Fan's Fan (and more)

Yesterday I finished stitching the pale yellow background and the red double border (slanted stitches over the painted border, then a row of tent on the outside for finishing ease) and the fan that gives Fan her name.

The fan itself posed several problems. It is a major focal point for this design. Little Fan's face peeks around it, after all, and faces are what we look at first on canvases. I stitched her face in tent stitches, then emphasized the hair ornaments a bit with beads and padded stitches. So the fan in her hand had to be slightly emphasized also to balance the hair ornaments on the other side of her face. Do up the hair ornaments but not the fan and you might make her face seem lopsided.

I ended up stitching the fan in long stitches, blending my rose to pink shades as I went. I irnored the leaf and blossom design on the fan as I stitched, leaving those areas empty. Yesterday I went back and stitched the leaves first using my medium green DMC floss (2 plies) and making cross stitches across the green threads. This gave them a bit more rounded look than the slanted / tent stitches would do but it didn't make them too prominent. When it comes to flowers, the blossoms are always more important than the leaves. Then I tent stitched (two plies of my pale yellow Splendor silk) the flower area. I wanted a foundation for the tiny little French knots I put on top as the flowers.

The French knots themselves are two plies of the same thread, wrapped only once around the needle, with my tension as controlled as I could make it while wrapping the thread and then plunging the needle with the threads held where they belonged as much as possible. Most of the flowers only have 3-4 French knots on them. The underlying tent stitches provide color so that you don't have to cover everything with French knots. I thought having too many French knots would make the flowers a tad too prominent. After all, this is supposed to be a paper or perhaps a silk fabric fan that would not have the flowers sticking out. They would just be painted on or woven in.

I need to finish the kimono today and then turn my attention to the butterfly in Fan's other hand. After that, I need to think about what outline stitches I might need to add on her kimono, face or hands.