Stitchalong – embroidered purse

This September Tanya from Opus Anglicanum, a blog about textiles and embroidery started a stitchalong which will result in an embroidered medieval purse. When she announced that it would feature a dragon I was hooked. 🙂

Her first post was the materials list with a picture of the finished dragon.
She also offered kits with everything needed but I have plenty of supplies and not so much money, so I will use what I have and try to avoid buying new stuff. That means I won’t be super authentic, but I will be as authentic as my supplies permit.

I will use white wool fabric for the background.
Embroidery thread will be mixed: the white one is cotton, but I have orange (madder dyed) wool yarn, green (several shades), light brown (skin tone) and yellow wool yarn (the yellow being acid dyed, all done by a friend).
I planned to use my handspun alpaca yarn but then I looked closer at them and the alpaca is about double the diameter of all the wool yarns. It’s about the thickness of commercial cotton embroidery yarn, but the cotton yarn can be split up into up to 6 thinner strands, the alpaca can’t.
We’ll have to see what I will use for the rest of the materials when I need them.

Here is my current progress:

Outline sketched on the fabric and all the yarns are ready. I haven’t gotten more done until today.
I will use two of the three greens in the bottom left corner, and probably one of the yarns in the top right corner as the fifth color. But I will decide about that on the go.