I actually made this temari (quite) a while ago, inspired by the forsythia that were blooming at the time, but they were gone before the temari was finished, and then I kept putting off photographing it until I could get a sprig. Now that spring has finally rolled around again, I remembered!
(Yes, yes, I know forsythia have four petals, but work with me here. I was experimenting with trying something unique with interweaving offset spindles.)
One of the designs I’m working on for my Level 3 JTA certification needs a “net” effect. The obvious technique there is the one called “net stitching,” but I had also seen another technique that looked like it might work for my purposes in some Japanese books, so I wanted to give it a try. However, since I have already spent about a week doing all the stitching that will be underneath the net, I decided I needed to try the technique out on a lower-stakes test temari first.
I did a variation of the design pictured in the Japanese book I was working from. Since the netting ends up on top, the first thing to do is stitch flowers, one at each pole and then several more randomly placed around the ball. This does mean that you can’t just put on division lines and start stitching away, but I found that I could add my own “division lines” wherever I wanted them pretty easily by using hatch-marked paper circle guides of varying sizes, which I used to place evenly spaced pins and then stitch a 10- or 20-spoke circle with pine needle stitching.
The net technique is hard to diagram, given that it works from pole to pole and one side of the ball to the other for each wrap of thread, so I wasn’t really sure I understood it correctly. As it turns out, I didn’t, but my mistake became readily apparent once I started working. (Hint: There is basically no stitching except to start and stop the thread at the very beginning and end; everything else is continuous wrapping.) Sometimes, loath though I am to admit it, you just have to do before you can really understand.
I worked on this most of Friday night and Saturday, and then on Sunday, the temperature got up into the 60s, so I can only assume that applying the golden net functioned to trap some spring weather!
I’m quite pleased with this! I’m definitely glad I took the time to put on all the flowers, rather than just jumping in and trying the net, because now I have this beautiful finished piece. Educational and artistically satisfying!
One of my great sadnesses about our current yard is that I have nowhere to grow clematis. Ideally, it would be growing up a trellis-like mailbox post at the end of the driveway, but all the mailboxes on our street are one-side-of-the-street-only, and it’s the other side from our house. Fortunately, one of our neighbors on that side and a few doors down has me covered. While it is not my most beloved bright purple clematis, it is a really interesting stripey kind that I hadn’t seen before.
April has come to a close, so I think I’m going to finish out this particular photo series as well. Here’s a pathway looking forward, hopefully to a happy late spring of consistently warm weather.
By returning to the Gardens a few weeks later in April, I also managed to catch the tulip beds in much fuller bloom. Have some exuberance!
Today’s post features two more views of the tea pavilion, both taken with my wider angle lens. (The more recent trip to the Gardens involved a lot of switching lenses to test things, since I was by myself this time.
And the other side of the tea pavilion, entering from the “front” path this time. If you look under the shoji-covered windows, you can see a little square of wood in a track on the right side. (It’s kind of half-hidden behind the low wall on that side.) This is the nijiriguchi, or “crawling-in door,” which I mentioned last time is the way you would traditionally enter the space to take part in a real tea ceremony.
This picture is technically from the second April trip I took to Duke Gardens, about two weeks later, so the cherry trees were done blooming and more of the other trees had leafed out. However, this time I had my zoom lens with me, so I was able to get a good picture of The Bridge. I don’t know that this bridge actually has a name, but everyone who goes to the Asiatic section of the Gardens has to take a picture of The Red Bridge.
When I was there earlier in the month, I did get a shot that isn’t actually bad, but is somewhat lower quality due to having been “zoomed” by cropping quite severely. I’m going to post it anyway, though, because the little weeping cherry on the right end of the bridge was blooming. It will also definitely give you an impression of how quickly all the trees decided to change once they were convinced spring was finally here.
Today’s pictures: Azaleas! Last weekend, we had dinner at my parents’ house, and their yard is fully of fantastic azaleas. Our yard is working on it, but it doesn’t get as much sun as theirs, so all our bushes were about a week behind. Here are two pictures taken on the same day, in two cities right next to each other.
From our yard:
From my parents’ yard:
(I wanted to post one of my longer-distance pictures of a full bush, but it was starting to rain, so the sky is really overcast and glarish, so they weren’t as nice. Hopefully you still get the idea.)
I think I’ve posted all the good pictures from my first photo trip to Duke Gardens, so I’m going to take a break from that series for the weekend to post some spring photos from around the neighborhood.
One thing about this area of North Carolina is that the climate is actually quite similar to a lot of Japan, so a lot of the things that grow well there grow well here as well; in fact, when I first arrived in Japan and was on the road from the airport to the hotel where the JET orientation was, my first thought was that the view out the bus window looked pretty much the same. Hence, a normal spring here is full of kudzu (you can find pictures of this eating roadsides all across the Southeast thanks to some brilliant DOT plan to import it as a fast-growing ground cover; surprise! it worked) and wisteria. Wisteria is at least beautiful, but in Durham especially, it has been allowed to grow rampant and wild in a lot of roadside wooded areas, which becomes obvious at this time of year, when sudden walls of purple flowers suddenly appear. I haven’t had a chance to get a good picture of this phenomenon yet, since I usually see it while driving, but there’s also a yard around the block from us with a good crop, so I took a brief jaunt over there to try to get some pics.
This one is my favorite:
This year it’s been even more clear than usual that wisteria actually comes in several different colors. The picture above shows the more typical darker purple, but the kind that’s growing between our house and our next-door neighbor’s is actually purple and white.
Apologies for missing yesterday! Today’s picture is a self-portrait in cherry blossoms.
I probably have a whole collection of pictures like this from various trips by now, since I find it to be the most personally amusing way of demonstrating I was there.
Alternatively, my shadow has been going on trips by itself, all Peter Pan-like, and is sending me vacation photos. Taunting me. That jerk. At least it seems to be seeing some nice things…
From My Wandering Mind 