On the Twelfth Day of Christmas, Embroidery Gave to me ...

Chrysanthemums and a Stream

Every spring since 2005, I have attended a five day residential course on Japanese Embroidery. The 2020 class was a little different from other years as we had a guest tutor, Midori Matsushima. I had attended two classes previously where Midori-san had taught us kinsai; on this occasion her class would be embroidery based. The design we had collectively chosen was Chrysanthemums by a Stream, with Rocks, Midori-san’s interpretation of an Ito Jakucho painting.

The stream is applied to the fabric in gold leaf. Originally we had expected to be doing this on day one of the course but Midori-san, while in Japan, had this done for us by a gold leaf Master. My disappointment that we would not be learning this technique was far surpassed by the delight of having the gold leaf so expertly done.

© Midori Matsushima/Carol-Anne Conway

The chrysanthemum’s at the top of the design are, I think quirky and very appealing. The petals are done in blister stitch. Midori-san instructed us to make a three-ply twist to use for the knots that serve as padding in this stitch. The two straight stitches that form the blister are slightly off set to create the petal shape. It looks deceptively easy but is devilishly difficult. I could not spread my silk enough to satisfy Midori-san and my two stitches slipped off the sides of the padding revealing the knot underneath. Much more practice needed!

© Midori Matsushima/Carol-Anne Conway

A particular feature of Jakucho’s work is that he did not paint perfection; he painted nature with all of its imperfections. He saw beauty in a decaying leaf and depicted it that way. Both the JEC, on the Phoenix and Pine design, and Midori-san have reflected this in their embroidery.

© Midori Matsushima/Carol-Anne Conway

I have a great deal more to do on this piece but, for now, it is in hibernation.

Happy Stitching

Postscript

In this series of catchup posts I have tried not to dwell on the pandemic or on losing my parents but these two events are what has afforded so much stitching of the past two years.

I had booked this class a year earlier. The schedule included this three day class followed by three days of our regular class lead my Margaret-sensei. I also had an entirely different class booked for the following two days.

Although Dad had been unwell for many years, his death in September was sudden and unexpected. Dealing with my grief was difficult; watching Mum grieve was heart breaking and watching her fade away over the next four months was unbearable.

We buried Mum at the beginning of March 2020 and my brothers and I were busy sorting out the family home and other affairs. I did not really feel like going to the embroidery class but everyone thought it would do me good to take a break. In the end I was persuaded to go for Midori-san’s three day class.

Meanwhile, I was watching the news of coronavirus. At that point was not overly concerned about it but over the three days of the class, the rate of infection was accelerating rapidly. The additional three days of regular class where cancelled and we went home.

The other class booked for the end of the week had also been organized months in advance. As this is a very small class held in a private home, we initially thought it might go ahead but in the end that too was cancelled. That week the company I work for decided that we should all work from home until things settled down.

There is no deneying this pandemic has been awful but my husband and I have been more fortune than many. We have both worked from home since March 2020 and have avoided getting Covid. Like everyone else, we were locked down and unable to go anywhere. Of course, I miss spending time with my friends and family, especially my brothers, and regret the things that we have not been able to do. However, in March 2020, I was exhausted, mentally and physically. Lockdown forced me to stop and take time to grieve and recover. I feel extremely fortunate that I have a hobby that I can do at home and I have enough supplies to last me a life time. Embroidery, the garden, and my lovely husband have been my salvation. I am very lucky!

PPS

I’ve got a few more things to catch up on and more stitching in progress so I’ll be back soon … I hope!

Kinsai Revisitied

The second workshop that I attended in September was a second kinsai class with Midori-san. This time we were doing the gold leaf work on Double Cherry Blossom Fan, a complimentary design to the Drooping Cherry Tree Fan that I did earlier in the year. The first was a two day workshop, this design was a one day workshop as there is less gold leaf work on it. First, Midori-san screen printed the design for the embroidery onto our fabric, which had been applied to foam board with 505 glue. As before, we began by cutting out the sticky back plastic masks. The masks for this design are less complicated so it took less time to prepare them. We soon had the first masks in place and began to apply blue paste paint with a stippling brush. I had remembered that the pigment in this paste is very strong and took my time building up the colour little by little. I liked the result much more than my first attempt with this technique. We then removed the first masks and put the second ones in place. We used a pallet to apply silver and gold paint to the gaps in the mask. Again, I had learnt from my previous experience and made sure that the edges of the mask were well pressed down so the paste would not bleed under it. That mask was removed and the final one put in place for the last step, applying the flakes of gold and silver leaf. Although I remembered the importance of working quickly for this technique, and I though I did work quickly, I had the same problems with the glue drying very rapidly and my sprinkles did not all stick to the silk. All in all, I think I did rather better than with the first class. I don't know if that was because this was a simpler design or because I had learnt from my first class. In some ways I would have liked to do this design first and had a little experience to bring to the more complex design. I still have the embroidery to do. This is Midori-san's finished fan. Of the two fans, I like this one best so hope that I will enjoy the embroidery more when I get to it. Happy Stitching.

A Surprise Parcel

I received a parcel a couple of weeks ago. At first I did not recognize the company logo on the envelope and wondered what it could be. However, when I opened the package and saw the gold and silver flecked box inside, I knew exactly what it contained; I had seen a box just like it on LilyStitch earlier in the year. By strange coincidence, the day that Christa wrote about her mystery box was the very same day that I sent mine away for finishing. I began Drooping Cherry Blossoms at a workshop on Kinsai during March. I completed the embroidery when I returned home and since then it has travelled to Japan and back with Midori-san. Now it has returned to me transformed into a fan. Before unwrapping the fan, I took a few moments to admire the bamboo display stand that came with it. Then I turned my attention to the fan itself. I slipped off the gold paper band and cellophane wrapper and took several minutes to appreciate the beautiful, lacquered wood used to make the veins. At first the fan was difficult to open. It was a little stiff but I think that my fear that I would damage it was the real reason. When it did unfurl, I was delighted with the beautiful finishing. Even the paper used on the back is lovely. Midori-san has designed a second fan and I hope to do the kinsai for that at a workshop in the autumn. Happy Stitching

Persistence is my Middle Name

Thank you for your advice and encouragement, I greatly appreciate it. It seems that I was not over the worst of my cold and have been a bit up and down all week. I went back to work on Monday but on Wednesday I came home and took to my bed again. Since then I have been gradually improving. We had planned to spend the long Easter weekend decorating the hall, stairs and landing (a project we have been threatening to do for 2 or 3 years). We have a least made a start although what we have done so far could more accurately be described as undecorating. With so little energy, I have only managed 2 or 3 hours work per day and then had to spend an hour or two stitching to recover. Shame! I knew what I needed to do to get this project finished, finish the dark pink blossoms. If I could get those done, the rest would be plain sailing. I did one or two a day and, little by little, I got through them. There are less than half as many pale pink blossoms and only a few of those are complete blooms, most have only 1, 2 or 3 petals and took hardly any time to stitch. Besides, I was highly motivated to finish them. During the class, Midori-san had demonstrated to me how the branches, stems and leaves should be stitched and I was keen to put what I had learnt into practice. I thought the technique for the main branches was particularly interesting. They are stitched in lines of staggered diagonal (very similar to stem stitch) but each line overlaps the previous line, effectively splitting the stitches. When Midori-san demonstrated this, I understood the method. I also understood the written instructions, but when I came to do it myself I could not transfer the information to to my hand. This happens to me when I try to draw or paint; my head knows what I want to produce but my hand refuses to follow instructions! Midori-san stitched the central section of branch. The two sections to the right are the first that I stitched. I think that it is difficult to see how our technique differs but believe me it does. I'm not sure at what point my hand finally came on board but the certainly all the vertical sections on the left are stitched as per instructions. The smaller branches where also stitched in staggered diagonals but here the stitches are longer. The leafs are just straight stitches. These stitched very quickly and tie the whole design together. It is a beautiful design. I don't think that I have done it justice. Certainly I enjoyed the kinsai class and, with hindsight, most of the stitching. I think my earlier despondency was largely due to my cold. I just have to do the finishing now and send it to Midori-san for the real finishing. Happy Stitching

Gesundheit

I haven't felt like stitching, and it's not very often you will hear me say that! Last Sunday I broke a tooth. I saw the dentist on Monday afternoon and he repaired it but I was feeling a little less than happy for a couple of days. Then on Wednesday I awoke with a sore throat, pounding head and aching from head to toe. Since then I have had a ghastly cold that has sapped all my energy and desire to do anything. I think that I am over the worst of it now and am beginning to return to normal. I did some stitching last weekend and a little today but I'm not really enjoying this project. I'm not sure if that is just the way that I have been feeling, or genuine displeasure in what I am doing. I am doing the embroidery on the gold leaf design and I have some 'issues' with it. Firstly, I am stitching to a deadline and that is a big turn off for me. I have to get the finished piece to Midori-san by the end of April so it can go to Japan for finishing. If I don't make the deadline, it can go with another batch but that may not be for some months. There are other things that I would rather be stitching now and there is a strong arguement for putting this aside and working on those instead. There are two reasons I don't want to do that. One is that if I don't complete this now, I suspect that I will never return to it and that would be a great shame, it is very pretty and I think I will like it when finished. The second is that I want the frame for another project I want to get started. In addition to the deadline, I'm not enjoying the stitching. The flowers are tiny and I am struggling to stitch them as well as I would like. Midori-san made them look so easy. She said to concentrate on each individual petal. To make them symmetrical with a rounded shape and clear points on the petals. She also said that we should not leave a one-point open space between the petals. The blossom on the left is stitched by Midori-san, the other poor specimens are mine. If you click on the picture then click again to zoom in, you can clearly see the differences between her stitching and mine! People often say that I must have a lot of patience to do Japanese embroidery. I don't usually see it as requiring patience, I just love to do it, but these tiny cherry blossoms are testing my patience and I am having to dig deep to find enough to keep going with them. I'm not sure if I am not enjoying stitching them because I am doing them so poorly, or I am doing them so poorly because I am not enjoying stitching them. Little by little I am getting through them and am on target to meet my deadline. One thing in my favour is I can be very persistant. Happy Stitching

Kinsai

Midori-san is a talented practitioner, designer and tutor of Japanese embroidery and Kinsai. Kinsai is the application of gold leaf to fabric. The first time I went to Bournemouth for Japanese Embroidery lessons, a supplementary class in Kinsai was held the following weekend. Perhaps my tutor thought 5 days of intense lessons was enough for an absolute beginner to handle in one week or maybe the class was fully subscribed. Whatever the reason, I was not offered a place on that occasion and I have always hoped that the class would run again. Well, yippee, this year it did. In 2005, I believe the class did Japanese Vista. This time we were taught Dropping Cherry Tree, one of two fans that Midori-san has designed. We were working on a very pretty, light weight silk that was spaced dyed in the palest of pastel colours. Each piece was unique. The silk is first applied to a piece of foam core board using 505 spray, taking care to ensure there were no wrinkles of air bubbles. As with most techniques it is worth taking time getting the preparation right as this can affect the quality of the work. We then drew around a card template to mark the outline of the fan on our fabric. The gold leaf was applied using various techniques. For each step, sections of the fan or surrounding fabric were masked out using sticky backed plastic. Midori-san had pre-printed the masks on to the plastic and carefully labelled them so we could easily identify each piece after we had cut them out. First everything except the gold cloud shapes was masked out. We then applied gold paste paint to these shapes using a tool called a pallet. It is rather like a rubber squeegee attached to a rectangular wooden handle. Basically the pallet is used to drag the paste across the area and then remove the surplus much in the way you do screen printing. As many of us discovered, this is not as easy as it looks and our paste bled under the edges of the mask. For this design that did not matter too much since the next step was to soften the edges using gold paste and a stippling brush. Silver paste was also stippled onto some of the clouds. Once the paint had dried, assisted by a hair dryer, we removed some of the masks and applied new ones over the completed central panel. The left and right panels were first colours with red and blue paste paint applied in a random manner with a stippling brush. Again, this was more difficult than I had anticipated. The paint is very strongly coloured and we were aiming for a more subtle look. You have to pick up a small amount of paint on the brush and then remove most of it on kitchen paper before applying a very light covering to your silk and gradually building up the layers to achieve the desired effect. I think that most of us felt that we had applied to much and that the colour was too strong. Having said that, I think the colour faded over the next twenty-four hours, perhaps when it had fully dried, and when I looked at it the following day, I liked it better. A new mask was applied over the end panels leaving only two small fan shapes on each end. These were filled with dark gold paste paint in the same way as the clouds but this time through a silk screen with the design(s) of your choice. There were seven designs to choose from. We did not have the same problems with bleeding this time, partly because we were aware of it and made sure we pressed down the edges of the mask more carefully and partly because the silk screen helps to prevent the paint squiging under the edges. The main difficulty here was ensuring that you had covered the whole of the shape before removing the mask. After the fan masks were removed, the end panels were covered with various gold and silver leaf ‘bits’. Glue was spread over the whole area using the pallet in the same way that the paste paint was applied. You then had to work quickly as the glue soon dried. First fine gold leaf strips were lightly scattered using bamboo tweezers followed by gold and silver cut ends using bamboo sifting tubes. The large cut ends are placed in an open mess tube which is gently rotated to gently release the pieces; the smaller pieces are placed in a fine mesh tube and a brush is used to sprinkle glitter-like pieces. And you guessed it; none of this was as easy as it looked. With the tweezers, you either picked up too few or too many; with the seize either too little or too much leaf came out at a time; and the gold leaf is so unimaginably light that in a seemingly breeze free room the pieces float around and end up in a completely different place to the one that you intended. The application of gold was now finished, all that remained was to dry our designs using a hair dryer and heat sealing everything using a heat press before Midori-san screen printed the embroidery design ready to begin stitching the next day. Rereading this, it sounds as though I did not enjoy the class. Nothing could be further from the truth. The materials that Midori-san had prepared for us (templates, masks and instructions) were spot on. One of the required pieces was not labelled and some students did not realise that it was needed but that only meant that they had a different feature on their design but every design was unique given the vagrancies of the gold leaf. It is not a characteristic unique to Japanese embroiderers, but I have noticed that we tend to have high expectations of ourselves. Despite this being our first or, for some, a second attempt at this difficult technique, we all wanted to achieve the same standard as Midori-san, who has been practicing Kinsai for I don’t know how long. I really enjoyed the class and learning the techniques even though I was not terribly satisfied with the results of my efforts. The course runs over two days. By the end of day one, we had covered what normally takes one and a half days, which meant we would had a full day for stitching on day two and Midori-san was able to spend plenty of time with each student demonstrating how she designed the stitched part of the fan. By the time my turn came, afternoon tea was announced. Midori-san said she didn’t want tea, she wanted to stitch and even though I was ready for a cup of tea, there was no way I was going to miss my opportunity of a one on one lesson with her. For me, this was a fantastic weekend but the best thing on Sunday night was ... I still had FIVE days of Japanese Embroidery to look forward to. Happy Stitching