Whew! It's been a minute. But as I anticipated, onboarding at my new job has been involved and intense. I've been there a month now and am still taking required trainings to get up to speed. To top it off, I had to go to my builder's design center last week and choose all the finishes for my new home, which took ages to research and decide on. I can't tell you how many Houzz articles I read or HGTV shows I watched. But it was a lot. 😂 Don't get me wrong, designing a new home can be fun and exciting, but it's also a ton of work, very stressful, and subject to frequent frustrations and disappointments.
All that is to say that I haven't had even a moment to think about embroidery over the last month till this weekend. But having cleared everything off my plate before the weekend, I devoted a good many hours to my JE phase 3 piece both days. So I do have some exciting updates to show you.
I continued working on my paulownia buds, padding them in groups and then doing the perpendicular stitching over the padding:
And here they are completed:
With that done, I went back to the dreaded cords. 😂 I don't actually hate the cords; they're just tricky and a bit tedious. And there are so many.
I had previously finished the ones on the right side, but I still had the tassel and the final cord on the left side to do. I started with the tassel because it was in the foreground. Using a softly twisted 4-->1 pale gold, I stitched the tassel in horizontal foundation, gradually changing the angle of my stitches to follow the curve of the tassel:
Here's a closeup of the tassel so you can see the long and short stitches at the bottom a little better:
Then, using a soft twist 4-->1 dark gold, I blended pale gold into the dark gold ruffle by sharing the holes of the light gold stitches, always going down into the shared hole:
Then I filled in the rest of the ruffle with horizontal stitches in the dark gold:
I think it's really pretty. Once I do some short stitch holding and add the Japanese knots, the blend will be a little more seamless. But I still need some guidance on that, so I'm going to wait till my next JE lesson in March.
With the foreground tassel done, I could now go back and finish that last cord in the background. I was doing this one mainly in dark teal, with a subtle transition to light teal:
The transition to the light teal had just finished in the above picture, so I completed the last section of the cord in the light teal:
I just love these colors together. The cords are perhaps not as flawless as I would like, but I do feel like they're pretty consistent at least. And, not gonna lie, it's just such a relief to be done with them! That was a lot of cords, and beautiful as they are, they're not my favorite thing to stitch.
But when I step back and look at the piece as a whole, it was worth all the hours of effort because it's really coming along! Here's a full view of everything I've done so far:
I know it's tantalizing when most things are still covered up in the protective yellow quilting paper (the anticipation is killing me, lolz), but you can at least get an idea of how it's looking overall and a general feel for the color scheme. I think this one is going to be very bold and vibrant. I can't wait to take off the quilting paper and see how it all looks together. But to make sure nothing gets messed up, I really need to wait.
I had to peel up some edges so I could see where to stitch the ends of the cords and paulownia buds, and it was thrilling to see the colors in all their vibrant glory. I think the big reveal at the end will really be something.
I've accomplished a lot, and I'm so proud. But there are still a few things to do:
- the paulownia stems
- the superimposed stitching on the tassels
- the hanabishi flowers in the hexagons on the lower cloud
- the goldwork veins and fan border
- the cloud edges
- the goldwork fan blade along the right side
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