So my new Japanese embroidery project is called Lantern Plants. It’s another design from the Japanese Embroidery Center. It’s got four lantern plants at different stages of the life cycle. In the picture above, I worked the foundation for one in flat silk.

Then I worked a lattice in a champagne gold metal. If you look at pictures of lantern plants online, they look like paper lanterns with a red seed inside. After a while, the outside skin starts to rot away, leaving a lacy network with the red seed showing through. That’s what this lattice represents. I started putting veins on in gold, but then realized that they didn’t show up very well. One of the suggested colors was a very bright lime green, and my teacher thought that actually this was for the veins. So I couched it down onto the vein lines, and it really worked well. The green and red contrast made it pop! So here we are, plant number one finished: