Phase 3: Superimposed Shippos Completed

It's been a while since I posted. I have been working on my JE, but it's been a bit slow going. I've been continuing my superimposed stitching on my shippo cloud. The shippo design is meant to represent overlapping circles, and it's quite a pretty design, but very time consuming. Last time I posted about my shippo cloud, I was slowly working my way across the shippos, stitching over the little cardstock pieces with my three chosen colors of deep teal, golden wheat, and steel-grey periwinkle:


The above photo was taken at about the halfway point. It took me several days to finish, but at last, here are all the shippos completed:


I just adore the colors. They turned out even better than I'd hoped. I really like my golden bullseye on the right side. (That's what it's called when you stitch a complete circle in the same color.) It makes a nice focal point. Just in general, I think this pattern of colors is particularly pleasing. And my weft stitching looks quite smooth, which I'm very happy about. But as satisfying as it was to get to this point, I wasn't quite done yet.

The last step of the shippo process was to do a few short-stitch holding stitches in the center of each circle to hold down the threads that were longer than 1cm. I just did one row of about three stitches in each complete circle center using 1-->2 twisted thread in the same color as the foundation. If you look closely at this next photograph, you may be able to see some faint diagonal stitches in the centers:


Then again, maybe not. 😂 They're not super visible because the angle and the color of the stitches are actually designed to help them blend into the foundation. The thread is also very thin, so if you can't tell the difference, don't worry about it. The point is, the shippos are done!

I still have to add the cloud border at some point, but that's a step that has to wait till almost the very end. My friend Pam, a fellow JE student, said all the fan ribs have to be stitched first, and those have to wait till all the other elements are complete. Also, I still need to learn to make katayori thread to do the borders. So that step will probably be one of my last posts about this project.

In the meantime, here is a photo from a more normal distance so you can get a better feel for how this looks in real life (sometimes the zoomed-in photos don't give you that):


I think it looks really pretty and quite neat overall. It's not flawless, but it was the best I could do at my current level of skill. Unfortunately, you can't fully see the other completed parts of the fan because I stitched quilting paper over them to protect them while I work. And in fact, I have now covered the shippo cloud with quilting paper as well. 

But just think how fun that big reveal will be at the end when I take all the quilting paper off and finally see it all complete! 😊



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