Phase 3: Tie-Dye Paulownia Leaf

I finally finished the tie-dye effect on my third paulownia leaf. I confess, I didn't love doing this one. I found it a bit fiddly in certain ways, but thankfully it turned out all right in the end. 

As you may recall, I started this leaf with my best weft foundation ever:

And it was grievous to have to disturb all that beautifully smooth flat silk. But alas, you can't really leave flat silk like that because it would eventually get messed up. So you have to tie it down in some way. Hence the tie-dye effect.

The first step in creating it is to make a lattice, the same as in any lattice work. I started by laying stitches in a dark periwinkle-esque blue (3-->1T) at a 45-degree angle to the weft:

I used my triangles and measuring templates to get these stitches very even and precise. And then I stitched in perpendicular stitches, also at a 45-degree angle to the weft, but in the opposite direction:

I was really happy with the lattice at this point because it was so uniform. Now, typically, with lattice work, you would then couch down the corners with a single, tiny stitch in the weft direction. But for tie-dye effect, you do three stitches parallel to each other. Since there are three, they have to be a bit wider than usual so the top and bottom stitches don't pull the lattice out of alignment. Here are my first two attempts:

I think these were pretty good. You can see how they separate the weft foundation a bit — that's intentional. And here are my first three rows of the corner stitches:

It's very hard to make the width of the three stitches uniform in each corner and harder still to make all the corners uniform with each other. Plus, I was annoyed that my corners didn't separate the weft foundation on exactly the same weft line across the foundation. My tutor said this didn't matter, but it bugged me a bit at this point.

After the corners are put in, you have to fill in the center of each square with two small weft stitches. But since these would just sink down into the weft foundation, I first had to place a very small vertical stitch over the weft foundation:

Then I stitched two tiny, parallel, weft stitches over this vertical stitch. Here are a few completed:

Again, it's super hard to make each set of stitches the same width and almost impossible to make all the sets uniform with each other. Sigh. This was the part I found so frustrating.

But again, I let go of perfection and focused on just learning and practicing the technique. In Japanese embroidery, there's a saying: time equals skill. Sometimes you just have to do something over and over till you get better at it. And with that, here are all the corners stitched down, along with two rows of the center stitches:

I don't think my corners look too bad, to be honest. They're not all perfectly uniform, but they're not dramatically different. However, I was a little frustrated that putting in the corners did slightly warp the lattice work even though I tried so hard to avoid that. You can see on the bottom left edge that the lines are angled slightly. Grrr. But that edge will eventually have a border around it that will help cover up the angle, so I decided to leave it rather than redo the whole leaf. But I wasn't terribly happy at this point.

Still, I pressed on. The last step was to complete all the center stitches:

I actually think this looks pretty good. No, my lattice squares aren't perfectly uniform anymore, and no, the stitches aren't all uniform either. But with the center stitches in, it really doesn't matter that the corner stitches didn't separate the weft foundation on exactly the same line in each row. And the good thing about tie-dye effect is it's kind of blinding and hypnotic to look at, so I don't really notice the flaws as much. 😂

Anyway, I think this is fairly decent for a first attempt. I'm sure I can do better next time, but I'm okay with leaving this as a sample of my skills at this point. If at some point, it starts to deeply offend my sensibilities, I can always redo it. 😂 But good enough for now.