When I finished the hair ornaments on The Geisha's wig, I was close to being finished with this canvas, but not quite done. I wanted to add one more thing--the Chinese characters for "three" and "women." You see them above the cleaning lady's outstretched arm. The three horizontal bars are "three" and the intertwined character below is "women." This was the idea of the Asian scholar I asked about the canvas before I started stitching it. She found the characters for me, which are used by the Japanese. I practiced on a scrap canvas until I could embroider the characters and used two plies of DMC in #610. It's darker than the DMC background (DMC #612) but not as stark as black would be.
Finding the right color was a bit of a struggle but I took various leftover threads from my stitching of this piece to use in my practice stitching to see if the plum color looked good, if black was too dark, if the blue from the lady's maid's yakuta would tie the two sides of the design together, etc. Nothing worked until I just picked a darker shade of the background color. It's there but subtle which is very Japanese.
Tomorrow I'll post a photo of the whole design.
Before I forget, the ANG website has a nice little charted "chop" from the late Mary Duckworth (renowned for her Asian charted designs) which is the little frame you can put your initials in to sign an Asian piece. That could easily go on the background instead of the Chinese characters....
http://www.needlepoint.org/Archives/Circles.php
Jane/Chilly Hollow
Main blog at http://blog.360.yahoo.com/chillyhollow
4 comments:
Nice touch!
Thanks. I like how it looks, especially in person, but a chop with initials and the date would also be nice in the same dark brown DMC 610.
Wow! Very impressive.
Thanks, Beth. Her wig is wonderful and the ornaments enhance the shine.
Post a Comment