As I promised at the end of my last temari post, the next ball I’ve almost completed now is the Swirl Ball. Due to a bizarre story about another temari person trying to insist that they can copyright a stitching technique, Barb has never written down the instructions for the way she marks this ball, which made it challenging to try to do on my own two weeks later. However, based on my memory of her verbal instructions, my own mental visualizations of how it was supposed to look, and some judicious browsing of the patterns forum on TemariKai, I figured it out.
Despite how fantastically complicated this ball looks in the end, it is essentially just 6 evenly spaced diamonds and the hexagons formed between them. Within each shape, you just do increasingly small offset stitches until you get to the center, and then move to the next shape. Here’s a picture to give you an idea of what the shapes look like while the stitching is in progress:
Once all the shapes have been swirled in, the shapes all blend together, and you get what looks like a continually swirled ball all over:
Now that I’ve told you that it’s all diamonds and hexagons, I bet you’ll be able to spot them. When I get better at evenly spacing all the stitching and lining up the shapes next to each other, it’ll look even more seamless. But I think this is pretty darn good for my first all-over Swirl!
As a bonus, here are some pictures of my completed Maritime Stars ball:
Say Dana, does it make it easier to justify the crafting if someone on the other side of the planet were to make a request?
No pressure — only trying to help
Nah, I justified it as something to do while watching TV anyway. But I’ll take a request! You can give me your request details via Plans.
[...] is because I used up all of the light green thread she originally provided us in our kit to do my Swirl ball, so I had to go get more. Of course, the store was out of that shade, so I picked up two more that [...]
I like made this emari,could you send me how may it, I want the explication in spanish please.
Unfortunately, these are copyrighted designs from my teacher. I don’t know of anywhere you can get them in Spanish.
Have just “discovered” this page of yours on a general trawl of “Temari craft”, WOW!! have been a Temari addict for many years now but had never seen the “swirl” pattern before. Where have I been ? Where does one start on the ball, any “helps” would be appreciated. Yours expectantly Beryl
Hi Beryl! You can actually do a swirl on any temari division. Just prepare by marking the ball with scrap thread, then stitch around the outlines of the shapes you want to do the swirl in with your actual stitching thread, and remove the scrap thread. Once you have just the outlines in place, pick one shape and start taking angled straight stitches the length of each side, then repeat until you have spiraled all the way to the center. The TemariKai article about marking a ball for an all-over swirl pattern is here: http://www.temarikai.com/patterns/StitchAlongs/SwirlBasics/Temswirlbasic1101.html
Thanks Dana, will definitely be experimenting with this design.
Happy stitching Temari addict.