Wednesday, January 4, 2012

TAST 2012 - week 1 - fly stitch (Take a Stitch Tuesday)


This year I'm taking part in the TAST 2012 Challenge — Take a Stitch Tuesday — being held on the blog Pin Tangle. Each week a new stitch will be introduced and anyone participating can learn it or if they already know it take it further; take a photo; then post a link to their photo on the Pin Tangle site.

Since everything I know about embroidery I learned from stitching temari, I know very little. Herringbone. Herringbone variations. Anything else? I'm not sure. So, this will really add to my vocabulary & tool box, so to speak.

While I expect most people participating will be stitching on more traditional materials, I am of course working on a temari. A temari "sampler." Last night I made the largest temari I've ever made — 3 cups of rice hulls in the center, whereas I usually range from ¾ to 1¼ cups. It's 13.625 inches / 34.5 cm in circumference; 4.33 inches / 11 cm. It's bigger than a soft ball. A little larger than a grapefruit. (And I'm considering this temari no. 85.)

I think stitching on a temari will present some unique challenges — there's no "back" of the canvas to access, it's curved, and the threadwrap comes into play a lot in how the threads are pulled by the stitches (or how the stitches are pulled by them). Especially on a temari this large a thread can end up over the end of a stitch, which you can see a little in my photos. I don't think this would be as much of an issue on a smaller temari, where the stitching area would be more convex.


Week 1
Fly Stitch

Gray: top - single fly stitches, and below is a stacked "branch" of them; top green: single stitches in an attempt to make a scale pattern; bottom green: the closed fly stitch, looks like [part of] a leaf.

plaited fly stitch

left: threaded fly stitch; right: whipped fly stitch

Finally, stacked stitches to make a little ferny thing.



Update, 9 January: Click to view my post about my completed "fly stitch" temari.



7 comments:

  1. Wow! I never saw this and I like it very much. It seems to be difficult to stitch on a ball.
    Jorin

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  2. This is really different. I have no idea what the ball would be used for, but it will be quite decorative. Are you using curved needles?

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  3. Hi Susan,
    If you look in the sidebar to the right, you can read a bit about temari (or look at finished work in the rest of my blog). They are a Japanese folk art — embroidered thread-wrapped spheres. I am using a large one as a "sampler" to learn the stitches that one day I could employ in future temari designs. I use regular straight embroidery needles.
    ~ kt

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  4. What a very cool way to participate in TAST! Love the whipped and threaded versions.
    Gail

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  5. WOW! I have never seen this before. great idea.

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  6. I love learning about new things and the temari was new to me. Very unique sampler.

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