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Description
I seem to be "blaming" other people a lot lately for the embroideries I've made but they are people who have given me reasons to be inspired to make something and I have always felt that such people should know that it was their doing that I was inspired to make something.

This year Mattsma is holding "The Year of the Magnificent Teresa Wentzler" and she linked to Teresa Wentzler site with all her wonderful embroideries - Luckily for me Teresa also offers some freebies for one to get an idea of how her embroideries are to make and I chose the pattern for "Futurecast" to make first.

After spending some days picking colours from my stash I had to find a fabric to use and after some digging found the green/blue hand dyed "solo mini" from silkweaver.com that Mattsma had sent me as a competition prize many moons ago which had been waiting for the right project to be used. I only needed half so the other half is waiting to be used for another project.

Stitching commenced on Sunday 19th January and ended Sunday 26th January.

When I started stitching I had other challenges - I've really never worked with 1/2 cross stitches in a pattern before and kept on getting confused as to where I had to make them and where they began and ended, which resulted in a lot of frog stitching. I also found that i'd managed to somehow get the tip of the tail (the spade shaped bit) 1/2 a stitch off from the rest but only after I'd completed the silver metallic stitches, which are almost impossible to remove so I decided to leave the tail as it was and work around it - this of course caused more issues down the road when I got to the border and the beading. However I think I have done reasonably well ad hiding the mistakes as if you look at it you don't notice straight away.

The border cross stitches should have been done in the same colour as the dragon's claws but I'd mixed up what was what and used the secondary colour instead - in the end I'm not too unhappy about that as I prefer it like this.

It was also a bit of a challenge to get the right beads for this - I knew I wanted a silver for along the spine of the dragon so it would look like extensions of the dragon's colouring there. I found alovely silver bead that was perfect for it. I thought I'd also got the perfect blue beads to use in the border but they turned out to be just a little too big. The white backup beds I'd got turned out to be far too small so in the end the silver beads that I'd used for the dragon turned out to be my goldilocks beads.

All in all this embroidery has been a bit of a learning curve - an enjoyable, if slightly frustrating at times, one at that

Now for the stats:

Fabric: 28ct overdyed Lugana
Size of embroidery: 3 1/2 x 5 5/8" / 8.89 x 14.28 cm
Stitch count: 85H x 53W
Number of colours: 11, all DMC
4010 was my starting colour - the variegated thread that inspired all the colours I used.
My main colour group was blue with the inspiration colour being 162 - I chose 813, 826, and 827 as the other 3 colours in the colour group.
My secondary colour was creamish - I chose 3866 as the colour and 3782 as the medium colour to go with it.
My third colour was greyish purple, with 159 as the light and 160 as the darker shade to go with it.
My metallic is E168
and the crystal ball was done in pearlescant E5200
Back stitching around the silver was mostly done with silver thread except around the wings where I used 826, which is also the colour I used for the back stitching around the blue of the dragon. I used 3782 around all the secondary colour stitches and 160 around the third colour stitches.
Number of stitches - not sure and too scared to count lol.

Description
I seem to be "blaming" other people a lot lately for the embroideries I've made but they are people who have given me reasons to be inspired to make something and I have always felt that such people should know that it was their doing that I was inspired to make something.

This year Mattsma is holding "The Year of the Magnificent Teresa Wentzler" and she linked to Teresa Wentzler site with all her wonderful embroideries - Luckily for me Teresa also offers some freebies for one to get an idea of how her embroideries are to make and I chose the pattern for "Futurecast" to make first.

After spending some days picking colours from my stash I had to find a fabric to use and after some digging found the green/blue hand dyed "solo mini" from silkweaver.com that Mattsma had sent me as a competition prize many moons ago which had been waiting for the right project to be used. I only needed half so the other half is waiting to be used for another project.

Stitching commenced on Sunday 19th January and ended Sunday 26th January.

When I started stitching I had other challenges - I've really never worked with 1/2 cross stitches in a pattern before and kept on getting confused as to where I had to make them and where they began and ended, which resulted in a lot of frog stitching. I also found that i'd managed to somehow get the tip of the tail (the spade shaped bit) 1/2 a stitch off from the rest but only after I'd completed the silver metallic stitches, which are almost impossible to remove so I decided to leave the tail as it was and work around it - this of course caused more issues down the road when I got to the border and the beading. However I think I have done reasonably well ad hiding the mistakes as if you look at it you don't notice straight away.

The border cross stitches should have been done in the same colour as the dragon's claws but I'd mixed up what was what and used the secondary colour instead - in the end I'm not too unhappy about that as I prefer it like this.

It was also a bit of a challenge to get the right beads for this - I knew I wanted a silver for along the spine of the dragon so it would look like extensions of the dragon's colouring there. I found alovely silver bead that was perfect for it. I thought I'd also got the perfect blue beads to use in the border but they turned out to be just a little too big. The white backup beds I'd got turned out to be far too small so in the end the silver beads that I'd used for the dragon turned out to be my goldilocks beads.

All in all this embroidery has been a bit of a learning curve - an enjoyable, if slightly frustrating at times, one at that

Now for the stats:

Fabric: 28ct overdyed Lugana
Size of embroidery: 3 1/2 x 5 5/8" / 8.89 x 14.28 cm
Stitch count: 85H x 53W
Number of colours: 11, all DMC
4010 was my starting colour - the variegated thread that inspired all the colours I used.
My main colour group was blue with the inspiration colour being 162 - I chose 813, 826, and 827 as the other 3 colours in the colour group.
My secondary colour was creamish - I chose 3866 as the colour and 3782 as the medium colour to go with it.
My third colour was greyish purple, with 159 as the light and 160 as the darker shade to go with it.
My metallic is E168
and the crystal ball was done in pearlescant E5200
Back stitching around the silver was mostly done with silver thread except around the wings where I used 826, which is also the colour I used for the back stitching around the blue of the dragon. I used 3782 around all the secondary colour stitches and 160 around the third colour stitches.
Number of stitches - not sure and too scared to count lol.