Goodness, I’ve gotten behind on my temari blogging. I just went to the last class Barb is having in preparation for EGA this weekend, and I realized I never got around to blogging about the class before that. That class was the second half of the intermediate session; we learned Maritime Stars in the first half. For the second half, we learned the design she calls the Kiku Sampler.
First, some basic terminology. The “kiku” stitch is the type of stitch that basically looks like a star or a flower, with points radiating out from the center of a circle. The stars on the Maritime Stars design are an example of a 4-point kiku. It’s one of the most classic temari designs, and has a huge range of variability.
To begin this ball, we divided the ball with a combination 8 division. That ends up marking the ball with shapes like these. We wanted to put kiku designs in each of the large open centers, marked on the diagram there as an 8-part square. We outlined the squares first by putting in green trefoil designs around each the 6-part triangles, which looked more or less like leaves. (Don’t worry, I’ll show you a picture and it will make much more sense.) Each of the kiku designs in the squares was a different variation on the design, hence the sampler part of the name.
Here is one of the most basic designs, which features two 4-petal kikus layered on top of one another. I made it look a little fancier by adding the green spiderweb stitch in the center. We learned a number of variations on this theme, with the two colors simply stacked or interwoven in different ways, but the end results all look pretty similar, in that they are all two colors of 4 alternating petals each.
This is a more complicated one, with color changes on each petal and more advanced stitching:
This one starts closer to the center, giving the petals a different, elongated look. It essentially combines stitching techniques from the first two designs shown, though:
And when I got to the last square, I had run out of suggested designs to use, so I made one up by varying the point that I started and stopped the different kiku layers:
If you look closely, you may also notice that my green trefoils are not all the same color. This 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 were the two next steps darker, and did multiple trefoils of each color. At that point I decided that my ball was attempting to look more “natural,” so I didn’t do the suggested final touch of outlining everything in a final row of gold thread. All in all, I was very pleased with it.
