I was apparently very lax with the photo documentation in 2015, or else I'm just not sure where I moved my photos from that camera phone!
In any case, I just let the tree grow through 2015 except for removing a couple small redundant branches and decandling the lowest branch to try & get some tight internodes. So it was looking quite vigorous by mid-April 2016:
A week or so after the above picture, I took the tree back to New England Bonsai Gardens for a spring pines workshop. It had spent the late winter / early spring on a very sunny south facing porch, and John Romano agreed that the candles were already too far along for a safe repot.
So I didn't do much more in the workshop than try to come up with a rough plan for the final design. I'd been thinking about changing the planting angle and trying for a shohin cascade, but John convinced me that an informal upright had more potential. So I decided to aim for something along these lines:
Since it was too late to repot, I just nested the existing colander inside a larger one to keep the outer roots from drying out quite so much summer.
Here is the tree in late June 2016:
I went back to NEBG for a fall pines workshop in October, and with my informal upright shohin design in mind, did some selective pruning and needle removal.
Here's how it looked in mid-November 2016:
You may notice I'd decided on the front by this point, and have two potential candidates for the new trunk once the sacrifice is removed.
Just a couple more pics to bring us up to present day....