Japanese Embroidery Class Phase 1 - Day 3

Day 3 of the class was one of the worst. After praises from the teacher about my beginner-skills-okay-for-the-nuido (I never made embroidery before !! ), I hit a wall that day. A massive one, and my inexperience gave me a lot of troubles.

First of all : Japanese knots.
I had troubles earlier in my life with french knots on cross stitch. Well, Japanese knots are also not the friendly type.

So while other stitcher were doing somme beautiful flowers with the french knots, all I did was...

Those. Horribles. Tentatives. Of. Straight. From. Hell. Things. 

On the top left, there three almost correct knots. The rest were... yuck. «Practice», yeah. Not a single knot was stitched on the piece that day ( nor 6 months later). My problem is about not pulling the good loop so it creates this kind of tail on the top f the knot. 

For info: I got a crash course of Japanese knot last month, they look better know but still haven't put any on the fabric.

Second struggle of the day : Bush clover. There are 34 of those little devilish things in the piece. We suppose the mad/genius creator of this piece made sure we would know how to stitch them properly at the end of the phase 1. Slow clap for him, they are very hard to do. In fact, they look like being easy. You start on one side, move and turn and shorten the stitches next to the top then turn and do longer and.... 

The teacher said it was not that bad.... but she made me redo the right part two times.

I was almost crying. 

( There is a small difference between the two pictures, I don't know if you will notice it)

On the afternoon, it was a litte bit more relax. We made a special thread, supertwisted thread that we had to put in water and made to dry before stitching. It is used for the stem of flowers. It looks super shiny and i love it texture. We couch it with little regular twisted thread of the same colour (green).

The little seeds ont the side if the green stems is where i should have put my (not on point) knots. 

Finally, we had to couche the outline of the paperbag, because on day 4 we would be working on it. 

So this is what the progress of that horrible day looked like : One leaf, 3 cm of stems and half outlining. And 30 ugly knots on the side.

Doing this blog post 6 months later, i remember the mixed feelings of that day. I was very naive about the Japanese embroidery.. like i knew it would be difficult be living those difficulties for real is not the same. After almost 3 years of waiting for this class, i never thought i would be that hard. Seeing the other stitchers doing there knots almost perfectly (because embroidering for years), I felt a little bit left behind. Moreover not able to distinguish angles and where the needle should land to have te perfect stitch, have to redo 2 times a single side of a leaf... Aouch. 

But the most important is... i'm not a quitter. It was not the first fail i had in my life, and certainly not the last. When life knocks you down, the only thing you can do is stand up. So I stood up, had a great night of sleep, ready for my fourth and last day.