Wild Child: Mostly Tamed

I have finished the embroidered part of Wild Child. It's taken longer than I thought, but due to other restrictions on my time I haven't had a lot of opportunities to stitch over the last year.

In the last episode, there were just a few outlines and a bit of green filling left. The majority of the remaining work was the black beaded filling throughout the entire piece, lots and lots of filling!

I finished off the final leaf outlines:

The green leaves at the top were filled with single beads. I filled them more densely than their counterparts along the sides of the purse. I wanted a little more weight at the top.

The last two little partial blue circles were completed and then it was back to the black filling.

The black filling, which is called para, consists mostly of pairs of black beads stitched like seed stitch. (I added a few single beads here and there when necessary.) At one point, I considered not doing the black filling, but I'm glad I did. The black beads make the black of the background deeper and create more contrast with the lighter colours of the design. However, I can't say I enjoyed stitching the filling. It was more like a necessary evil to stitch black beads on a black background with black threads...usually at night. Thank goodness for good lighting and magnification!

After adding the black beads, I went back and couched between each pair which took quite a while. I'm happy it's done and it looks great.

I learned so much from this project. It was interesting, challenging, and ultimately very satisfying. Along with all the Japanese bead embroidery techniques I was able to try, I enjoyed figuring out the various changes I made to the original design, especially the shaded embroidery parts.

As a reminder, here's the original version of Wild Child:

Here's my take on Wild Child (click on the image for a much larger version). I'm very pleased with the results.

I like both versions. Neither is better than the other, they're just different. I'm kind of disappointed that I didn't get to do the beaded veins in the original, but the temptation to add shading was too strong!

I am going to set the purse aside for a while. I tend to get burned out on projects that have a lot of repetition. In a few months or so, I'll return and do the final construction, but it's finished enough for now. Wild Child and I need a break from each other!

Koji agrees. He's worn himself out helping me.