One of my instructors at the Japanese embroidery course has suggested me to use gold thread instead of my usual substitute of pale yellow for framing diamonds design. The gold thread I use is a real gold one; thin gold leaf strip wrapped around the silk core thread, and not the fake polyester one. That means it is so delicate that the gold is really easily coming off.
This one, and the one below, are not in my usual thimble size. It came to my attention (belatedly) that there are people who likes the bigger pin cushions than the one I think is big. I do not do dressmaking or quilting or any other heavy sewing and do not require a big pincushion, and naturally my idea of big does not coincide the one for the heavy users. Therefore I am going to renaming the size of my pin cushions. These two you see here are "extra small" ones (although they still require cushion part), slightly bigger than the thimbles. My former big pin cushions, which are still on my Etsy shelves but soon to be expired, will be "small" and napkin ring size will be "medium". I am still wondering what "big" should be, though.
Now, back to the metal thread. For this gray one I used silver thread. The picture does not do justice for it's rather sparkling, though I am not sure if I really like the effect. Perhaps it needs more colour, is all. I also need to determin if it's wise to use metal thead for pin cushions. For collectibles, no problems at all, but as a working tool, metal thread may be too delicate...
Here is another pin cushion-to-be with gold thread. The design is modified Blue Waves, 1:4 for fins. 
1:4 for one part of gold and four part of stripy part, you see? One round in gold and four rounds in stripy part instead of alternating rounds. The problem with this design using metal thread is the metal thread being far smaller than silk thread. It makes segmentalizing quite...interesting. I intended to end the stripe part with gold however I had to add a single round in ivory silk. There is still gaps visible but adding another ivory would make the result different from what I intended and there would be no more space to add a gold there after another ivory. So this is it. I may try this design again sometime to see if I could learn from the experience.
