Celtic Wolf

Celtic Wolf happened because of the Tribal and Totemic competition. I wanted to do a wolf and searched dA and found the Celtic Wolf vector art by Lupas-Deva which I immediately fell in love with. Luckily Lupas-Deva was kind enough to allow me to use the artwork to make myself a pattern to use for this competition.

I designed the patterns and colours using illuminated manuscripts as inspiration for patterns that were used at the time - I'm no longer sure which particular ones sparked me the most as I didn't have them next to me as I drew them out, rather I looked at lots of pictures and then wandered off to design Wolf. The patterns were made to be as if they went under the things that are on top.

Making Wolf has been quite a journey and I blogged all about it as it happened... the ups, the downs and the ripping - the beads that were added, and removed - more than once, in an attempt to make it right, not to mention the times I had to set him aside to make the Ornament of the Month and the Fob a Month smalls. I used DMC cotton threads and metallics as well as Kreinik #4 braid and blending filament. smallbluemonkey kindly made me the book of Wolf using all of the blog posts so you can read them all in one go without having to search my blog for them:

I loved working on Celtic Wolf, even when things were getting a bit frustrating due to having to remove stitches or, I adjusted the pattern to reflect reality as I decided it was easier to adjust the pattern than to rip out over 100 stitches of an outline. I planned to use beads and he was set aside for a while while I decided what to do instead when it turned out that using beads was not going to work.

I used blending filament on his eye to make the transition between the black and the blue more gradual. I used metallic threads for sparkle and even blended some to get the shade I wanted. I broke my own personal record stitching and stitched more than 1000 stitches on one day, but some day's I barely made 100.


Size: 11" x 8"  -  150 x 207 stitches
Fabric: 18ct hand dyed with Dylon velvet black dye.
Threads:
DMC cotton 310, 503, 666, 792, 800, 814, 820, 902, and 3818
DMC Light Effects: E301, E168, E317, E334, E677, E3821, and E3852
Kreinik very fine braid #4: 001HL, 002C, 003, and 021L
Kreinik Blending filament: 085
Pattern: My own pattern using a vector art created by Lupas-Deva who kindly allowed me to use it.
Total stitches: 17618
Total backstitches: 88.53 inches


You can see some close ups and different angles here:
This is what the fabric looked like before I started stitching: 

Yay!! I won second place!