Japanese Landscape - Part M

The leaves at the center of Japanese Landscape took me a bit longer to stitch as it had more steps than the other sections. Not to mention it involved a bit of plunging. For me, stitching like this works better in small sessions with a specific goal in mind. By doing that I'm able to get through it much more efficiently.

The first steps involved passing. I love how passing thread looks when it's couched down in a line. However, I don't like it that much when it involves lots of plunging or going round and round. And these leaves involve both.

My passing thread came as a single wound strand. Normally when we couch passing, we do it in pairs. So I unwound the single strand (with help as it was very long), folded it in half and cut it. I ended up with two strands that I then wound around a pair of komas I had.

I think I need to buy more of these, they're very handy. The komas made it easier for me to control my tension and keep the passing from twisting. You'll notice below that I put in a piece of paper beneath the komas, that's because the wood isn't well finished and I was afraid it would snag on my fabric.

The lower leaves start and end at the edge of the top leaves. This mean that every strand of passing needed to be plunged at both ends. The top leaves weren't too bad, just tedious going round and round. I did find it particularly hard getting the tips just right. I'm not very happy with the result but it's not very noticeable from afar thanks to the yellow felt.

(click on the post to see the animation below)

For the top leaves there is a row of s-ing which perfectly covers whatever flaws I had at the tips. The leaves are surrounded by a line of pearl purl. It was really tight getting it in there. I guess I didn't enough space between the leaves but I also had very little space left between the left and right side, very strange as the original version in the book had plenty of space.

(click on the post to see the animation below)

The final step is filling in the center of the lower leaves with cutwork.

The first step is two lines of couched pearl purl in gilt and copper. The original piece had done this as a continuous line (folded at the point). Since it was such a tight space, I decided to cut the pearl purl at the point and couch a second piece to continue the line.

The rest of the space was filled with cut smooth purl and bright check. It was really hard cutting those piece as they were TINY. I kept losing them.

(click on the post to see the animation below)

Here are the leaves all done. The more I look at my kid leather the less I think it was a mistake. It worked out quite well at the end.

The overall piece so far. This was part M and the parts go up to T, so there are 7 left.

Part N is the cutwork on the arc that surrounds the center flower. This one will look amazing when it's done. After looking at soft string padding examples online, I noticed that mine needs to be couched down more. I've started going over it to make sure there is no puckering before I start.