Yesterday's photo of Fan showed one row of her kimono stitched but I didn't mention it. I was amused to note no sharp-eyed person noticed and asked about it, but with the Comments system in Yahoo 360 not working well (and I haven't turned Comments on in the Blogspot mirror blog) you might have noticed and not been able to say anything. Before I talk about the kimono's stitch, let me say I forgot to mention one thing yesterday when I talked about stitching right on top of the tiny butterfly antenna in Fan's hand. In one spot I also stitched over the butterfly wing a bit. You can see that in the photos yesterday and today. I plan to put the wing right on top of the background stitch.
Now let's talk about the kimono. I've stitched the left sleeve in the stitch I plan to use, which is called the I stitch. You can see it here on Carole Lake's website. By the way, Carole has lots of cool stitches diagrammed there which aren't available online anywhere else. It's a great resource for which I am very grateful.
I work the I stitch in three steps. First I did a long vertical column of the / stitches, then I worked back up on one side adding the cross bar. Finally, I did the other cross bar doing back down on the other side of the original / stitches. I used two plies of my darkest orange Splendor silk. The paint shows a little so you can see the shading without my having to change colors.
I did one column of the first step in the back hem of the kimono on the left and started back up on the left with the cross bars there. Ran out of thread so I didn't finish step 2. Notice that my column on the left back hem doesn't line up with the sleeve. But that's ok. In real life any pattern on the fabric of a kimono sleeve probably doesn't line up with the rear hem fabric. This is realistic.
When I start doing the right sleeve, I'll slant the step one column the other way \ and I'll also make sure that the front of the kimono under the obi belt will all line up from the belt down to the bottom above her shoes. That's also realistic. Make sense?
This blog entry is also on my main blog at
