Dragon cross stitch WIP

Hooray!  You can finally see one whole wing and the beginning of his very long tail.  I am so excited to see this thing complete!

FINALLY DONE WITH PAGE ONE!!  WOOHOO!!!!

The beginning of page two!

Dragon cross stitch WIP

Aah!  He is so cute!  You can really start to see him taking shape, there's one wing almost finished and the beginning of his tail.

Here he is from a little farther away.

As you can see I'm almost done with the first page.  So exciting!

Dragon cross stitch WIP

This is another couple of days progress.  You can start to see his legs and the rest of his body.

If you compare it to the other picture of the pattern, you can see that I've completed another row and a half.

This is a little later the same day, I've now completed another 10x10 square of stitching.

Dragon cross stitch WIP

This is after another whole row was done, it took me roughly three or four days.  You can start to see his wing taking shape.  So exciting!

Dragon cross stitch WIP (work-in-progress)

This is an HAED (Heaven and Earth Designs) cross-stitch design, they are a fantastic place to get cross-stitch charts and I have several of them but it took me a while to get the courage up to attempt one.  Not because they are overly complicated, pretty much all of them use whole stitches, no half-stitches, no backstitches, nothing like that; but they do use a lot of floss.

And you have to work them in a grid pattern rather than starting in the middle and concentrating on one symbol.  I've also begun what is for me a new technique called "parking;" this involves halting your stitching and leaving the floss intact in the corner of the next stitch the floss is required for; as you can see below.

This is (I believe) about two months of progress.  It was originally designed to be a bookmark and is supposed to be an inch wide by seven inches long and done on linen.  I tried doing it that way but I didn't like the way it looked so I'm doing it on Aida and it's going to be considerably larger.  I started this little guy sometime last year and then life happened and I haven't been able to get back to him.  But my goal this year is to finish it and eventually the little guy up top here will look like the little guy down below.

 This is only the first page of the pattern.  All of the shaded parts are the parts I've already finished.  Yikes!  Two pages after this.

 And this is all of the threads that are called for in this pattern. Whew, lots of reds, pinks and purples.