Thimble Storage
So where do you keep all of your nicely made thimbles?
I know that Rebecca has been known to display them beautifully in her home. Mine have been living dumped unceremoniously in a little box in my thimble drawer:
The bottom of the iPhone box gets repurposed.
Now that is hardly the way to be respectful to a little piece of art that took me hours to make. I need something better. Maybe something more prettily organized like the boxes they show in the Japanese thimble book. Maybe something more like this:
Yes! Those are the very same thimbles that were just a moment ago dumped in a heap. So how do you do it?
First, start with a suitable box. I highly recommend the box I am using, but mostly because of what it contained before thimbles. This is a 1 lb chocolate box from Ethel M Chocolates. It was filled with nothing but their dark chocolate lemon creams, pretty much my favorite filled chocolate of all times. (DH definitely got points this Christmas!) After the immense enjoyment of the chocolates, I wiped it out with a damp paper towel and allowed it to sit open for a few days to allow the chocolate smell to dissipate.
Really, any nicely sized box that is deep enough for the thimbles when the lid is on will do. The chocolate box is nice since it is just the right depth for one layer of thimbles. I suppose you could use other kinds of boxes. . .
Next, make holders for your thimbles. You could be fancy and get a wooden dowel, cut it into the right size pieces and sand them a little to make them smooth. However, I started thinking that these thimbles are just made from regular old paper, fabric and tape. Why don’t I just make my own paper forms just like I do for making a custom size thimble form?
The forms for this box are cut to a width just a bit shorter than the box along the full length of one sheet of paper. Then they are rolled to a circumference about .5cm smaller than my smallest thimble so that the thimbles will slide on and off easily. If you routinely made different sized thimbles you could make different forms for each size you make and organize them that way. I wanted to organize mine chronologically so I just made one size fits all forms. I made enough to fill the box with thimbles so I don’t have to make any more (forms) for quite awhile.
Now I have a nice pretty box to keep my thimbles safe, organized and happy. 
February 3, 2012 1 Comment
Temari #120102
My first temari for 2012!
This one is stitched on a C6, with support lines added to fill out the four centers to 18 sections each. That gave me enough room to stitch these nice bright flowers. Each one is a different color so when I want a different look for the display I just rotate the ball.
You can see more pictures of each side of the ball in my notebook here: http://exploretemari.com/singleitemgallery.php?Number=120102
The flowers were created by playing with the period of the kiku paths (number of sections from inner point to inner point) and the nesting of different paths together. A ‘normal’ kiku has a path of period 2: take a stitch at the top on a marking line, move to the next marking line and take a stitch at the bottom, move to the next marking line and take a stitch at the top again. I am using the vocabulary word ‘period’ in the same way we use it to describe thimble paths.
In this design there are paths with period 1, 3, 2 and then 1 again (moving from the center out). In some cases the paths are nested by stitching under and around only one row; in others, by stitching under and around all of the available rows. And, in the case of the last row, it is just nested right next to the previous rows.
I started drawing out a diagram for this one but. . . wow. With all of the different sorts of paths it is painful. When I write instructions for this one I may just have to skip the diagram and rely on words.
Interestingly, Rebecca just shared a temari on her blog, Temari Addict Australia, that uses nested kiku paths.
January 31, 2012 1 Comment
Just a little update
I have been working on the exploretemari.com website slowly but surely. Part of this week’s task was updating the notebook with all of my thimbles. When I first started stitching them regularly in 2009 I didn’t know if the craft was going to ‘stick’ so I didn’t put them in my notebook. (I did post about them on the blog.)
This week I have gone back through my blog posts and photos to add all of the thimbles to date into the online notebook. So, for all you thimble enthusiasts, there are now a total of 56 thimbles in the notebook!
January 26, 2012 No Comments
January Thimble
Here is my first thimble for 2012. It has reverse stitching! The last time I tried to do a thimble design with reverse stitching I was not impressed with my results. Then I got distracted with all of the fun things I could do using only forward stitching and sometimes a little weaving so I never came back to it. Looking back on it now it doesn’t look so bad in the picture but I can still see the flaws in the real one.
Here are the details about this one:
- Standard thimble base on 5cm form
- DMC Satin floss in green, yellow, orange, blue
- 2 paths with a period of 2 on 8 sections
Directions:
Stitch one row on each path at a time. I did 6 rows green, 1 row yellow, 6 rows orange, 1 row yellow, and 4 rows blue.
The way you would see this diagrammed in the thimble books looks something like this:
But I think I would prefer to diagram it like this instead because it more accurately matches how I did the stitching.
Backwards stitching without stitching backwards
Way back when I did my first thimble with backwards stitching I complained about how difficult it was to space the stitched consistently when you are going in both directions. At the time Chole Patricia made a comment about making the reverse stitches differently and turning the thimble rather than doing it the way I did. I filed the thought away to revisit at a later time.
Basically you can make reverse stitching in three different ways:
- Just place the stitches to the left of the previous rows instead of to the right. That is the way that I did it in my first attempt what it looks like you do in the first diagram. It is like doing shitagake stitching on temari.
- You can reverse the way you make the stitch, taking the needle from the inside of the thimble towards the outer surface. This is how they diagram the stitches in the Japanese book Thimbles and Flowery Temari (ISBN 978-4-8377-0308-2) and it results in a stitch traveling to the left around the thimble rather than to the right.
- You can turn the thimble over and start stitching at the other edge stitching in your usual manner. The path of the thread will naturally travel in the opposite direction around the thimble compared to paths stitched on the other side. That is how I stitched this new one and why I like the second diagram better to show the technique.
The problem with the first two methods is that you are actually making the stitches differently and not surprisingly, they will look different either in spacing or on the edge. With the third method you are stitching in the exact same way the whole time so all of the stitches look the same (assuming you are consistent in your stitch technique). It is easier too since you really are never stitching backwards, you are just stitching forwards in the opposite direction.
Stitching with the third method does mean that you have to keep track of what way is ‘up’ or forward on the thimble. In the books they do that by drawing arrows on the padding before they start stitching. I never really liked that way so I came up with a different method. I will save it for another post since this one is getting long. In any case, you can expect to see some more reverse stitched thimbles from me in the future.
I am curious though… for all of you out there who have stitched thimble designs using forward and reverse stitching, how do you do it?
January 20, 2012 1 Comment
Temari #111202 – a combination continuous path
This design is from Dream Temari (ISBN 4-8377-0199-X). I like the simplicity of the flowers in the final design juxtaposed with the complexity of the continuous path used to stitch them. The original was stitched with floss but I used #8 perle cotton. I think if I did this one again I would either use floss laid flat or use a ribbon fiber.
It is stitched on a 32 center marking. Here is a segment of the continuous path used:
The orange part is the seed of the path (see #4 at the link for a definition). Notice how it stays within the pentagon (or hexagon) creating two inner points of the flower before veering off across the center of a triangle to get to the next shape. I classify this as a combination continuous path because of the way it utilizes the two different shapes.
The colored dots on the path are to show stitch placement: black stitches are as close to the pentagon or hexagon center as you can get, green are about halfway on the long lines of the pentagon or hexagon and red are in the middle of the triangles.
Here is what it looks like after five of the paths are stitched (colored differently so you can see the paths):
Since it is stitched with two rows you have to keep track of the stitching order so that they will layer properly. Using a wide fiber so that you can get away with only one row would make it easier by removing the layering.
I enjoyed stitching this one. Once I got the rhythm of the path it became very methodical stitching. It was fun to watch the flowers slowly emerge all over the ball as I added more and more paths to the design. I suppose that is one of the things that is so appealing about continuous path designs.
There is a bit more info about this one in my notebook: http://exploretemari.com/singleitemgallery.php?Number=111202
January 17, 2012 1 Comment
