Japanese Embroidery Phase 2-3 - Class Day 1

After months of waiting, the first day of class was finally here. As always, travelling with Japanese embroidery means a lot of baggage. My frame is in the artist hard case, the stand and lamp in the blue yoga bag, and all my tools and technical material in the black tote bag. Lunch is in the pink tote. We're really lucky that one of our members has a big enough space to accommodate all of us.

Before coming to class, we wanted to be able to jump right in. So homework had been given to us, which I did over the last three months. Our teacher was very happy we came prepared, as it meant we wouldn't be spending the first day and a half doing foundation work.

We started with sayagata. The purple foundation covered up the lightning pattern and needed to be put back in. There are different ways to do it, but we used the tracing paper method. The design lines are drawn on the paper, which is then tacked onto the fabric.

From there were stitched the design lines using couching silk.

Once we were done, we could tear the paper away and stitch the design using the actual thread we want to use. In this case it's a pretty silver twist. I really like the combination of the two colors together.

After a full day of class we have a cloud that is on it's way to be completed. I still have some lines to stitch and the entire thing will have to be couched down after, but it's well on it's way.

Before we left, we were given homework to do so we would be ready to start the shippo cloud the next day. We needed to cut ellipses which will act as our padding. More on the next post.