I Did A Thing, Vol. 18

Today’s post features a special collaboration with a very talented co-worker – you can see her work on IG under the handle “lianneangeles”. We are both huge fans of Game of Thrones, and one day she made me a tempting proposal: she would draw a GoT character cartoon for me to embroider. If you’ve been reading these posts, you will know why this was so tempting; preparing the line drawing/template is my least favourite part of any embroidery project. Having someone else do the job, especially someone as talented as my friend, would be perfect. Almost immediately, we settled on Daenerys as our first pick. Dany and her dragon – what could be more GoT than that?

Here is the drawing I got a few days later:

First of all, it’s amazing. In fact, maybe too amazing for my actual embroidery skills. That was literally my second thought. My friend was very encouraging, but I was daunted, nonetheless. But hey, I am not a quitter! Well, not without giving it a shot anyway. As it happened, I felt ready to quit this project several times in the course of it, but managed to pull myself together long enough to finish it. To say that it was my most challenging project to date would not be an understatement.

My friend and I talked briefly about the materials I would be using, though she left most of the decision-making to me. We did agree that a dark background would be better than white; based on my limited available options, we decided that the dark blue I had used for my Iris portrait would be fine. That’s what I started with.

I knew that transfer of such an intricate line drawing – on several types of materials, no less – would be a challenge, even with my new light-box. I actually did okay copying the lines onto my muslin canvass, and the part that initially worried me the most – the face – turned out quite well.

The hair and dress bodice turned out to be much bigger hassles (I had to do a bunch of extra work to “fix” them up), but they were mostly fine as well. The cape was fun; I ended up thrifting a 90s relic of a blouse – made in Italy, brand name “Gigli” (not sure if that was a diffusion line for Romeo Gigli or not), so you know it was fancy AF – which provided the perfect fabric. I added a piece of an old brooch for the shoulder bling, and Dany was all set.

And that is when the not-fun really began. That dragon … o-m-f-g. Based on the colour, I think it’s Viseryon. The choice was, again, mostly dictated by my available materials; I thought the dark green felt would look nicer than yellow (for Rhaegal), and stand out a bit better than black (for Drogon). I knew that cutting the shape out of felt would be difficult … so I enlisted my husband to help. That might seem like a weird thing to do, but he used to make architectural models in grad school, and has way more dexterity than I do. He did a great job!

The next tricky thing was figuring out a way to make the dragon stand out; the dark green wasn’t as much of a contrast with the blue background as I had hope. I used some darker green thread to stitch on some texture to the dragon body, then used metallic thread to add relief. That gave the thing a bit of dimension.

But the worst part, by far, were the wings. I knew I wanted to use this metallic fabric from an old Madewell top I decided to sacrifice to my craft hobbies; it’s really cool-looking, and also seemed very dragon-appropriate. But, friends, it was a PAIN to cut into the right shape and then embroider. The metallic threads almost shredded the yarn I used for embroidering the wing veins. This is the part where my final design differed the most from the template drawing, because there was no way I could trace the lines onto the metallic fabric; I had to free-hand cut everything … and did a so-so job.

When Dany and dragon were complete, I finally breathed a sigh of relief; but my job wasn’t done yet. I felt like something was still missing. My husband, who enjoys being an impromptu critic, told me that the blue background was to blame, and reminded me that he’d warned me against using it in the first place. I refrained from giving him a piece of my mind – I had spend close to 20 hours on this project by this time – given how nice he’d been about the dragon thing, and starting thinking. I had to jazz up the background somehow … but how?

FLAMES!!

A few more free-hand cuts of felt, and some beading later, and there she was:

After all that work and stress, I decided to take a little break from embroidery … but not for long. Stay tuned for my next adventure!