As suggested by the title, this is the second blog post on my series on dragons with my grate frend, Beatriz Acevedo. This is another piece which has a lot of stitching on it because I had time over the Christmas break to spend stitching, which I generally do while watching television. Christmas is good for this, otherwise I can spend hours watching the specials and become slightly goggle-eyed.
This piece started with a piece of strange stretchy dress fabric which I bought in a lucky dip bag at the Knitting and Stitching Show in October:
It is choc-ful of lycra which makes it quite difficult to sew, but if you distort the fabric it just springs back, so it is hard to make a mess of. I thought it looked like a reptile hide, and so I backed it over some very heavy yellow silk and a thin curtain interlining and then stitched into it. I tacked it down using fly stitch, which I use a lot, but which went a bit odd when I decided that I liked it portrait rather than landscape. I fixed this by stitching over the top with more fly stitch:
and then I added a lot of beads which I had got very cheaply in the Hobbycraft sale in Nottingham with my mother. The whole thing jumped into life, though, when I added some tiny red seed beads:
just enough to move the eye around. I remember from some distant history of art class that medieval stained glass artists often put dots of red around the edge of windows as the eye reads these as a frame.
I enjoyed working with this unusual fabric and making a magical pelt whether or not it has been splashed with dragon blood…
