Blue

And just for fun, the blue version of the stitched circles.

Red circles

I did red and blue versions of the circles design also. They were done with a compass and fabric marking pencil so it was easy to get them consistent. Although, orientation issues would be user error. You don’t notice that until you’re all done and standing back and looking at it. But we’ll just pretend that isn’t an issue and I’ll only show you the good parts. I used binder clips to hold them to my cutting mat to make it easier.

The red one has more variation in color but the color is a bit darker so there was more room for shading from light to dark. I think the difference between the front and back is more pronounced also. The back looks like sediment kind of collected in the little poofs. The poofs on this one were pulled out a lot better. The insides of the circles look better than on the green one.





I need a lot more walls to hang things on. My office at work still has some room. I may have to start hanging them there.

Circular

Another practice piece. I'm please with how it turned out but there is always something I can learn. This was done two rows of running stitch as Hira-nui on the large motif and one row on the smaller.

One thing I noticed is that I didn't pull up the 'free' fabric well enough in the middle of the stitching in a couple of spots. The center and left side of the large design as well as left and upper of the small one. Even though those areas weren't stitched, because they were still compressed a bit they didn't get the dye as well as the areas I had pulled out properly.

You can also see the difference in the veining on the one side compared to the other. It matters if you pull out the little puffs to one side or the other. The darker veining is the side where the puffs were out.

Vine and leaves

An example of Maki-nui stitching for the long vine and Hira-nui running stitch for the stylized leaves.
Again, using black fiber reactive dye on silk shows how the color shifts.