Baby Booties!

I made these! And now, Baby is finally big enough to wear them (and still has some room to grow with them).

How to Train Your

Watercolored the stormy sky, green grass, and a couple mountain peaks in the background first. Then appliqued the outline of the purple dragon body onto the fabric, and embroidered over the top of it.

Blue Baby Blanket

Another new stitch pattern, another baby blanket.

Block Printed Dragons

I hadn't block printed since high school, so I was a little nervous about this one- but it's pretty simple, and the tools don't take up as much space as, say, screenprinting... This was fun! I used screenprinting ink, because neither I or the art-supply-store clerk knew if block printing ink would wash out, but screen printing ink will stay fast. I initially printed the pink one with a pink spot in the middle of the eye, but I ended up not liking how that looked, so I put a bundle of French knots over it. I also backstitched the upper edge of the purple dragon's wings. I've still got one more color of ink, and one more "plate" that I can carve up, so I'll probably add a couple more to this group of dragons!

Paperbag Princess Dragon

On this one, I knew I couldn't get the watercolor look of the original through embroidery (or maybe I could, but I actually want to finish this project someday). I wasn't sure what I had that would get that watercolor look, and stay on the fabric through washing, so I grabbed all of my old markmaking tools from art school, and made a couple different backgrounds on a length of the extra white muslin. I was so sure the Easter egg dye was going to work- but it only made flat areas of color, and washed out completely when I washed it. My friend that helped me was so sure the colored pencil was going to wash out- but that ended up staying. Permanent markers worked as expected- they were permanent, and though the egg dye washed away, the blurring of the markers from the egg dye stayed. The winner was some fancy watercolors- the kind that come in little tubes and are not made by crayola. They looked pretty and right when I laid them down, and were mostly colorfast through the wash and dry I put them through. There was a little dulling and blurring, but little enough that I chose to go with that one.

My friend's grandma called with a trick for laying crayon colors down onto fabric the day after I did all of my experimenting. It was almost like she knew what I was working on, all the way from Texas! I don't actually have any crayons, but I might have to get some.

Mercer Mayer Dragon

I really didn't want to draw a dragon, so I pulled out every book from my bookshelves that I thought might relate to dragons somehow, with the idea of looking through them for inspiration (see: "procrastination"). One of the books was Mercer Mayer's "Little Critter's The Fussy Princess"- a story Little Critter tells his fussy little sister to make her fall asleep at bedtime. It has a dragon. I ultimately decided to hell with drawing my own dragon, this illustration was super cute, and would take a couple weeks of Sunday mornings to embroider, so I traced and went for it.

Baby Blanket

Trying out a new stitch pattern, and trying to use up yarn that I already have- the white with pink tones is all gone now, and the pink is almost there. Made a border all the way around with the pink, using double crochet stitches.