Dragon

 The royal blue silk dupioni is at least 40 to 50 years old.  My father bought this silk when he was in the Air Force and traveled all over the world.  I'm not sure where he bought it Japan..India..Indonesia.  It works beautifully as a border for the hexagon.  I auditioned other colors, but this just popped and made the other silks really shine.

 The dragon came from a Dover clip art.  Ellen told me about it and encouraged me to sign up for the weekly email of free clip art.  Each week, I would look through the selections and save the ones I liked into an excel spreadsheet.  This dragon clip art was actually only 3 inches long and it was holding a flower in its talons.  I used the excel picture tools to crop the dragon.  I measured the border at 10 inches by 15 inches.  Since 1 sheet of paper is 8 x 11, I expanded the dragon to cover 3 sheets of paper.  These were printed out in black and white and pinned onto the border.

I used a gold thread from Superior as the top thread with a size 90/14 needle.  I free motion quilted the dragon using the printed paper.  My mistake is using the regular copy paper.  I should have used either a tissue paper or light interfacing.  As I tried to pull off the paper, it was too heavy and strong and lifted the gold threads.

One of my favorite books is Dragonsong by Anne MacCaffrey.  A quote from her book is "When thread falls, dragons fly".  Thread had a different meaning in the book, but I just love the thought of the dragon flying around the edge of the quilt looking for loose threads to singe.