The next part, but not the last part in Temari

Okay you crazy crafting voyeurs, here’s how you mark a temari for stitching. There will be one more entry after this one, because after I got to a certain part I forgot to take more pictures, so this one will be a cliffhanger. Dun dun duuuuuuuuuuuun …

So you have yourself a mari. Wrapped all pretty, like. I forgot to mention in the last entry that when you get to the end of the wrapping you thread a needle with the wrap thread and then stitch all over the ball with about 30cm of the end of the thread. This embeds it and keeps it secure and it should definitely not ever come undone.

Now you’re ready to mark a mari for stitching. First, you cut a length of paper. Most of my temari are small enough to use an 8.5 x 11” sheet of paper cut into strips, but if it’s larger, then I tape the pieces together, end-to-end.

You make a tiny fold near the end of the paper and then stick it into the ball using a pin, right exactly at that fold. This will become your north pole.

Wrap the strip of paper around the ball until it meets the pin and then cut it off at that point. The length of the strip of paper should now be roughly the circumference of the mari.

You take the loose end of that piece of paper, while it is still pinned in the mari and when the end touches the pin, you fold it and cut a v-shaped wedge into it at the fold.

Leaving it folded, you take the end up to the north pole pin and fold it AGAIN, and cut another wedge into it. Doesn’t matter which side the wedge is, I just find it easier to have them all on the same side.

When you unfold it (leaving it still attached at the north pole) you will have a strip of paper with 3 wedges cut out of it. The middle wedge is going to be the indicator for your south pole.

Laying the strip flat along the curve of the ball you put a pin in at the tip of the triangle that is the south pole wedge. This is where making sure you have no lumps and bumps comes into play, because the more perfect the sphere, the easier it is to mark the south pole. Once the pin is placed, leaving the north pole pin exactly where it is, you move the strip to a different area of the mari and check the placement. If it’s not right, you move the south pole pin. And then you move the strip again, and check again. You keep moving the south pole pin until you have moved the strip countless times and it hasn’t been moved again (or only a millimetre or so). I got lucky on this mari and didn’t have to move it at all.

Now that you know your north and south poles, you use the top wedge (closest to the north pole) to mark where your equator is. Depending on how many guidelines the pattern calls for, you place pins around the mari at equidistant points. This is where you can eyeball it. Temari aren’t supposed to be about perfect math. Sometimes, if I’m concerned about the look of it, I will measure the circumference and calculate the exact distance between pins and then measure them, but that’s pretty rare these days.

Typically I put one pin in a different colour. It didn’t really matter on this mari (even though I did it anyway ~ the white one) because I did wrapping bands of colour. The alternate colour pin is the starting line for when I’m stitching in the round. You would think it wouldn’t matter, where each colour starts and stops, but it does, and not just for the number of rounds you’ve stitched.

After this I got caught up in this temari, so I didn’t photograph the guidelines. I think that’s okay because this is long enough as is with this many pictures. So the next edition of show-and-tell will be the guidelines for a simple division and then a complex-8 division (because they both start the same way, and the next pattern I want to do is complex-8).

This finished temari is in the next entry.

Last updated May 13, 2021