Tico temari

While stitching temari in Costa Rica I came up with a pattern for a morpho butterfly. I have seen dozens of these giant blue butterflies in a single day, yet they always give me a thrill.

A lot of women in the Monteverde area do embroidery to sell to tourists and I've been getting some women in the San Luis valley going with temari. When making crafts to sell as souvenirs, the product has be done rather quickly, so teaching a complicated division of the ball was out. Although the local embroidery looks free-form, it's based on patterns transferred to fabric with carbon paper, which just doesn't work on a thread ball. So I came up with a paper template which is used to position pins at the corner of the wings. I stitch an outline around the pins and then fill in the wings and add a body with spindle stitch.
  This is my first student, Daisy, with her first completed ball. She's holding up the side with a dragonfly on it, another motif I taught her.

 Here are some of her morphos in progress.

I also designed some little balls that I hope will sell to those on a tighter budget or with very limited luggage space. I tried a lot of different designs on these doodle balls but the mini-morpho is my favorite. It requires a very different style of template than the big version.

It will be very interested to see what Ticas do with temari.