The Final Touch

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

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