The Dragon - Part Six

Leigh Designs' European Dragon

Once Sandy narrowed down the background choices and picked the major threads for her dragon, it is time to talk about the final touch to the background.  As a reminder, the European dragon is on 13 count canvas that is roughly 20x24 inches in the outside dimensions with a dragon that is about 15 inches wide and roughly 18 inches tall. Sandy bought Rainbow Gallery's Silk Lame for the wings and Plant Earth Fiber's Silk Opal for the body of the dragon, and is thinking about using Flair for the smoke and flame. Sandy likes full coverage on her designs and is stitching this for her son.

If you want to look at the background stitches Sandy considered, here's the link.
http://chillyhollownp.blogspot.com/2010/12/dragon-part-five-last-of-background.html

Before we talk about possible stitches for the dragon itself, Sandy liked the idea of stitched a "frame" around the border.  In this blog entry I showed Sandy three different types of stitched frames.  Now that we know she is leaning toward using Sundance's Eye Wave stitch, we can look at the borders again.  Personally, I think I would use SharonG's Favorite Border for this piece.  That's the one with the black and gold colors with the diamond shape in each corner.  If Sandy switches the colors to use some of the green and browns that she bought to stitch the dragon, I think it would look beautiful. It's also fairly simple so it won't compete with the dragon for attention, just frame the piece.  She could also add a bead to the center of each diamond to further set it off.
http://chillyhollownp.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2010-12-06T06%3A00%3A00-05%3A00&max-results=6

If Sandy chooses this border, she'll have to play with the threads she has to find the correct number of plies needed for the effect but SharonG lists the threads she used here, so it'll be easy to compare using 2 plies of Silk Lame Braid with using #16 or #12 Kreinik braid.
http://www.needlepoint.org/StitchOfTheMonth/2005/oct.php

Ok, Sandy, now it is your turn to pick a border and play around with using the threads you already have for it.

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