Phase 3: Hanabishi Cloud Foundation

I've been working on my hanabishi cloud foundation for a couple of weeks, and I finally finished it this last weekend. Why did it take so long? Because it was involved. Really involved. 😂

I started by twisting 4-->1 thread with 3.5 strands of dark turquoise flat silk and one strand of #1 iridescent green-blue metallic thread. I had to twist a lot of threads, and incorporating metal thread also takes longer because you have to divide the flat silk to accommodate the metal thread and softly twist it before you combine it with the metal thread (which is already twisted).

Once I had enough threads to start, I began the weft foundation:

I started by stitching in every weft valley, but it was a little too close and the stitches tended to bunch up. So I began skipping a weft valley every few stitches to allow the weft stitches to lie a little more flatly and neatly together. Here's the weft stitching complete:

This took me a few days to get through. There are a couple of spots where it was a little bunchy, but it was pretty good, especially on the bottom part, which I did after deciding to skip a row here and there.

Next, I made some 1-->2T silk threads (a tedious and slow process due to the need to divide each strand of flat silk into four sets of three sugas) in the same color and stitched temporary holding lines 5cm apart:

Then I stitched down those lines at 1cm intervals in a random sort of bricking fashion:

These holding threads were all in preparation for the short-stitch holding. Short-stitch holding involves stitching short diagonal threads across the foundation to help secure it. It's especially useful when you're doing superimposed work over the top of the foundation and need it to be pretty stable.

You come up in one thread, cross diagonally over the next thread and stitch down into the following thread, like this:

The stitches are usually about 8-10mm long. It's not always possible to see individual weft threads because they're designed to blend into the twisted silk foundation, so I think it's more about keeping the correct angle. I tried really hard to do that, but the short-stitch holding threads are the same color as the foundation (1-->2 twisted silk), so they're hard to see. But you may be able to tell from the following picture that the upper third has short-stitch holding in place, and the lower two-thirds don't yet:

The bottom part just appears a little more smooth at this stage. One of the ways I tried to keep the angle correct was by pulling the thread down straight like this:

Then I moved it one thread's width to the left:

And then one more thread width to the left:

That was fairly useful for trying to keep the correct angle. And I could usually see at least the previous stitch, even if the vast majority blended in with the foundation. This is what the cloud looked like with the short-stich holding completed:

You can see that the bunch threads have really been smoothed down by the holding threads.

The last step was to carefully remove the temporary holding threads with my tekobari:

The short-stitch holding took about eight hours to do on its own. But here it is all done:

I think it looks very smooth and, most importantly, feels very sturdy and stable. It should be a good foundation for my hanabishi flowers. But before I can do those, I have to stitch down a kikko (or hexagon) pattern, which is also a very time-consuming process. So I will keep working on it, but I have a lot of work to do. Still, it feels great to have this complete. 😊