All-over Kousa

I finished this guy last night. It was a stitch-along on one of my temari groups, except most of the people finished in September. I'm a little late. I'm actually pleased that I finished it at all, after the mishaps I had during the stitching. I had picked a pink and two different shades of burgundy, and I had done one needle-full of thread of each color. When I needed another length of pink, I could not find it anywhere! Either the dog (or my chair) ate it, or it fell into the garbage can. (Any of those are possible.) So it sat for a couple of weeks until I got to the store. I had the temari with me, and I thought I matched the color, but when I started to stitch, I had actually matched a darker shade of pink. At this point I decided no one would notice, and I kept on going but after one needle-full of pink (you guessed it!) my replacement pink color disappeared! (Same three possibilities for that disappearance.)

So it sat for a couple more weeks, hoping that one of the pinks would reappear. When that didn't happen, I decided to bite the bullet, take out the old stitching, and start over again with new colors. (I still couldn't give up on the pink.) I had been regretting my choice of colors for a quite a while already, so I wasn't too disappointed about that, but this is about when my stitching blahs hit.

On this pattern, the pattern doesn't start to show up until quite a bit more than half the ball is stitched, and I didn't like how it was looking earlier. I did have pictures of the same pattern in progress and finished, and I could see that I was on track, so I kept going, but it took quite a bit of determination.



This is a c8 division, and the stitching is layered, one row of each color at a time, building up the pattern. The marking is done with a white sewing thread, hardly visible when you are looking for it, and not visible at all when you are not. There are 6 pink squares, 8 green triangles, and 12 yellow diamonds. After working with one row at a time for a while, you can change things up, skipping a shape in one round or doubling up, so the possibilities are endless. Our stitch-along leader calls it a kaleidoscope ball, because it is constantly changing. I left off several of the diamond rows, and ended with three rows of pink.

It is possible to continue stitching until the "channels" get completely filled up too. That makes a much smoother look, and gives a very different character to the ball.

This type of pattern is fascinating, and I'm so glad I stuck it out.