Celtic Wolf - WIP post 1

The Deviant Art group Stitching Pirates is having a competition with tribal and totemic as the theme. I spent some time looking around trying to find something I liked to stitch and finally found an amazing Celtic wolf line art image, the artist was amazingly kind and let me use her artwork to make a pattern for myself. As the image was only the lines this gave me a lot of freedom as to how to fill in all the spaces as just lines for a cross stitch is boring. I decided to go down the route of illuminated manuscripts and let them inspire me with the colours and fill in patterns. So I will be using lots of metallics, some interesting patterns from manuscripts done in normal DMC floss and for that extra bling some beads too. I found some amazing Dragon scale beads (manufacturer is All Beads ) that I will be using and I'm considering some rose petal beds too.

 I started this project a couple of days ago but didn't really do much as I was tired and had a busy day. The starting point for yesterday is 101 stitches which you can see in the photo above.

The fabric I'm working on is white 18ct Aida that I hand dyed with Dylon velvet black dye which resulted in a grey slightly splotchy fabric.

Yesterday I got my skates on and did a lot - 663 stitches to be exact, 396 of them using DMC 310 black and the rest using DMC E168. The bit I'm working on is a woven section and I hope to get my hands on some 001L - Solar Silver or 001HL - Silver High Lustre Kreinik #4 braid so I can have 2 different silvers in this area.

As this project is huge and I need to finish it by the end of March I need to focus on this project and keep progress going so I am using my tried and tested method of posting my progress every day in an attempt to make sure I do enough every day. My goal is to do at least 428 stitches a day to make sure I finish in time. I will be back tomorrow with today's progress.