Head of a Dragon, Body of a Snake

Last night was spent basketweaving the black border around Cape Cod Dogs but I finished the body of Ch'ing the red dragon from Leigh before starting Even More Basketweave and want to show this part of the design off.

The sinuous snake-like body of the dragon has red, orange and yellow scales outlined with gold. Some of the gold areas widen to become gold scales. I didn't want to lose the lovely shading and I didn't want to tent stitch the whole body, either, so it took me some time to come up with an idea that would give me the slightly wet look of snakeskin. Here in CH we get to inpect snakes fairly often (mostly the very small and very pretty tree snakes who live around us and who sport a gold ring around their necks) and all their bodies look shiny and wet. I wanted this look for Ch'ing.

I first stitched the gold lines in tent stitches using Petite Treasure Ribbon from Rainbow Gallery. This is a shiny metallic ribbon, thinner and narrower than ribbon floss, that is easy to use. Like all ribbon threads, it does twist and turn as you stitch with it but since the twists expose the vintage gold-with-black color of PR30, I didn't use a laying tool as I stitched. Please note that Treasure Ribbon comes in two widths--Petite and plain Treasure Ribbon. I used the Petite as this is an 18 count canvas. If you are curious about Petite and regular Treasure Ribbon, look at the Rainbow Gallery website.
http://www.rainbowgallery.com/colorcards.cfm

Remember I said that some of the gold lines widened to produce gold scales? When I got to these areas, I only stitched the outside edge. I left the centers unstitched. When all the gold outlines and the red or orange or yellow scales were stitched completely, I added tiny gold faceted beads from Sundance Designs to the center of the gold scales. My tube isn't labeled, but the gold shade of the beads and of the Petite Treasure Braid is similar. Matching the color is more important than using the same brand of beads.

Adding the beads were the last step. The next to last step is filing in the orange and red and yellow scales with long diagonal stitches using three colors of Water N Ice--red WT5, orange WT4 and yellow WT3. Water N Ice is a slightly transparent ribbon thread. It looks like strips of heavy Saran wrap. To see more colors, go to the Rainbow Gallery page listed above. The smaller photo on the right shows some gold outlining, a few of the red scales stitched and a cluster of gold beads in the center of a gold scale.

In most cases I used slanting diagonal stitches to fill in. I worked the two sides of each mostly oval shape first, then put a long stitch in the middle overlapping the sides slightly. In this case, I did use a laying tool to keep the thread from twisting. The look is wet and slick, just like a real reptile.

I did lose some of the beautiful shading by topping it with this thread but I did see changes in some of the orange scales especially depening on how dark the orange paint underneath was. In a few cases I mixed orange and yellow thread in one scale where the paint clearly used both colors. I am happy with the look which gives Ch'ing the Manchu dragon a solid body that stands out from the checkerboard background.

The next challenge will be to heavily pad the dragon's head so that is even more prominent but before I work on that area I'm going to stitch the metallic hanger on top of the ornament.


Written by Jane/Chilly Hollow
Blogging at http://chillyhollownp.blogspot.com
Archived Yahoo 360 postings at http://profiles.yahoo.com/chillyhollow