a better idea how to get the right angle now.

On my last round of couching, the circle closed up, so I will have to fill in the center of it later. I will also need to start a new technique the next time I couch down toward the V of the fan blade so that I can keep going in a continuous line. But more about that next time.

In other news, I ordered a bird's-eye maple koma-dai — a little wooden platform that fits over the edge of the frame to hold koma when couching:

It has four little wooden legs, two of which go on either side of the warp bar, like this:

It fits very snugly and gives me just a little extra space to rest my koma on when I'm couching near the edge:

It's a handy little tool and fits the koma nicely. And it's a beautiful piece. I really love bird's-eye maple. Mary Alice's husband, John Sinton, made this for me. I've also asked him to make me a tomo-dai (a wooden platform that fits across the whole frame and serves as an arm rest or a place to put tools) and a second JE frame (because I think I might like to have two pieces going so I can have a bit more variety in my stitching).

And that's my update for now. At the moment, I can really only write about one blog post a week because the things I'm working on take so long to stitch. There's just not much to show on a more frequent basis. So tune in next week for some more progress photos of this section.