You might remember this temari from my indecision post earlier. Thanks to comments and DH’s two cents I decided not to rip.

I added a woven obi, just over two and under two. The weaving adds a cool tactile texture as well as a visual one. In fact this ball is pretty fun to hold in your hands because of the Artic Rays fuzzy thread that I added in the last row of the kiku and the weaving. It is an interesting feel.

As I did the weaving I tried to spread out the spindle threads a bit so that the individual spindles are not so distinct. It would have worked a bit better if my spacing was more consistent. Gotta watch that.

As part of my indecision about ripping out the last temari, I decided to make another one with the same technique but on a smaller marking so it would not be so crowded. Here it is:

The design is from the Japanese book Cosmo 7 (pg19). Like the blue one, I did the kiku as a braided kiku. I made a few other small changes too. I am really happy with how it came out. I still get four stash credits for it, even with perle cotton only counting half. That’s because designs that use doubled thread to stitch really gobble up thread.

I can’t say that I like the spacing all that much better than the blue one. It is definitely less crowded but that just makes it different, not necessarily better. DH chimed in on the indecision (as well as several of you who commented) so I decided not to rip out the blue one. I’ve designed a new obi that you’ll be seeing in a few days.

To rip or not to rip?

I have a temari started, well, halfway finished really. It only needs the obi treatment which is a large part of this particular design.

I stitched about 2/3 of the obi part before I ran out of thread. It is my nightmare of using stash threads… “I’ll run out of thread in the middle of something and I won’t be able to get more thread or adjust the pattern to suit.” Yup. That’s the case.

At first I thought I could buy more thread since I was careful not to use a discontinued color. But my LNS is out of stock for the foreseeable future and I don’t want to order only one skein of perle cotton from somewhere online. So, I ripped out all of the obi parts that I had done.

Now, I have a few choices:

1. use a different color that I have lots of to do the original obi pattern,
2. redesign the obi area, or
3. scrap the ball entirely; yup.  rip it out and start over.

I have an idea for the obi redesign but the more I look at the ball in my hand, the more I think that I should just scrap it. It is a bit cramped and could use with a larger ball or fewer petals on the kiku. So I think, maybe I should just rip it out… The thing is, I suspect that if I rip it out I won’t re-stitch it and I kind of like it, but I think it could be better.  I don’t know, I just can’t decide…

I have not posted all of my latest temari in the left column. I’ve been stitching kikus to create a little flower garden. Everyone needs pretty flowers in the winter!

red/orange is #5 perle cotton, pink is Vineyard silk, blue is Rainbow Gallery Grandeur silk

I am going to be teaching a beginning temari class for the local EGA chapter and these are samples for the class. I am a firm believer in choosing your own colors for temari so I wanted the ladies to be able to see a small variety of colors to get the idea of what they could create.

In the process of doing these I’ve learned a few things to improve my uwagake technique. I don’t know why but it always surprises me to revisit an old technique and find that I can improve on it. Somehow the sum of all the little things I’ve learned in the meantime elsewhere come together and make the old skill better.

I’ll have to share my thoughts on mastering uwagake here at some point. For now I’m a little swamped so I don’t have time to make the diagrams needed. It’s on the to do list.

A view from the top

A view from the side

This is the willful temari that I wrote about in the last post.  As you can see, it is nothing like a lacy, open sort of HHG design.  I love it though in spite of all the trouble it gave me at the beginning.

It really is a very simple design, just braided kikus interlocked with each other on a 42 marking.  The last row of pink on each of them kind of pulls it all together with the little bits of pink left in the very tiny negative space.  (I ended up almost running out of the pink….only 6 inches were left at the end, yikes!)

I was trying to exploit the N/S and equator nature of the 42 marking so I did alternating ‘rows’ of flowers.  I think this might be a very pretty orts type design though, possible with lots more centers.