Temari #115- learning

Temari #115- the making of this temari was an exploration of incorporating felt into a temari design. The smaller felt circles are hand dyed wool/rayon felt and the larger circles are repurposed felted wool fabric. On the circles, the blue thread is a perle cotton, and the white is a silk/bamboo yarn with the plies split and the variegated thread is the same silk/bamboo yarn with the plies split that has been hand dyed. The background embroidery thread is a hand dyed perle cotton.

The design was inspired by penny rugs, which are rugs made of scrap wool felt or felted wool fabric, cut into circles by tracing coins and then joining the felt circles to make a rug.

Felt appliqued to a temari ball makes for a nontraditional temari, so there was nothing on internet for me to find to guide me on the subject. So, exploration means teaching myself.  Although this is not the first felt appliqued on temari that I have made, I still had some learning to do about appliqueing felt on a temari.

After stitching beads to a couple of the circles, I found out the hard way that beading should be saved for last if possible: after the circles were appliqued to the ball and after the background was stitched. Thread kept getting hung up on the protruding beads. Very annoying and time consuming to have to untangle with almost every stitch.

So, all those lovely beads (except on a couple circles) were stitched last. Stitching beads on a ball is challenging since there is no back to work from like when stitching beads on fabric. Ideally, I would have used a curved needle to make stitching easier, but I do not have one small enough to work with seed beads. Definitely something I will be seeking for future beaded temari projects.

Another lesson I had learned was that felted fabric, if not densely felted, would tend to ravel along the edges. Hence the necessity for an edge stitching.

Something I had to learned before, but had to relearn, was that felt has a lovely pliable quality in that it can be shaped and deformed to take the shape of a non-flat surface. So the circles appliqued to the ball lay “flat” against the curved surface of the ball with no rippling of the edges. But this malleable felt characteristic can be problematic in that the circles can become deformed enough to make them not regular circles, which in turn means the spacing between them becomes irregular even if they are properly placed on the ball.

I struggled with getting the placement of the circles right for quite a while before realizing that it was the circles not their placement since the ball was accurately marked and the circles were centered on the intersections.

The ball was set aside for quite a few months. And ignored. Finally, I could no longer tolerate seeing it unfinished.

This time I could see the problem; I was trying to make something irregular become regular. Eventually, I found that by using the guidelines as a starting point I could adjust the placement of the circles so that the narrow spacing between them was somewhat uniform. This left the pentagons in the background irregularly shaped, but something I could live with. The one in the picture below is one of the more regular shaped ones.

All the circles got stitched down. Then it was time to stitch something in the blank pentagon spaces. I tried a couple designs that echoed the pentagon shape. Not a good idea unless I want to emphasize how deformed the pentagons looked. So, I guess I had not really learned my lesson yet about how to deal with the irregular spacing.

Finally, it dawned on me. An irregular pattern in an irregular space. Embrace the irregular.  A random fill pattern based on Chinese ice ray lattice patterns was stitched in the blank pentagon spaces. Okay, I admit that the background stitching is just a distraction and the irregularity of the pentagons are still there; but it is a good distraction and a nice background pattern too.

More about the temari:

Temari #115 is a C10 division. The smaller felt circles are hand dyed wool/rayon felt and the larger circles are repurposed felted wool fabric. On the circles, the blue thread is a perle cotton, and the white is a silk/bamboo yarn with the plies split and the other thread is a hand dyed silk/bamboo yarn with the plies split. The background embroidery thread is a hand dyed perle cotton.

Hawiian Quilt Inspired Temari

With a Hawaiian name and being a quilter, I thought for many years it would be fitting if I made a quilt in the Hawaiian applique style. Never got around to it.

Traditional Hawaiian quilts are usually a radially symmetric design created by folding the fabric (or paper template) into eighths and then cut along the edges, like making paper snowflakes.

For this temari, a paper template was made to fit the size of the ball. Next, two pieces of hand dyed rayon/wool felt were cut from the template. The felt pieces were appliqued to the ball and then outlined using stem stitch. The thread is a hand dyed 5/2 perle cotton. Little bullion stitches were used in the cut slits for accents in the leaves and seed head.

This temari, #89, is an S8 division with no markings.

Glass Float Temari

This S9 temari was inspired by glass floats, which used to be used to keep fishing nets afloat. Many are found with barnacles attached. This one also has a starfish (or sea star) adorning it.

Side view

 

In reading about the history of glass fishing floats, they were first produced in Norway around 1840 and other countries followed, with Japan starting around 1910. Even though glass floats have been replaced by materials such as plastic and Styrofoam, many of the Japanese floats are still being found washed up on the Pacific coast.

Bottom view

 

Glass floats are netted then secured to fishing nets. Looking on internet, one can see several different styles of float nets. Some are simple and others more complex. There are even tutorials on how to tie a glass float net. That is how I learned to make one for this temari. The netting just happens to be a simple division, with a north and south pole.

Top view

 

The starfish was made after the ball was netted. It is made of some of my hand dyed rayon/wool felt and loosely stuffed with scraps of yarn. The surface is stitched with matt glass seed beads in a pattern that was inspired by pictures of real starfish. The red color for the starfish was also inspired real starfish.

Each barnacle on this temari was machine embroidered on little pieces of stabilizer.  The ends were hand stitched together to create a tube, some stitching over the join was added to disguise the seam and the bottom circles were stitched to the tube to finish the barnacle forms.

Next, the barnacles were pinned to the netted ball along with the starfish. After they were arranged, then each one was stitched into place. A curved needle was a necessity in order to stitch the barnacles to the ball.

I discovered that taking a group off the ball and pinning them to my work surface in the same order helped me to keep them in order and out of the way while stitching each one on. I left all the other barnacle clusters pinned to the ball while working on a group.

This was a good project to finish up on a snow bound day.