Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Cernunnos

Using the pattern for this lovely stained glass dragon, (altho I accidentally flipped the pattern when I applied it), I embroidered a gym bag flap for my husband. I only used the lower half of the pattern, and I did make a couple of small changes because I was working with fabric & floss rather than glass. The two changes are: the small diamond on the lower point of the face mask (because I wanted to slightly shorten the length of the satin stitch there. The other change is at the end of tail, where I needed something that made sense to my eye when I changed the direction of the chain stitch used for the body & tail to simulate scales.

The brighter yellow areas around the head which form the dragon's face mask are done with padding under the satin stitch. I used an inexpensive (we don't want to say 'cheap', do we?) yellow felt that matched the shade of my floss. I wanted to create a bit of depth there, for several reasons. 1/visual interest, so everything isn't on the same plane. 2/some depth around the eye area, to help focus attention there. 3/I was bored with all the satin stitch, but still had to do more so I wanted *something* different!


Tuesday, February 21, 2012



Recently, I lost the distal phlange of my right great toe (in other words, the doctors removed the first joint) due to an infection that entered and destroyed the bone. In my mail today, I received these - with the sweetest note from a dear friend telling me that these 'Heart Socks' are to help me keep my 9 & 1/2 toes warm! Thank you, Mumsey, they will!!