Guinevere’s Dragon-Completed

Working on the second part of the Bell pull, I realised that somehow I had not placed the dragon’s head correctly and it looked as if the head was suspended rather than attached. Oh well! That is the beauty of these designs that one can manipulate with others to correct any flaws. So, inserted another flower from Farsi I onto the open space. The completed embroidery measured about 26″. I kept taking out all sorts of silks and batiks to figure out the border. In the end I decided simplicity would be best and chose a bronzy gold braiding all around with a matching large tassle to go in the point area of the bell pull.

The next question was whether to quilt or not. Hanging up the fabric to the dowel made me realise that if I didn’t quilt, the weight of the embroidery will make the embroidered area sort of hang wrong. Now the question was that if I quilt, do I attach the braiding before I quilt or after. If I attach after then I will need to create a false backing. I decided best to first do a bit of quilting on a sample piece to see how the front and back would look and whether to use plain black thread or a gray invisible thread.

Now one of the things I would love to find is black batting. LOL, no I’m not kidding. I’ve made enough quilts to realise that black fabric no matter what type of batting one uses, somehow little tiny fibers will poke through and look awful. Maybe it is just me but I would love for the batting manufacturers to create a black batting. Sure enough when I test quilted I found that the back would have tiny little white fibers showing here and there and that just didn’t look right. So, I decided to use a plain cotton fabric as the backing for quilting with the top and using dupioni silk as a second backing to when I attach the braiding. I opted for simple stippling as I didn’t want to distract away or add on more to the embroidery. The quilting really did help bring the whole design out more and muted the background. One interesting conversation I was having with friends on the MP board about stipple quilting. Someone had mentioned that they had seen a beautiful embroidered quilt but the middle which had the most embroidery sort of sagged with the stippling all around. Yes, that is a common thing and it will happen. Quilting must be an all over thing or if it cannot be an all over effect, some sort of small tacking or quilting must be done within open areas of the embroider otherwise when hung, the embroidery will make the non-quilted part sag and look awful. I really didn’t have too many open areas but whatever little I had I made sure they were well anchored. With the quilting finished, I attached the trims and stitched on another backing to cover up the first one. Good thing as I had a little boo boo happen there…. the fabric sort of caught and I didn’t notice and there was a definite wrinkle in the backing. The finished bell pull measures 38″ long and 14″ wide.

So Guinevere now has her dragon behind the garden wall and another project finished and definite satisfaction. Onto my next project. Hope you like Guinevere’s dragon bell pull.