It’s not Monday. It’s Wednesday. For that I apologize. However, I do have a fun project here to share, and a How To in the works. I promise I’ll get that one up soon too, but a How To takes a bit more preparation than a regular post. So that’s taking longer than expected.

This is the reveal from my Teaser Post from last week!

Anyway, one of the reasons I haven’t been posting all that much lately is travel. Read about that here. The other reason is that my aunt loaned me a book on Japanese Sashiko Stitching. The book is in Czech, and romanized Japanese, but luckily I speak enough of both of those languages to figure it out.

(click the image for a link to the blog I got them from)

I was immediately caught in the simplicity and the intricacy of the work. I wanted to reflect it in a piece of my own, but because I’m in temporary housing mode (six months here, four months there, four months somewhere else) my craft supplies are limited to what I can find here, and what I buy, and the one hobby I allowed myself to bring.

I chose beads as my one hobby (duh), so I ended up making a series of three bracelets intended to reflect the Sashiko style.

I found the patterns I liked in the book, among pages and pages of tiled patterns intended to give inspiration, not instruction. That one up there is apparently a variation on the “sayagata” style. Awesome. It was also my first, and biggest cuff bracelet.

The “patterns” for the other two bracelets also came from the book, the other white one was “Nanamehogan tsunagi”, and I couldn’t find a name for the one I used for the purple bracelet.

I made some mistakes, sure, especially on that big cuff (which measures close to 4 inches wide) but that’s part of the fun! There’s a tribe somewhere in Africa which purposefully includes mistakes and flubs in their work because to be perfect is seen as imitating the gods, and is therefore blasphemous. I like that approach.

Anyway, what do you think? Did I capture the spirit of Sashiko?