Silk flower dragon wings

At the time, I only had a 5x7 machine, so that’s the largest dragon I did - and that’s still the limit I’d stick to now, just because the wings will droop under their own weight very easily.

I have an entire moving box labeled "Floral" that I should use or lose, so I may do this again and take proper tutorial pictures. But here’s a little preview.

Some of the leaves I used were glued to plastic veins and a stem socket, but they were cheap and peeled off easily. Others were "table scatter" so didn’t have any hard bits at all. It’s about the season for those to start showing up, so keep an eye out.

As I mention in the blog entry, I used tearaway stabilizer. For a dark-winged dragon, that meant I should have used black tearaway. If I were to do it again, I would probably use washaway, and treat it just like free-standing-lace projects: soak it with minimal water, and let the washaway serve as a stiffener. Test your leaves/flowers/etc. first to make sure it doesn’t change the texture/appearance too much, or make the color run. If I didn’t use a stiffener, or maybe even if I did, I’d still fray-check the edges. Test that too.

I didn’t do a tackdown, because the "silk" flowers are pretty coarsely woven and they’d show the needle holes after I removed the basting stitches. I just taped the flowers in place. That coarse weave means they fray easily, and the tape tends to pull out threads, so I would probably do the minimum of that, and use a topping stabilizer with a basting box that hopefully isn’t going to pierce any of the leaves. That will keep the foot from catching in the edges of the leaves, which was a problem for me.

The underside of the dragon’s leafy wings, with a little white outline on the bones from the stabilizer

Use a matching bobbin thread, or at least black for dark thread.

That’s pretty much it. I gave mine leafy "horns" as well, by the simple expedient of not turning the horn nubs and instead sticking the end of the cut-to-shape leaves in the resulting slot and then ladder-stitching it in. Again, the leaves are fray-prone so I dipped the end of it in glue first so it didn’t just pull the threads apart and come out.

Closeup of the dragon’s head, with maple leaves trimmed down to a sort of moose-antler shape.

I never did a spring dragon with flower petal wings, or a Christmas dragon with holly or poinsettia wings, but one of these days I will. I’ve also got some plans for my own FSL wings, so keep an eye out for those.

Other wings

I’ve already done a little add-on for the baby dragons: cupcake sprinkles. I’ve done a spectrum wing too, which is just a color-change version of the regular wing, but haven’t put together the package - if you’re interested, a couple of them are way in the back, in the upper right of this picture. It breaks the regular stitching up into six colors.

A light box full of assorted dragons. Really, really full.