To Dooooooooo - well its a very long list

Today I had a spare few hours due to the heat (today we got to 43.0°C - the hottest January day on record was 45.7°C on the 31st in 1991) so I gathered all my Japanese temari books to make my temari to do list. I had previously decided to only look at Cosmo 1-7 and a few others but when I had done that I figured hey how could it hurt to look through the rest as well.....


I broke out a brand new 220 page A4 sized Journal and started taking notes of the balls I want to make. I can t believe that I filled 5 pages of the book. There are 66 temari patterns on listed on the first journal page alone - and that is just for Cosmo 1-3.

On the yahoo temari groups some members (I am one) lament the fact that many of the lovely temari featured in the Cosmo books have no pattern. I discovered today, by the process of examining all the books within a few short hours that many designs featured in the earlier books are actually explored in the later books. Also many books have very similar designs in them which lead me to question the reason for this... is it because there are so few authors or is it because there really is an actual limit to the variety of ways to place the thread on a ball??? Well I probably wont be able to answer the second guess in my lifetime.... I may not ever finish my to do list as I am sure it will be added to when the 3 new temari books arrive from Japan this week.

I also have to try out the Stitch Along balls made on TC and TT last year. I only had time to do the yubinuki obi ball in 2009 but I have printed hard copies of the instructions for all the others so these are on the to do list too.

I also made 6 new temari bases so I am ready to commence my list. Here is a picture of my base stash. It is a little on the light side (meaning a bit empty - only 12 in there) but that's ok I plan to make some more over the coming weeks. Today I was finished off a rice hull bag and it was too hot to go ripping into a new one. The larger bases are made with almost 2 cups of rice hull (28cm). The smaller sized pink one is made from wads of dryer lint (21cm). The medium size temari in red and green are (24cm)... this is the size I usually work on.  The meduim size temari fit nicely in my hand and feels comfortable to stitch on.  All good for simple division temari and less complex combination division but I feel that I need to move up to the larger size now for the C8 and C10 work I am planning for the next few months.  TC has a HHG project starting around Feb 1st and I am going to try to follow along with it so one of these balls will be set aside for that.

My goal is to make at least 30 C8 and C10 balls this year .  Next year I hope to use what I learn and move into Multis... I keep raising that bar don't I?!