Introducing: Viking Dragon

Those of you who watch my social media accounts will have seen this photo, me referring to "Viking Dragon" and may be wondering what it's all about. Well... it all started with the latest Stitching Pirates contest: Any One Colour Contest. I like this kind of contest as it challenges me to think about what I want to do - I don't always manage to meet the deadline, which is a shame, but it doesn't upset me as I will have had fun with the doing already. I first started by looking for some line art and eventually found something I liked, but it wasn't in the resources section so I contacted the creator and asked permission, which he graciously gave. I'm not going to show the artwork yet, as I want it to be a bit of a surprise but once it becomes more clear what it will be I will show what I worked with, and who created it and tell you a bit more about the wonderful creator and what he does. I will say now that this pattern will not be shared, I have permission for personal use only.

All organised in the lovely bag Carla gave me and ready to stitch, with lots of threaded needles so I don't have to stop and thread every time I run out.

Like with my beloved Celtic Wolf I will have an outline in one colour and fill in all the spaces with other colours and lots of SHINY Kreinik - and perhaps this time the embroidery will let me use beads! The main difference will be that in order to meet the contest guidelines I will have to use one colour only, not lots.

I planned on using copper only and picked out DMC copper (918-922 colours) and Kreinik copper #4 braid and blending filament. Unfortunately DMC and Kreinik do not agree as to what is copper so the threads did not match enough for my needs. I decided that I'd then just go for brown as my one colour since copper falls under brown as do the colours I picked from DMC - this also allowed me to use the darkest Kreinik thread: 022L

The colours I'm planning on using (who knows what I decide as I stitch hehe) are:

• DMC 300
• DMC 301
• DMC 400
• DMC 402
• DMC 3776
• Kreinik blending filament 021L
• Kreinik #4 Very Fine Braid 021
• Kreinik #4 Very Fine Braid 021C
• Kreinik #4 Very Fine Braid 021HL
• Kreinik #4 Very Fine Braid 021L
• Kreinik #4 Very Fine Braid 022L

I'm stitching this on a piece of 14ct hand dyed Aida by Dyeing for Cross Stitch It's a pale beige-ish off white in colour with splodges of sage green.

It wasn't my first choice which was an 18ct orangey colour Aida but as parts of the colour are so close to some of the Kreinik I had to reluctantly set it aside.

It would have been too same-ish and would have resulted in it looking blah not Wowzers! I definitely want it to be Wowzers!

The First photo I took of this project.

The whole project will be 15858 stitches, of which almost 4000 will be Kreinik (though that might change and become more - I often end up adding more SHINY). The deadline for this contest is April 22nd - only 56 days away now, which is doable IMO. I calculated that if I started yesterday, which I did, I'd have to do 278.23 stitches a day to make it.

3 threads and 155 stitches in.

And that is on top of all the stitching I need/want to do for the Weavers Tapestry Band Sampler SAL and the Randje per Week that I enjoy doing. Even so I consider this doable and am confident I can make it in time.

This is today's starting point. I did 354 stitches yesterday - so I have done 74 more stitches than the minimum, despite not starting till the evening. Right now it doesn't look like much but there are 8 threads in this, though 3 of them are parked as I ran out of space in the hoop to keep stitching.

I am going to continue working on the outlines within the hoop before moving the hoop, though I'm not yet sure in which direction.

I'm not sure how often I'll be posting update pictures here on the blog but I will certainly be doing them on Instagram