Today, I Dance

Teresa Wentzler's Tracery Dragons.

Tracery Dragons by Teresa Wentzler

I spent most of the weekend on this piece and have made some progress. I hope to have this piece ready for the framer by week's end. But this section does include another of those time consuming roses so it may take longer. I tend to be overly optimistic about what I can accomplish in any given time period. However, when I am this close to finishing a piece, I find I am energized and manage to squeeze in more stitching time than usual.

Tracery Dragons Progress

Just thought I'd post a photo of my latest progress onTeresa Wentzler's Tracery Dragons.

Continuing progress on Tracery Dragons

It's been a while ...

... approximately three months since I did any stitching on Teresa Wentzler's Tracery Dragons. But I decided to make the dragons my focus project for the International Hermit and Stitching Weekend and made a reasonable amount of progress. After the long break, it was surprisingly easy to recover my rhythm and enthusiasm for this piece. It even seemed easier to stitch, somehow. Go figure that one out! Though I really don't get much stitching time in the early part of the week, usually an hour or less a day, I think I'll continue to make this my focus piece through Wednesday. I am anxious to see just how far I can get with this project before the week is out.

TW Tracery Dragon's Progress Post

Well, pages 2 & 3 of both the cross-stitching and backstitching/specialty stitching charts are done. I start on page 1 of the cross-stitching chart tomorrow. This has been a joy and a frustration. I never thought it would take so long to finish. At this rate, I will be thrilled to have this piece done by the end of the year. It's just one piece in a rotation of five pieces ... so I don't work on it exclusively.

Teresa Wentzler's Tracery Dragons Update

I am still working on pages 2 and 3 ... but I have finished the cross stitching and am now doing the backstitching and long stitching. I still have quite a bit of the backstitching on the trellis to complete and then it's on to adding the dragon's mane with a Kreinik metallic braid and using a wrapped backstitch to connect all the leaves to the rose bush canes. It's nice to see the design take on some definition. I hope to finish up all the backstitching and long stitching this week. I figure at the rate I am going, I may see a finish in late October or early November.

Teresa Wentzler's Tracery Dragons

This is becoming a love-hate kind of stitch. I have had to frog errors four times on this project ... something most unusual for me. I have been stitching for a little over 40 years and like to think of myself as rather an accomplished needlewoman. But this rather unforgiving chart is doing a number on my ego. It is deceptively simple with its many unstitched spaces [at least, at the cross stitch stage of the project ... these spaces won't be quite so empty after the backstitching]. However, what this means is that all the stitching has to line up precisely. Well, as many of you know, TW is the unrivalled mistress of the irregular repeat. Most recently, my aging eyes didn't take note of a 2 1/4 stitch repeat causing me to have to frog two rather lengthy branches of the rose bush. And I do hate to frog quarter stitches!

But I love the design and so am determined to get this done perfectly. Here is my current progress photo. Lest you wonder where the dragons are: the blue stitching will begin to look more like dragons after the backstitching.

TW's Tracery Dragon's Progress

Now that it is actually beginning to look something like the model photo, I feel comfortable in posting a progress photo. TW designs depend heavily on back-stitching. Compare the back-stitched rose at lower center with the un-back-stitched rose on the upper left and you'll see what I mean. The one not yet back-stitched looks rather messy with all those quarter stitches going every which way, exposing the background fabric. Even so, I'll be waiting till I complete page two of the chart before I do any more back-stitching ... it has to be done in a specific order to define the design properly.

Some small progress

I am back to working on a Teresa Wentzler project each Wednesday after missing a week earlier this month. Still my progress is slow ... but I have gotten far along enough that I am satisfied that choosing a lighter fabric than recommended is going to work out well. This project will probably take all summer to complete ... there are a record number of fractional stitches, even for TW, and the backstitching will be very complicated. She included a separate three pages of chart just for the back-stitching which will be in five different colors.

New Teresa Wentzler BAP: Tracery Dragons

My new TW piece, Tracery Dragons, just eats up stitching time. There are far more quarter stitches than usual ... and Teresa Wentzler is no slouch when it comes to quarter stitches at the best of times. In this piece, the quarter stitches are offset to make skinny little diagonals. Talk about counting twice and stitching once! More like counting three and four times to make sure these wicked little fractionals are in exactly the right place. I can sense the frog waiting in the wings but so far he has not made even a cameo appearance, thank the Lord! The frequent color changes and all the blended needles seem like child's play compared to the fractionals. I foolishly thought that because this piece required only 46 shades of DMC and was a bit smaller than the usual TW chart, it would take only a month or so to stitch. Not likely!! I usually enjoy Wentzler's work since I have a split stitching personality: enjoying the process as much as the end result. But I fear this piece will not give much joy to the process stitcher within. Furthermore, at the moment the piece has all the aesthetic appeal of a three year old's first finger painting: random blobs of color with no discernible design concept. I have to keep looking at the model photo to remind myself of my reason for stitching the piece. Never had to do that before.

The other potential problem with Tracery Dragons is that, though the chart was designed to be used with a dark fabric, I am using a mid-tone fabric. The floss toss looked fine but that isn't always a clear indication of how the stitched piece will look. I want to believe it will be okay since I dislike stitching on very dark fabric. I'll have a pretty good idea once I have finished cross-stitching and back-stitching page three of the chart ...and since that only involves the bottom two inches of the piece, I won't have invested too much time in the project if I decide it doesn't look right. I have some black linen I could use instead if necessary. I hope it won't be necessary, though.

At least the other pieces in my current rotation are easy, quickly finished and visually appealing ... enough to help me get past the initial ugly duckling stage of Tracery Dragons.

A Faerie Finish

Teresa Wentzler's Autumn Faerie is beaded and ready to take to the framing shop. This project has taken nearly two years to complete ... mainly because I'd set it aside for other projects that caught my fickle fancy. But as it neared completion, I began to worry that the chart might have been misleading in calling for only one package of lavendar beads. If anyone wants to know what relief looks like, take a look at the second photo of 42 lavendar beads left in the beading dish after the last bead had been set. While I have stitched several companion pieces to the Autumn Faerie, namely the Spring Faerie and the Lily of the Valley Faerie ... I am not certain I will ever stitch the two remaining faeries in this leaflet, i.e, The Summer Faerie and the Winter Faerie. But I may change my mind so I am holding onto the leaflet. I have already started my next Teresa Wentzler BAP, Tracery Dragons. I just haven't gotten far along enough with that project to warrant a photo ... maybe next week

Only the beading is left ...

... on my Teresa Wentzler Autumn Faerie. I had hoped to be a bit further along on this project at this stage. My goal was to have it ready for the framer tomorrow but clearly, that's not happening. But, perhaps by the end of the long Memorial Day weekend, it will be complete.

Next up is Teresa Wentzler's Tracery Dragons.

Autumn Faerie Progress shot

I have dubbed the fourth day of the week Wentzler Wednesday and devote each Wednesday to my current Wentzler BAP. This will continue even after the Autumn Faerie is fully stitched and at the framers. Coming up in the rotation are Wentzler's Tracery Dragons [for me] and her Woodland Angel Christmas Stocking [for my grandson Liam]. I hope to finish the cross-stitching on Sunday and devote the rest of next week to beading. The goal is to take it to the frame shop on my day-off next Friday. Section IV has been the easiest section to stitch because there is less confetti stitching. Though there have already been 16 color changes in this small area, there are more stitches of any given color as the colors flow down the folds of the skirt. This has made the counting ever so much easier than in the wings and apples.

Riona's Mermaids

My mermaids are a lot funkier than Tracy's beautiful denizens of the deep. These less glamorous creatures are from Workbasket's I Heard The Mermaids Singing. The title of the leaflet comes from T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. I stitched them when I needed some serious color therapy last winter. I was just so tired of the white out of all the snow and even more weary of the gritty grey of day old suburban roadside snow. Both are stitched using the recommended over-dyes and specialty fibers. The pair of mermaids is stitched on Silkweavers' Monster Mash 28ct linen and the single mermaid is stitched on Silkweaver's Marine Blue 28ct linen. I am planning on stitching the single mermaid again without the border on a more muted silvery sage green, Silkweaver's Meadow Mist. I am planning to use this frame on which I have started embellishing. You can see that I have painted a plain wooden frame in a sand with peach undertones and affixed some oyster shell fragments that have been polished by the waters of the Chesapeake Bay till they have a nice mother-of-pearl patina. My next step will be to spray about ten layers of clear acrylic varnish on the frame to give it a high gloss. Then I will carefully paint the quote from T.S. Eliot on the frame, apply morre varnish so that it will look as though the words are floating just below the surface of crystal clear water. Once, I have got that done, I will decide if a few pieces of beach glass should be added to the shell fragments or whether enough is enough. I enjoy putting together mixed media pieces.

And speaking of mixed media, I thought I'd share my current surface embroidery project with you: a piece of my own design called Fertile Circles. I know fertility symbols are more a pagan theme than a fantasy one, but like many here I am fascinated by mythology and ancient cultures with their rich religious symbology. I intend to finish this piece as a needlebook. At the moment I am working on the back with my initial rune. It is hard to see in the photograph but linen shows through between the rows of the flame stitching and I am currently concealing that annoying bit of pale linen while adding a little glitz with a doubled strand of the dreaded Kreinik blending filament in a copper color. After that it will just be a matter of couching the snake's body [a Thread Gatherer woolen fiber] to the front, winding it's way through the nests. Finally, I'll finish it up as a needlebook using some WDW wool for the pages. In case anyone is wondering how I formed the circles: I used plastic rings that you can buy in the notions section of any fabric store and covered them with closely spaced satin stitches and then decorated them by layering more stitching over the satin stitches. I used a wide variety of fibers: metallics, overdyes, silks, wools, perles and blends. I chose to use autumnal colors because harvest time represents the end result of fertility. I know using sun colors rather than moon colors for fertility symbols is somewhat counterintuitive but that was my take on the theme: fertility made ripe.

Riona's Rotation

I am very eclectic in my tastes and have a wide variety of projects started at the moment. But each month this year my rotation includes:

a BAP: my current BAP is Teresa Wentzler's Autumn Faerie ... I just finished Section III yesterday evening.

a Crazy January Challenge project: only one fantasy project remains on this list: Teresa Wentzler's Tracery Dragons and I won't be getting to it until July, probably.

a piece from my 2010 WIPs & UFOs list: nothing fantasy-related in this particular category at this time

a Surface Embroidery Project: my own design, The Fertile Circles Needlebook

Sewing & Framing Finishes: I have a couple of mermaid pieces from Workbasket's I Heard The Mermaids Singing awaiting finishing: the larger piece as a tote and the smaller piece to be framed in a frame I embellished myself with sea-polished oyster shell fragments ... giving it a kind of mother-of-pearl look. I am still working on the frame, adding multiple layers of clear acrylic varnish after which I will paint in the T.S. Eliot quote and add more layers of acrylic. I want it to look as if the words are floating just below the surface of crystal clear water. I am hoping the process will give me the effect I am looking for.

A Few of My Dragons

If I ever get around to fixing the boys' old bedroom up as a sewing/craft/computer room, I will have a Dragon Wall to show off all my dragons ... at least, the ones I haven't already given to my daughter who also has a fondness for the beasts.

As part of the get acquainted process on this new blog, I thought I'd share a few of my dragon finishes with you. The first two are Dragon Dreams pieces: on the left is The Ice Dragon's Kingdom and on the right is Stormbringer. The one at the bottom is

Cross-Eyed Kat's Red Dragon from the Snowball Fight series. I'd love to get the other colors in this series but it was a limited edition series and offered only to certain retailers who attended particular shows, so they are hard to come by. If any of you ladies have any for sale or trade, I would certainly be interested.

I'll post more dragon finishes over the next few weeks. And I look forward to seeing all of your finishes, as well.

What a wonderful idea!

I am delighted to join this blogging group since faeries, dragons and mermaids are among my favorite stitching themes.

My current BAP is Teresa Wentzler's Autumn Faerie. This BAP was started in Autumn of 2009 but had been languishing untouched for nearly 18 months until I came up with the notion of Wentzler Wednesday: one day every week devoted to working on my faerie. Once I began to see real progress, I was unable to put it down. Most Wentzler Wednesdays have stretched into Thursday and sometimes, even into Friday. In any case, here is a recent photo.