Dragon Assembled

 

All the pieces of the dragon were ready to sew together.

And tah-dah, there she is! This is the biggest paper pieced thing I've ever made and it turned out pretty well.

The messy back with all the paper to remove.

As I'd printed the paper foundation papers out on the special newsprint paper, I thought using the water pens woul

At first it seemed pretty helpful.

But then it was too much water all at once and the paper kind of went blah all over the place. Probably would work better if it had been used on regular printer paper. 

A final kind of still damp picture of Sylva.

I really like how the teeth turned out.

The back is very cool looking without the paper.

Now to figure out what to put her on and quilt her. Maybe a tote bag or something?

Assemble the Dragon

 I've gotten all the pieces of my paper-pieced dragon done, that took a whole lot of sewing time today.

I didn't use all of the fabrics I selected, but I used most of them. I'm not sure about some of the choices I made, but I'm not doing any un-sewing at this point. Calling it good enough.  The gold circles on the teeth are a particular triumph, it took some doing to get those exactly in place.

Now to sew the pieces together.

Happy Lunar New Year!

About this image
Dragon paper-cut
From Paper-cuts of Yangzhou, China 中國揚州剪紙. Gift of Ann Tompkins and Lincoln Cushing to the C.V.Starr East Asian Library & Chang-Lin Teen Center for East Asian Studies at U.C. Berkeley This is the Year of the Wood Dragon, that's me, I'm a wood dragon. And if you were born in a year ending in 4 or 5 then you are too. That means it's really our year!

Happy Lunar New Year! It's the year of the dragon, the wood dragon in particular. And I just happen to be one. You are also a wood dragon if you were born in 1964 or early 1965. 

Since it seems to line up with "being My Year", I decided to commemorate it with making myself a dragon from a paper pieced pattern from Happy Sew Lucky. I really love her patterns, they always turn out so well.

 

I picked out a selection of fabrics 

and mapped them out to all of the many many pieces on the helpful chart provided with the pattern. 

I got out my paper piecing set of tools, my small cutting mat that can fit right next to my machine, a smaller rotary cutter than I usually use, a shortl add-a-quarter ruler, a regular square ruler and a seam roller. And the first section (the eye!)  is done, just like that.

Am I turning into someone who likes paper piecing now? Maybe...it could be turning out that way after sewing all those paper pieced blocks (and minis) for the Trinket quilt. But ask me when I'm done with this project.