Best of Show for Japanese Embroidery (The Beverly E. Booker Award); First Place, Non-Professional Japanese Embroidery; Judge’s Choice

The design (on light blue silk Shioze) is a spider-like Japanese mum in which each petal is stitched (with hand-twisted silk) in one of the four ‘braid’ (also known as ‘cord’) techniques or in a technique called ‘diagonal layer’ (used to space out the complex braids for a more appealing visual). All five techniques are used in all nine colors.

The original design contained fewer techniques on a red/blue dyed silk which did not appeal to me. In order to ‘master’ the braid techniques, I felt I needed to do all four of the braid techniques. Lastly, because of the change in background silk, the original colors needed to be changed (done by the Japanese Embroidery Center with additions by Mary Alice Sinton and myself).