Mackintosh Kimono

Last week I got to runaway for two days of class with the talented Toni Gerdes. 

Now she was teaching three separate guilds all within driving distance. But the art deco Mackintosh Kimono spoke to me the most. I already have her Frank Lloyd Wright Kimono. And soon there will be a Klimt Kimono. 

I drove out to Harrisonburg to join the Shenandoah Valley ANG Chapter for this class. They meet in the Virginia Quilt Museum and occasionally we had quilt museum visitors wander around (and we were on our best behavior whenever we had guests.) Not that we ever weren't on our best behavior. But we do sometimes like to complain, in a nice way. Of course. 

Like when I opened my thread kit and realized that there were two spools of Accentuate in the same color. That's a lot of Accentuate. 

Toni started us right in on the one thing that none of us had experience with - the Wire Lace or Wonder Ribbon. What this stuff is from the Fusion Bead website:  WireLace® ribbon is an innovative product for making jewelry! Made of fine, woven brass, copper or aluminum wire and bonded with an enamel coating to create a variety of stunning colors. 

In bead stores, you'll find it as Wire Lace. In needlepoint stores, it might be repackaged as Wonder Ribbon or it might be Wire Lace. It comes in multiple sizes - 1mm, 3mm, 6mm, and 12mm. 

If you look in the column under the rose, the one with the double helix stem, that's Wonder Ribbon that we have stretched between two balloon sticks and then stitched down. With Accentuate of course. 

So we now have this sheer wire ribbon tacked down and can stitch over it. In fact, we can see through it to see our placement of the stem. Pretty darn cool. 

We got to work the various patterns of our roses. Our checkerboards. We stretched some Flair and worked jessicas over it for our rosebuds. We had some lively discussions of stitch names, learned our backgrounds stitches. In general, we had a great time and it was over far too soon. And how to outline everything.

There's a part of me that wants to zip right through this project, but something else is calling my name. In fact, I'm leaving the computer to go back upstairs and stitch some more on it. More on this soon!