Stitching Hair Ornaments for The Geisha

Above are The Geisha's hair ornaments. If you look at the hairpins on the right and left, you can easily see that they were done before the beads or the long straight stitches were added on top. I sat down with my color copy of the original canvas and planned out what I wanted to do with the hair ornaments, step-by-step. I had the beads (white, blue and pink) that came with the canvas and the original design from Gail Hendrix which I didn't follow entirely. I love the little dangles that geishas wear in their hair and wanted to add some to this design. I also didn't want quite as many beads in her hair as in the original design since the black Japanese flat silk I used for her hair is so lovely. I didn't want to cover it all up, and I also was worried about disturbing it by stitching through the flat silk.

So planning was important. I needed to decide what to include, what to omit, and the order in which things had to be stitched. The pink comb was stitched already. You probably remember that the black areas between the comb teeth are tent stitches done in the same Soy Fiber I used for the hair of the other two women. I also added the three straight lines that make up the hairpin on the right side before I put the flat silk stitches in. I thought metallic thread might disturb the flat silk.

It turns out the flat silk is rather forgiving when it comes to putting other stitches on top of it as long as you are careful. I tried to go down into the canvas from the front as much as possible. I also used a sharp beading needle for the beads so I could put the stitches exactly where I wanted instead of using a John James short beading needle which is shorter than regular beading needles with a slightly duller tip.

The dangles are a long length of Accentuate with a bead added, then stitched again with a short stitch through the bead to hold it where it needed to be placed. I scanned the canvas to give you a good look at the headdress which disturbed the beads somewhat since the canvas goes face down on a scanner. I had to reposition them with my needle's tip slightly when I finished the scan. Looks like there's a bit of Accentuate sticking up also. A photograph or scan is very good to find things like this, even though using the scanner probably caused the disturbance to begin with!

The real trick to adding hair ornaments on top of flat silk is to plan out what you are going to do, going slowly and using a sharp needle as much as possible.

Jane/Chilly Hollow
Main blog at http://blog.360.yahoo.com/chillyhollow