I've been busy moving photos from the old computer the last several days. Luckily, that means I have time to stitch while waiting for one photo to finish so I can start another. You'll see my progress on Fan's kimono above (or to the left, depending on which of my blogs you visit).
The left sleeve is done. After the I stitch all over the sleeve, I put a gold metallic cross stitch on the gold dots painted there and using two plies of my darkest green DMC cotton floss, I did a few long stitches to make the slightly shamrock-looking green symbols. The inner sleeves (rose areas)and the obi sash in the front are done already. I think I need to do all the orange kimono before I stitch the long yellow trim on the sleeves or the yellow band at her neck, as well as the green border of the lower left kimono edge near her little sandals. I plan to stitch the edges in long stitches and I think stitching them first and then doing the kimono orange body might disturb the long stitches. Since I want them perfectly smooth, I'll wait.
Once the sleeve was done, I started on the kimono bottom to the left of the green edging. I forgot to mention that when the I stitch comes to a gold dot, I skip it, but when the I stitch comes up and over a green shamrock, I put the orange thread right on top I'm just using two plies of orange NP Inc. silk so the green shows up. I'll know where to put them later. But for some reason the gold doesn't show well. Even though I skipped those dots of gold and didn't stitch on top of them, I still needed my color xerox of the original unstitched canvas to find them all. More color magic! Weird what colors do, isn't it?
I'm a bit more than half done with the main body of the kimono. Its I stitches slant / like the left tail side and the sleeve. When I get to the right sleeve, I change the slant to \ . What I'll do is take the printed page of Carole Lake's instructions of how to do the I stitch, scan it with my scanner into my image software, and reverse the image so it is a mirror image. If you don't have this equipment or software, just hold the back side of your printed page up to a sunny window. You'll see the instructions reversed and can just trace over them with a pencil. Once you do two columns of the I stitch, you won't need the instructions any more. You can just follow along.
I found another batch of pictures of the grandkids to copy so I hope to finish the kimono this weekend while I do that.
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