Before I Stitch the Kimono and Wig,

you should watch some of the wonderful videos collected by The Immortal Geisha website.

http://www.immortalgeisha.com/videos_01.php

I highly recommend the fourth clip from the bottom, "Twelve Layer Kimono Dressing" which shows how kimonos are layered.

You also will enjoy watching the third clip from the bottom, "Traditional Japanese Katsura Stylist" which shows a man dressing a traditional Japanese wig, or katsura. This is what our geisha is wearing, a highly stylized and carefully composed wig.

Finally, don't miss the short four-part series entitled "Sakurako - Asakura Geisha" which shows a 25-year old modern geisha putting on her white makeup and being dressed by her maid in kimono and obi.

Many of the videos I wanted to see are File Not Found when you click on the link but luckily the ones above are still there for our viewing pleasure and to help us understand the Japanese tradition and beauty I'm trying to recreate in needlepoint.

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

Progress Report on Three Women and a Peach

It's time for an overall photo of the Squiggee design of three Japanese women I've been stitching. After all, the separate parts of the designs have to look good together. It's not enough for one part to look great if it clashes with the rest of the design. So here you go.

The figures on the left and right are finished. You should go back to the Dec. 13 posting about the lady's maid and look at the left side of her yakuta where it touches her neck. See how jagged it looks? This happens in NP because you are working a grid. When you do tent stitches along a diagonal, they look like stair steps. Most of the time no one notices but when you have a very dark thread like the black outline of the robe against a very light area like the white skin all our ladies have, it can look odd. It bothered me enough that I laid a long stitch on top of the area with my black Soy Fiber and then tacked it down with a few little tent stitches right on top of the old ones. This seemed to smooth out the line somewhat and make it darker. I prefer the new look.

You can also try turning your tent stitches into cross stitches to see if that helps make the jagged line disappear. It didn't in this case (I tried) but occasionally this is the way to make the line less prominent. Gee. Make a line less prominent by stitching it twice? Who'd a thought that would work!?

I've been working on the central figure of The Geisha off and on for a while. I have tent stitched the darkest plum purple sections of her kimono (Splendor #S1035) and have started work on the satin labels and the flowers. But I'm running out of time today to talk so just take a look at her wig. It has the long lines of Soy Fiber put in right on top of the hair ornaments to use as padding. I'm going to stitch her hair with black Japanese flat silk but not until I finish the kimono.

Hope you like how this is coming together.

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

Introducing Robin King's Insomnia

Robin's got Insomnia. Yes, indeed! And she's willing to share....

Before you start emailing me home remedies for sleeplessness, let me assure you that Robin doesn't have trouble sleeping. She's stitched a canvas called Insomnia which you see above which she is graciously sharing as my guest blogger today. Insomnia is a Maggie design, adapted from a Jeanju Clifton painting. The link below has the plain painted canvas on Maggie's website. Insomnia measures 11.5" wide by 15 " high on 18 count canvas.

http://www.maggieco.com/html/detail.php?ID=973&Category=1&pg=1&q=@Jeanju%20Clifton

Here's what Robin told me about the design and how she stitched it:

"I am attaching the photo of Insomnia. Here is my story: Pat, my guy, photographed the original art piece by the artist, Jeanju Clifton. When I saw the photograph, I said to myself, 'This would make a great needlepoint canvas!"' It took me a few years to get Maggie Co. and Jeanju Clifton together, but it was finally made into a canvas.

I had Amy Bunger create a Stitch Guide through her Cook-Up a Canvas classes, and then I stitched it. I learned how to knit, and knitted the long scarf with Poppies on size 0 Bamboo needles. I made her curlers (from curlers) for her hair, and I made her knitting needles out of the same size 0 Bamboo needles. Her hands are wire-wrapped floss so that she is actually holding her knitting project. I was true to the painting, so yes, those are blood-shot eyes. After all, it is entitled 'Insomnia'. Each of the cats are wearing a different sweater. You can even see Elliot in the aqua Argyle sweater. She isn't a pretty woman, but she sure was fun to stitch. I lost count at the number of Colonial Knots for her Chenille robe. Her Curler Cap was done with Gathered Flair. The blue/gray flooring is the Tessellated T's. She is wearing an actual pearl pierced earring. The white cat is playing with a real ball of thread that I wound up.

I submitted Insomnia to the Nashville ANG in 2005. It didn't get any awards, but there was a nice commentary from Tony Minieri and Judy Souliotis. They asked that Insomnia be given a chance to comment on, and for me, that was all of the prize that I needed."

[Jane says: Heck YEAH! Ribbons are one thing but being singled out for recognition from Tony Minieri and Judy Souliotis is rare and priceless. You can read what they said about Insomnia and see another photo of this piece on the ANG website in the link below. By the way, Robin is the photographer and webmaster of Amy Bunger's website and she films the Amy DVDs. The Elliot she mentions is her orange tabby cat who loves wandering into the photo shoots she does of finished Amy needlepoint.]

http://www.needlepoint.org/WhatIs/2005/conversation.php#502np

Robin continues: "So, that is my story. I took an idea and through determination brought it into reality. Yes, those are real curlers. I went to Sally's Beauty Supply, found some tiny curlers, and then cut them down even 'teenier' to fit Insomnia. The small yellow velcro type curlers were about the size of your little finger. I used about a 1 inch length, and then I trimmed away some of the guts so that the curler would tighten down even more. Remember, all stitch suggestions & threads were à la Amy; I was merely the worker-bee. Amy was fearful about sending her needlepointer customer / friend into a Knitting store ... would I get hooked and ditch needlepoint for knitting? I told her to not worry. I was only learning to knit for Insomnia. (Later I found out that I couldn't multi-task while knitting like I can when I needlepoint.)"
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Learning to knit so you can stitch a NP canvas? Robin, that's REAL dedication!

Hope everyone enjoys seeing what a talented stitcher can do when helped by a terrific teacher like Amy Bunger using a hilarious canvas from Maggie. Thanks for sharing, Robin, and for being my guest blogger this morning. I get a grin all over my face every time I look at Insomnia's details.

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

Jade's Hair

In the photo above you can see Jade's hair stitched on top of the padding, using the Soy Fiber in long stem stitches that were staggered so that each one began or ended at a slightly different place than its neighbors. I tried to do the stitches in the same direction that real hair would go. Of course there are areas that the stem stitches couldn't fit, like the curls at the nap of her neck. The tent stitches done there cover the painted canvas and look ok.

By the way, this photo is color adjusted so you can see the black threads on the black painted area of the canvas better. It is really black in person!

The bows are finished also. The knot was painted in alternating stripes of light dusty pink (I used Kreinik's Soie Perlee #3333) and light blue (Thread Gatherer's Silk N Colors in Delphinium which is the thread used on the light blue parts of her robe), so I covered the stripes with long skinny cross stitches in those colors, then took my needle full of pink silk under the row of cross stitches to put a horizontal line under them. I did that because the skinny cross stitches didn't cover well. The pink cross stitch was done using Soie Perlee which is a skinny perle-type silk thread. Very pretty but it was too thin to cover entirely.

The ends of the pink and blue bows were done in outline stitch except for the tiny bit of blue ribbon on the left which was done in reverse tent stitches covering one or two thread intersections. I worked from the centers out using my light blue and light dusty pink but I needed a darker dusty pink and a darker blue, so I used the dark blue thread from the robe (Thread Gatherer's Flax N Colors in French Blue) and the darker purple-pink that I will use on the geisha's robe. That is Rainbow Gallery's Splendor in S1035. I used the Flax N Colors as it came off the card, the Soie Perlee in one perle thread, and two plies of the silk floss Splendor and Silk N Colors.

The bow itself is a bit fancy for a lady's maid but we have to remember that she dresses the geisha and is probably up on the latest fashions and rather skilled in fixing hair so I expect her vanity got the better of her.

I'm going to work on the geisha's robe but before I do, look at the last blog entry and check out the neckline of the maid's robe. Doesn't the left side look a bit jagged? I'm going to talk about why that happened and how I fixed it next.

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

Dressing Jade

The lady's maid I call Jade on the right side of the Three Women and a Peach canvas has a robe now and I've started her hair. As you can see, I removed the medium gray outlines of her robe and restitched them in black using the same black Soy Fiber I am going to use for her hair. This same thread also created Pearl's hair, the cleaning lady on the left of this set of three women.

Robe
I discovered it was a lot easier to rip out everything (her robe, her arm, the outline stitches) and redo it when the grey outlines on her robe were just too pale. Combining medium gray outlines with medium and light blue stitches for the robe didn't give me enough contrast. I know this, having stitched a background in mint green with lilac flowers once. Although you'd think mint green and lilac aren't much alike, pale shades of both disappear into each other, which made my background muddy and without the flowers scattered around I intended. I should have learned from that but it is easy to forget lessons learned in needlepoint, as in Life! So don't you forget--mixing two light shades or even a light and medium shade may not give you enough color contrast to define the various parts of the design you are stitching.

Hair
For her hair, I mentally divided the hair into sections: the "pony tail" held by the ribbons, the tendrils of hair along her cheek and forehead, the little upturned curls at the base of her neck, the bangs at the top of her forehead and the main body of her hair. If you look at the photo, you'll see how small an area there is for her bangs, the tendrils, the nape of her neck and some of the pony tail area between the pink and blue bows in her hair. I tent stitched all of these areas except the tendrils with my Soy Silk. Tent stitches will cover all these areas and serve as padding for the top stitching I plan to do. The main body of her hair and some of her pony tail will have long lengths of my Soy Fiber laid across them in straight lines reaching from a stitch or two inside the black hair paint border to the other side almost to the edge of the paint. This raises the next layer of stitches to give a padded effect, but padding doesn't work in very small areas, hence the tent stitches. The little curls along her check had to be done differently. They are jagged vertical lines which are perfect for padded stem stitch. There are four lines, two short and two long. The short ones each got only two staggered stem stitches but the long lines had a series of rows of padded stem stitch. Sometimes I did three stem stitches, sometimes two, depending on how wide the area was.

Once the tendrils and tent stitches were done, time to pad. My first step was to grab my black and white xerox copy of the canvas and sketch in pencil how her hair flows. Once I had an idea whether an area would have slanted lines, horizontal lines, etc. of hair, I could decide how to lay the underlying padding threads. If your top layer will be straight vertical stitches, the padding is horizontal. If your lines will slant/ to the right, your padding probably will need to slant left \. This keeps the top layer raised. I will sketch this out in detail when I do the geisha's hair because she has such an elaborate wig, so this may become clearer later on. Hopefully you can see the mostly horizontal stitches of padding on Jade's hair. I'll post a second photo with her hair finished once I get the bows in her hair stitched.

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