Phase 3: Sayagata Foundation

This past week, I finally got to start the actual stitching for my phase 3 Hiogi fan. It was thrilling to see some color on this piece — and such a lovely color, too! 

I started this piece by stitching the sayagata foundation on the leftmost cloud in weft foundation, using two strands of flat silk in the most beautiful blue:

It's not quite this bright in person; it's just the light I shot the photo in. But I was really pleased with the evenness of my stitches here. The shioze fabric I'm stitching on helps because it has somewhat distinct weft lines, so you can stitch along a line in the fabric to keep the stitches even. The foundation intentionally goes halfway into the border on the right side of the cloud because the box chart says to do that. But that border will be eventually filled in with couched katayori thread, which will cover up those edges.

I kept going with this foundation over several days — it really takes a long time to lay a smooth foundation, but it was coming along very well:

I stitched right up to the left edge where my pattern guideline is, again because the box chart said to do this. I may have pulled slightly too hard on the stitches, which is why they're creating a slight line in the silk on the left edge. But I'm not too worried because that edge will be covered up eventually when I couch down metallic thread around the border of the whole fan. The right edge isn't perfectly even either, but again, it will be covered up by the cloud border, so I'm not overly concerned.

Things were going pretty well up through this point:

I think it looks just beautiful. And the color in this photo is really close to how it looks in real life. But just slightly after this stage, I somehow got off on my weft lines. Even though shioze fabric has somewhat distinct weft lines, they all tend to blur together for me after a while. I have a really hard time seeing them or even following along them with a needle.

So a trick that works for me is to take several needles or pins and poke them along a single weft line, about a centimeter apart:

It's easier to see that you're on the same line over a very short distance than over several centimeters. So I used this trick many times to help me keep things straight and even. I had to remove stitches and redo them a few times, but it's worth it, because look how lovely the foundation turned out:

It's soooo smooth and shiny! I love it. And that color gives me good vibes. 😊 It makes me think of a shallow ocean off a tropical island, where I would very much like to be right now.🌴

Anyway, although the foundation was laid, I wasn't quite done with this cloud. Weft foundation in flat silk is particularly prone to getting damaged. And in fact, a couple of spots on the lower part of the cloud became a little frayed while I was stitching the upper part, so I had to remove small sections and redo them to get it all nice like it is above.

To prevent that from happening as much, I used temporary holding to tie down the foundation. I made a few strands of 1->2 twisted silk in the same color as the foundation and laid them perpendicular to the weft in rows 1cm apart:

I used a laid stitch rather than a satin stitch to save on thread. (I kind of hate making 1->2T threads — dividing up the flat silk strand into four is kind of a pain.) I also went slightly outside the borders of the foundation to make it easier to remove these threads at the end.

The last step was to tie these threads down. Using the same 1->2T thread, I placed stitches at 1 cm intervals along each line:

Although the stitches are 1cm apart on each line, they're just randomly placed across the different lines to try to tie down as many parts of the foundation as possible. This should help keep it nice and smooth until I'm ready to add the sayagata pattern over the top of it.

Once the pattern is done, I can remove the long strands across the foundation, and the tiny holding stitches should sink into the foundation and be invisible. At least, that's what some ladies on FB told me. 😂 This is my first time trying temporary holding, and I was just using instructions I found in various books and on the web, so I have no idea if it's right, but hopefully it is. 

Guess we'll find out at my first class on this phase, which is in a week and a half. I'm going to try to get one more cloud foundation done before then so I have more to work on in class. But not gonna lie, being back at work full time is pretty tiring and I haven't had the energy to stitch this week so far.