Happy dancing galore

First day of this year, I started with a rather large stitching project: Midnight Hunting by Dracolair. Since I've discovered Dracolair's designs I've wanted to make at least one of those dragons - I love those shadings and the dragons are simply beautiful in my opinion. I did start small with the two bookmarks (Knotwork Dragon and Red Dragon Bookmark) though in both cased I did change the colors - Knotwork is blue on green and Red Dragon is actually a Green Dragon Bookmark.
After seeing somebody else's finish of Midnight Hunting on an hand dyed fabric, I decided to do it at well, only I've plunged in, and dyed the fabric myself in light shades of blue. Not very noticable, but I'm quite happy how it turned out.
As the dragon has a fairly limited color palette, I used for the first time pre-threaded needles for the blended colors and loved how this made stitching easier. Though I probably wouldn't want to do it with something like a Teresa Wentzler pattern - there are simply too many needles to handle in this case.
It has been really fun to stitch and sometime in the need future, I' plan on doing the other two dragons in the series (and the two unpublished ones if they are ever published)
And, finally, I'm done with my draggie.



The colors are not quite right - they are a bit on the greyish side. Dunno why.
But you get the idea.
A larger photo of Midnight Hunting will hopefully go up on our webpage today.
(here's the link: Midnight Hunting)

Here's some details of the face.





And here are two smaller finishes.
Dance of the Bumblebee from Bent Creek (which I don't twice now)
All colors are the rcommended GAST and Week Dye Works theads exept the green in the flower, that is one of the new DMC color variations.




And, I tried my needle for the first time ever on hardanger. This is a freebie from Victoria Samplers. I loved it and plan on doing more. I'll finish that one as an ornament, eventually. The fabric is a very pale green .... not that you can see that on the picture *shrug*