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.

2013 Christmas present for my mom

I'm really, really proud of this present so it gets a post all it's own.

This is an Iphone cross-stitched case!  Cool, right?

 The case is made from silicone and I ordered it online, it came with a couple little skeins of floss and some patterns (none of which I used).

I'm super-duper proud of this because I designed this pattern myself!!

The top part is Wonder Woman's crown and the bottom is the WW logo.

I spent hours upon hours looking at Lynda Carter in her Wonder Woman outfit as well as Wonder Woman comics to try and figure out the colors of her crown and the placement of the star and the size of the star and...everything!

(it doesn't get much better than Lynda Carter, man)

And then there was the logo...

  

Why?  Why are there so many different Wonder Woman logos?!?

I narrowed it down to a certain look that I thought I could translate into a pattern for the red silicone Iphone case (the yellow one with a black outline and red between the W's).

And there I was, with an idea of what I wanted to do and how I wanted it to look, now I had to actually make it.  So, I got some graph paper, used the patterns that came with the Iphone case as templates and on an hour-and-a-half flight to San Diego to spend Thanksgiving with my bro, sis-in-law and niece I worked on the pattern.  By the time I landed I had most of it figured out, the size and structure of the crown (sans the star) and the look of the WW and their placement in relation to each other and on the case.  But I couldn't figure out the freaking star.  Grr!!

So while I was in San Diego I worked on it; I looked up cross-stitch stars and various patterns that I thought I could adjust to my design and I got something that sort-of worked.  It would have looked awful and then my brother (God bless my brother!) took a look at it and took the graph paper from me and sketched a star to fit in with the crown but still look like a star.  It was beautiful!  And, within a few hours, I had stitched the Iphone case with Wonder Woman's crown and logo.

My mom loved it!  Of course, it did come with the entire Lynda Carter Wonder Woman series on DVD (she's a fan) so that may have had something to do with it, LOL!!  

She used the case until she got a new Iphone (different series) and the case no longer fit, so I know she loved it.  This picture was taken after she'd been using it for a couple months so it's got some wear and tear; the threads around the crown are a little squished and it's a little bit dirty, but it still looks really cool and it held up really well.