Stained glass temari

If you like temari, this post is for you. If you don't, skip this one.

A few years ago we made temari as Christmas gifts for family and friends. My husband and I also wanted to make one for each other, but we sort of skipped that part. We had the balls wrapped and ready to go, but they sat on our counter, neglected. Last month I finally took it up again. My husband had wrapped it beautifully with purple, black and blue thread. I knew I wanted to make a pattern that would resemble stained glass, and after searching online and coming up with nothing, I found something that would work in our local library's temari books (I love living in a place where temari books are easily found in the local library).

Creating the guidelines was the first challenge. This ball is a compound 10 division, meaning the ball is first divided into 10 sections, and then after a slight rotation, is divided again, and then again...and it looks something like this midway through:

Two poles of 10 divisions each can be seen here, but more poles and divisions are needed before the guidelines are complete.

The guidelines are finished. Now it's time to create the main pattern.

After the divisions are finished, triangles join the pentagons at their sides. This pattern needs 20 triangles in 5 colors. Each triangle takes about an hour.

Two triangles weave together where they meet.

In the little video you can see how all of the divisions create a regular pattern of stars, diamonds and pentagons. Honestly the hardest part about this design was mapping out the colors so that each pentagon had all five colors, and each overlapping triangle was a different color. I had to plot it all out with colored glass pins before I covered the ball with triangles.

I got a little lost while trying to count my thread. The little pins are helping me keep track.

This pattern is a little tricky because each triangle needs to be wrapped the same number of times. If one triangle is wrapped 10 times, and another 13, the weave where they are joined won't work out right. I'm not very good at maintaining concentration during times of tedium, so there are a few triangles that I messed up and didn't want to go back and fix.

Half of the ball is complete.

You can see in the picture above that some of the edges are a little ragged where the two colors meet. I can fix that later by slipping my needle between the colors and pushing against the line.

Completed temari

I love stained glass, but I couldn't really find any examples that combined the look with temari, so I created my own. Bordering all the colors in black helps sell the effect. There are quite a few mistakes on this ball, but the black borders also help hide a multitude of sins :-)

The design inspiration for this particular ball came from this book, かわいい手まり (Kawaii Temari):

See the ball in the lower right corner?