Such a wondrous and colorful gathering of perle cotton, styrofoam balls, and sewing thread can only mean ONE thing: Temari balls! DeeDee has been asking and asking to start a Temari ball. I had a few yarn wrapped Temari balls ready for decoration and we just started there. First we had to agonize over the COLORS which is always the worst part. She then wound her chosen spool of sewing thread onto the base and got some practice anchoring her thread and learning how her stitches would behave. We used a paper strip to make her measurements and divisions on the ball as well as establishing her two poles.

That is where we picked up this week. She learned how to stitch her latitude and longitude lines and made further measurements to mark the wrapping. She agreed that the measuring/marking was the most tedious and frustrating part. We began wrapping with the perle cotton and the metallics and she was off! I watched her start the first few rows and then she worked on her own! We also just started doing actual embroidery stitching on a ball. She has 2 more that are marked with the stitching already begun and she recently took her final and was excited to have time to work on these!

This is the Temari I finished that night. It is wrapped in a spool of martha blue thread that I have been dying to use on a ball. This ball was divided into fourths and stitched with two woven spindle shapes. It has a wide obi belt so you can't see where my spindles overlapped a bit! I have had SO much fun showing someone else how to make these! The two we have made so far are the simplest to make but you can still see how beautiful even the simplest ones are. I need to be making these for my nieces, but I think I want to keep these! I look forward to revisiting different techniques as DeeDee learns, and I'm excited about learning the more complex ones!

DeeDee's WIP is a deep purple divided into eighths and will be 8 single spindles in shades of purple and rust--and the first one looked SO good! I can't wait to see it when she is finished!