The thimbles I am working on right now are a design called bi-colored scales.  It is described as a beginner design but it is pretty challenging to execute well.  The geometry and stitching path is easy but the simple large shapes tend to show off your mistakes pretty well. Mine just don’t look as neat as the examples I have to look at.

my first bi-colored scales

my second bi-colored scales

It reminds me of the squares design in temari.  It is also considered a beginning design, worked on a C4 marking with just a basic solid square.  But, it takes some skill to get the squares to maintain a nice shape and fill in evenly.

a squares design temari (not my first!)

This is the one I used for JTA

So, are these beginning designs because they have simple geometry and stitch placement?  Or are they beginning designs because in order to do them well you have to practice a bunch?

I know that in temari, in order to do the squares really well you have to be good at:

• placing your marking lines accurately and securely,
• stitching without distorting the lines,
• spacing stitches so that corners don’t get bunched up,
• adjusting the spacing as the shape gets larger,
• and progressing evenly towards a common point.

Whew!  That is quite a list for a beginner.  Many of those skills end up being more intuitive things that you discover as you stitch and try to make your design look as good as the example. I know that the first squares I did looked nowhere near as neat and smooth as the example I was working from.

In my early temari days I moved on from the squares design onto more complicated things pretty quickly because I could make the complicated ones look better than I could make the squares look.  Then, when I started my Japanese Temari Association certification process I had to revisit the squares design.  As a more experienced stitcher I could now appreciate a little better what went in to stitching that design really well.

So, as I work on this ‘beginner’ thimble design I wonder what I am teaching myself that I won’t appreciate until I am more experienced. What tricks and techniques do I need to polish so that my bi-colored scales will look as good as the ones I see from thimble makers more experienced than me?

Will I have the persistence to stick with it until I get it?  Or will I move on like I did with temari and revisit the design later? My bet is that I will stick with it for a bit, but won’t quite be able to match the ‘good’ ones that I see until I have a lot more thimble stitching under my belt.

The thimble that I am stitching right now is larger than the previous ones I have done.  It is probably about twice the distance around.  Whereas the other ones stitched up in a few hours, this one is taking a bit longer.  That is probably a combination of the bigger size and not much dedicated stitching time right now.  The slower pace of completion leaves me time to contemplate that every thimble is like an all-over design on temari.

An all over temari design, #060512 from my notebook

Thimble design, no gaps allowed!

Consider:

1. The surface must be completely covered with stitching so that none of the padding shows through just like you must completely cover the mari for a temari all-over design.
2. When you do an all over design on temari, you get to the point where you can see the gaps getting smaller and it looks like just a couple more rows will fill them in.  It always takes more rows that you think and can really make that part of the stitching drag on when you just want to be finished.  Thimbles act the same way, only with the smaller thread, it seems to take even longer to fill in those last little gaps.  Patience, patience…

When you do all-over designs on temari there are a few tricks you can rely on to make the finished design come out nice, even if your marking was a little off to begin with.  You can adjust the spacing of your stitches a fair bit without causing gaps in the coverage, and you can add a few extra threads here and there as needed to close any last gaps that appear as long as it is not too many stitches in any one place.  Those techniques should apply to thimbles too, right?  Not so much…

1. The stitches still have to be spaced appropriately so that the sections of the design all fill in at the same time.  If you are a little off on your sections at the beginning that means you have to be able to adjust the spacing as you go.  With thimbles, if you leave a little extra spacing between stitches it just shows as a gap on the edge.  It is a small gap, but noticeable nonetheless.  You are better off trying to squish the stitches closer together than you are trying to space them out, but unfortunately that has its own issues because there are only so many fibers in the fabric you are stitching into.  When you try to pack the stitches too tightly you end up stitching into the same hole repeatedly or worse yet destabilizing the fabric.
2. Extra rows show on thimbles if they do not go all the way around.  You would think that since you use such a small thread you could get away with packing in an extra line of thread here and there to help fill in gaps.  Nope.  Those extra rows and stitches seem to be more noticeable on the small space than they are on the larger areas of a temari.  So, you can do it, but it will be seen.

Although the design itself may be somewhat simpler on a thimble (it is just a zig zag after all), the precision of the stitching is really more important than it is on an all-over temari design.

Why am I thinking about all of this?  Because I am to that point on the thimble where it is just a little bit more to finish (patience, patience…) and I can see that my sections were not as close to even as I thought they were in the first place.  My usual skills in making a temari all-over work are not going to give me the result that I want on this one.  It will still be a nice thimble, just not as nice as I had hoped.  (Which I suppose is a realistic result since I have only made 5 of them so far and none at this size.  Patience, patience…)

Since I am thinking so much about preparing thimbles for stitching, and I am doing other sorts of stitching than temari right now, I am thinking about how these different things compare.

Somehow prepping the base for the thimble is much more part of the specific project than prepping the base for a temari.  I think that is because the fabric design choice must come right at the beginning of thimble prep, whereas the wrap color choice is the last thing to happen on temari prep.

I routinely sit down and wrap 15 to 20 temari bases at a time in a variety of sizes, just leaving off the thread wrap.  Then when I pick a design I want to do I go grab the right size from the bin, pull design threads and then pick the wrap color.  I’m ready to go with a minimum of fuss since most of the work to prepare the base for stitching has been done before I even thought about the specific project.

On the other hand, for thimbles I need to know the color of the fabric for the ring at the very beginning of the project in order to create the base.  Essentially that means at a minimum I have to already have chosen the design threads.  In order to choose the right number of design threads I need to have chosen the design.  And to some extent, I need to already have an idea of what size I am making since that impacts the thread choice.  So, choosing the fabric is an integral part of the thimble design making the prep work much more a part of the design than it is for temari.  (Yes, I know that if I just did a simple black for every thimble I wouldn’t have the dilemma, but I have lots of nice quilting scraps so I might as well use them.)

I don’t think that is a bad thing, but it means that shifting from temari stitching to thimble stitching requires a shift in my point of view about starting the project.  Rather than picking fibers and essentially getting right to the stitching, I pick the fibers and then must do all of the prep work before I get to the stitching.  I suppose temari would be like that if I didn’t prewrap my blanks.

Come to think of it… prepping thimbles is more like prepping for cross stitch than prepping for temari.  For cross stitch I also need to have the project pretty well planned out before I prep the fabric for stitching.  I need to plan the function if it will make a difference in the fabric thread count, then pull the threads so that I can compare to fabric colors and choose the right one.  Adjust the size requirements of the pattern if I have chosen a fabric with a different thread count than the pattern.  Then I can cut the fabric, straighten/serge the ends, and find the starting place for the stitching. Depending on the type of project, I also have to find stretcher bars or my stitching frame and get the fabric attached.

So, the process that I use for temari is somewhat unique in my little world of stitching.  If I think about it, I tend to drag my feet on getting a temari project started too if I don’t have any blanks ready to choose from.  It would seem that one source of my reluctance to get going on projects is the delay between choosing the threads and actually threading the needle to stitch.  Somehow the motivation I gain from the lovely colors and fibers gets lost in the mundane tasks of preparing the stitching surface.  Aha!  A personal insight!

Maybe now that I am a little more aware of that I can be better at not dragging my feet in getting things started.

Note:  I wrote this 2 days ago and am just now getting around to posting it.  But in the meantime I got a new thimble started!  Yea!  Seems that discovering what my difficulties (excuses) were helped me get past them.  A new thimble should be posted this week!

Recently I’ve been more motivated to work on my cross stitch project than any new temari projects.  I can blame it all on Jane who’s been blogging about a beautiful project that she is finishing up over at http://worldembroideries.blogspot.com/.

But as always, I think of temari when I am stitching.  (Probably because I have temari within view just about anywhere I sit to stitch at home.) This project has an interesting feature:  the main design is stitched over two threads of linen with two strands of floss, but the words are stitched over 1 thread of linen with on strand of floss giving a smoother outline and more detail.  See:

Notice how some of the edges of the dragon look jagged whereas the edges of the word appear smooth

It strikes me that this idea of detail has a counterpart in temari when we take a design on a marking with large areas and transfer it to a design with more and smaller areas.  We get more detail in the same space.  Look at this progression from a C6 to a 32.  See how the design becomes more and more detailed as the markings create more and smaller stitching sections.

C6 with 4 large areas

C10 with 12 smaller areas

32 with even smaller areas

However, that idea does not quite allow for the more detailed area to coexist on the same temari with the less detailed one like it does on the cross stitched piece. Perhaps a better temari analogy would be to change the thread size and the design area. That is, mark a multipole based on a C10 marking. Stitch a section of the design using #5 perle or a similar large fiber using the C10 markings. Stitch other sections of the design using the multipole markings using a much smaller thread, like a #12 perle.

While I have explored using different size fibers on the same temari before I have not really looked at it in this way.  Hmmmm. That’s a new design challenge to explore!  It will have to wait a bit though.  The little dragon above is only one out of three and they are calling to me more than the temari is right now.

I just started a new temari yesterday.  I am thinking that I will start a new thimble ring today.  Doing both at once gets me thinking about how similar the two crafts are and yet also how different so I thought I would write about it.  Disclaimer:  Although I’ve been making temari for many years and feel like I know them pretty well, I am really new at making thimble rings so my knowledge about them is pretty limited.  Please feel free to correct me in the comments if I missed something or got it wrong entirely.

Getting the base ready:

For starters, in both temari and thimble rings you have to create your own base for stitching.  In temari it starts out with some sort of core material (rice hulls, dryer lint, fabric scraps, old socks…), then gets some yarn for shaping and padding, and lastly, a nice thread wrap to create the stitching ground.  In thimble rings you still have a base material: fabric backing, a paper core, followed by some padding and then depending on the padding you use, perhaps a thin paper wrap to put your markings on.

Marking:

 Marking for thimble rings is much simpler than it is on temari because the geometry is limited by the ring.  Basically all you do is divide the ring into even sections with a pen or marker.  You can choose however many you wish depending on the pattern you are creating.  It would be similar to a simple division in temari and only takes a few minutes to do.  On the other hand, in temari, marking generally takes a bit more time and effort.  You can choose to do a Simple division or one of the Combination divisions: C6, C8 and C10.  They all have their own precise methods for placing the correct points on the surface of the ball.  You use pins as temporary markers and then add threads to mark the lines, tacking them in place at the intersections.  After you place the basic lines you may add additional support lines to further divide the spaces.  The threads are often an integral part of the finished design.  They can be bright metallics or very subdued so that they melt into the background.

Stitching supplies:

In temari you tend to use large needles.  The smallest one in my temari kit is a #1 crewel.  Most of my other ones are longer.  They have rounded eyes to accomodate larger threads.  #5 perle cotton or other fibers of a similar size are the most commonly used.  Embroidery floss is also used but with several strands at a time.  In contrast, the threads and needles for thimble rings are very small (at least in my limited experience).  I used a single strand of floss for my first one. The discussion on the < href=”http://groups.yahoo.com/group/thimble_rings/”>Yahoo thimble rings group is about using hand sewing thread.  The needle I used was a #9 quilting between.

Stitching:

There is one thimble ring stitch that I know of.  The thread path is a zig-zag up and down the band.  It can be steeper or shallower depending on your division of the band.  You can do weaving techniques with the thread to get different effects but the stitching part remains the same.  The thimble ring stitch consists of a small vertical bite of the fabric backing of the ring.  It is taken with the thread under to tip of the needle to give an edge almost like a buttonhole stitch.  In temari there are several different stitch arrangements.  The basic stitch is like a herringbone stitch but the path that the threads take can vary significantly so that there are different names for many of them (uwagake chidori kagari, tri wing, five point star, closed shape, spindle…) It can take quite awhile to learn all of the stitches that can be used on temari. And, in addition, sometimes regular crewel stitches are used for free embroidery.

Designs:

Here is where the fun part is.  There are thousands of temari designs and really no limit to what you can create save your own imagination.  I used to think that thimble rings were more limited but I am finding more and more variations as I seek them out. That leads me to believe that the limitations I see come from just not having enough experience with the craft.  I think there will be fewer possibilities because of the limitations of the ring geometry, but I think it is not nearly so limited as it would seem.

I should not forget to point out that you can do thimble ring designs on temari but not temari designs on thimble rings. I’ve done thimble ring temari in the past, before I had actually made a real thimble ring. I go back and forth on whether I like them on temari. I suspect that the more I do ‘real’ thimble rings the more I will not want to translate the patterns to obi designs on temari.  However, the latest Japanese temari book - Thimbles and Flowery Temari (ISBN 4-8377-0308-2) – has wrapped temari designs that were extrapolated from thimble ring designs.  Those I really like although I have not tried one yet.

Mathematics:

Both thimble rings and temari are interesting from the point of view of symmetries.  Temari designs can demonstrate various symmetry groups of the sphere.  I think that the patterns on thimble rings will be connected to the symmetry groups of frieze patterns.  There are fewer of them but it will be fun to explore them when I get good enough at thimble rings to begin to create my own designs.

Portability:

Both crafts are portable.  My temari projects often go with me in just a baggie containing threads, embroidery scissors, needles and the ball.  The only limit is the size of the ball so it isn’t something that usually fits into my purse.  Thimble rings though are the ultimate in portability because they are so small.  A few yards of thread, a tiny needle, small scissors and your ring are all that is needed.  It can tuck away even inside my small and overstuffed handbag!

Time:

I almost forgot this one.  One of my favorite things about temari has always been that they are relatively quick projects, rarely taking more than a week to stitch anything but the most complicated of designs. (Nothing like that quilt I made that was 10 years in the making!) Thimble rings are even quicker.  I finished the first one in less than a few hours!  Cool!

So, all in all there are lots of similarities between the two crafts but enough differences to make them each truly unique. The similarities to temari is what drew me to thimble rings in the first place, but the more I make thimble rings and learn about them, the more I get excited about them all on their own, separate from temari.  As my daughter says, ‘They are so cool!”