Holiday spheres

  As we are finally moving into cold weather and the holiday season, it affects my color choices and projects. I'm especially drawn to icy blues as on this 16 division chrysanthemum stitch.

 The ball shown below has the same base color in sewing threads as some of the number 5 perle cotton thread, causing new shapes to seem to appear by magic.

Blues can be kept warm with yellow.

  I made this cute Santa temari from a pattern from Barb Suess that I bought from her Etsy store.

The pattern is easy to follow and it aimed at newbies. One doesn't even need to divide the ball to make this. Even so, it had some useful techniques new to me such as the bullion stitch for the beard. The other side of the ball has snowflakes stitched on it. I had some fuzzy white thread that was perfect for that. You can see one to the right of Santa's head.
  Meanwhile, Mr. Rududu has gotten into the spherical mode with a module origami designed by Toshikazu Kawasaki. It was featured in the last issue of The Paper, the magazine of Origami USA.

Apparently it is quite challenging to get 30 modules together into a sphere without them falling apart at some point. I even heard brief mutterings about glue but I kept him under careful surveillance and know he made them the morally correct origami way: no scissors, no glue. There were a lot of tiny clothespins involved at one point. Once they are assembled, they are quite strong although picking them up from the top is discouraged. (I think I almost gave Mr. Rududu heart failure when I did that. The ball survived, fortunately.) I think they look really festive perched on some old wine glasses, some of whom belonged to my grandmother.
  The nitty-gritty: The first three temari in this post are from patterns in Japanese Temari; A Colorful Spin on an Ancient Craft by Barbara B. Suess.