It's been quite a while. I got busy with work, got laid off, conducted an intense job search, and found a new job. All of this was rather time-consuming and stressful, and somewhere in the midst of it, I decided to return to an old hobby of mine—writing books—which also takes a lot of time. That meant my Japanese embroidery got put on hold for a while. But wouldn't you know it, the perfect, irresistible opportunity to get me back into it sprang up.
For anyone who hasn't read my early blog posts, Midori Matsushima's embroidery kits were how I started my foray into Japanese embroidery during the pandemic. I highly recommend checking out her website if you'd like to get into JE but don't know where to start. Midori creates some of the most beautiful, inspiring designs I've ever seen.
And as luck would have it, Mary Alice Sinton, my tutor, arranged for Midori to come to Houston and give a gold leaf class where she would teach a project, Kakitsubata, that could be made into a handbag. As I will eventually run out of wall space for my completed pieces, I loved the idea of creating something that could be more functional. I've also always wanted to try gold leafing.
So I flew to Houston in late February for a few days to take Midori's class, and it was well worth it. Midori is a lovely person—incredibly patient, kind, and cheerful. Watching her hands do Japanese embroidery is like a religious experience. They're so gentle and quick and deft. She makes it look incredibly easy, which it is not. But it was a real treat to work with her and watch her. This is Midori helping another student:
I had originally requested a teal blue colored silk for my purse, and Midori had the color specially dyed for me—did I mention what an incredibly thoughtful person she is? 😍 BUT, when I got to the class, she had all these rolls of silk for people to choose from, and I lost my heart to this gorgeous white silk with an almost metallic satiny finish. I HAD TO HAVE IT. But, the teal silk was beautiful and I figured I could use it for another project, so I bought it as well (she'd gone to all that trouble!) But I decided to do my purse on the white silk.
Our first step was to trace the design on our fabric using chaco paper and a little ball tip tracing tool. I'll be honest. I hate this process a lot, and I feel like it doesn't work very well. The design has a tendency to shift around no matter what you do to hold it in place, and the lines don't always show up clearly on the fabric, but this is what the setup looks like:
The blue is the chaco paper, laid over the white silk, with the tracing design on top.
The next step was to cut out the mother-of-pearl flowers. This is very tricky and tedious since mother-of-pearl does not lend itself well to being cut with teeny tiny scissors, which made my fingers hurt quite a bit. It also didn't help that the shapes were so complex, but I think they turned out reasonably well. Some of the edges weren't perfectly smooth, but since the edges get gold-leafed over, this really didn't matter:
There were nine flowers, but I decided to use only five and stitch the other four flowers—partly because I wanted a bit more color since I'd gone with a white background, and partly because I couldn't bear to cut out another four of these 😂:
The back of the mother-of-pearl peels off, leaving a sticky surface so the flowers will stick to the fabric.
The next step was to apply the glue base for the gold leaf. Midori brought little piping bags made of mulberry paper with her (lower left of picture below); they have to be soaked in water to make them pliable enough to pipe with, but she did all that prep work for us. And then we put a tiny little brass tip inside, secured it with masking tape, and piped a thin line of puffy glue around each flower:
Once it had dried to a tacky stage, we applied the gold leaf with little wooden tweezers and then brushed it over the glue with what looked like a makeup brush for blush. We used a smaller sort of eyebrow brush to remove the excess gold leaf. I couldn't get pictures of this whole process because it was very finicky and stressful, but here is the final product:
I think it looks lovely. I chose a very pale, almost blond gold for my gold leaf. At this point, I was ready to start stitching. Midori stitched the first few stitches for me just to show me how to get the right angle, so these are the only perfect stitches in the whole thing:
I stitched the rest by myself, and I think I did reasonably well on this little top section:
But when I moved to the lower part, I got the angle wrong. Still, I think the stitching looks very neat and smooth, so I decided to leave it:
And here's a little shot of me, working away in class:
Once I'd done my first leaf, I moved onto the flowers since most of those are in the foreground and had to be stitched before any leaves in the background. I started with the far left flower and blended different colors in a pseudo long-and-short style. It's not my best work, but it was a tricky shape, so I just did what I could:
That was all I got through during the class in Houston. But we had to finish the piece by August so Mary Alice could ship them to Japan for the finishing process. That's where these will be turned into elegant evening clutches. Since each flower would take hours and each leaf would take an hour and a half to two hours, I worked out that I needed to stitch about two hours a week to complete the project by early July, leaving me enough time to do the regular finishing process, take the piece off the frame, and ship it to Mary Alice. But all that will be forthcoming in another post. 😊
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