“After 100ish hours of work, I’m so happy to say this beast is done!!

For the most part, I had an idea that I thought would be cool, drew it up, and transferred it to fabric (here’s the hoop pre-stitching). Prior to this piece, I’d only done florals – some from patterns I bought online (Namaste Embroidery) and some of my own design – so really I just wanted to see if I could embroider a dragon. I hadn’t been embroidering long but was feeling ballsy.

So that’s the pattern… as for color choices: the mountain, clouds, fog, and trees were entirely a product of I’d bought a bunch of floss I thought was pretty and kind of went together and figured why not give it a try. I love how the mountain came out. The gold for the text was my favorite gold I’d worked with in a sunflower piece (I have an entire floss organizer of just shades of yellow because of that piece, so the gold pieces pretty much just followed). Smaug’s colors and pose in general were inspired by an illustration of Smaug Tolkien did that I’ve always loved.

Process in general: I kind of made most of it up as I went along. I knew what effect I wanted in various sections and if I couldn’t figure out a way to make it look the way I wanted with stitches I knew, I’d go googling. The pile of gold Smaug is on is all seed stitch (I don’t know if it’s technically seed stitch, but that’s what I’m calling it) and literally caused me to set this piece down for two years.

- the implement I used to transfer the design was a Sakura Gelly Roll white pen. In a pinch, the gel ink can be removed (like when I edited out the two other mountains)

- I wore a reasonably high powered, rechargeable headlamp for a lot of this project in an attempt to have my stitches be as precise as possible. It ain’t pretty, but it worked pretty well!”

Been doing some spring cleaning around the studio and came across my old stash of cassette tapes 80s and 90s. I can’t play them anymore so I decided I’m going to scrimshaw them all.