Yesterday, I had the brilliant idea of finally getting around to installing the SSD drive in my machine, replacing the spinner. Turns out copying over a quarter-terabyte of data takes awhile, who knew? The Pi’s don’t run Inkstitch so the only stitch files I had were the ones already generated, and I was tired of owlbears (more on that later), wanted to tweak Queen of Unfinished Projects… and I had the tiny beanie dragons, the Pernese flavor (headknobs and applique eyes).

So I ran five of them, in Pernese colors, cut them, turned them, and went to bed well satisfied with myself.

Then I woke up, stuffed the pieces, and questioned all of my life choices, and (after booting up on my speedy new drive) spent all day running different sizes of dragon pieces.

You may recall I had basically maximized all the pieces to fit in a 4×4 hoop. I scaled the head back, wasn’t real thrilled with the similarity of wing and leg sizes but what are you gonna do, right?

And then I went “hahaha, needs a white dragon” and scaled the pieces down by 80%, and then the body down by another 80% (so, 64%) and went… hmm.

After an afternoon of testing different sizes and combinations, I ended up with the gold dragon in proportions I’m happy with. I actually ran that one in the 5×7 hoop, but it’s still square, so the 4×4 dragons will just be 80% of the size of that. The green dragon has a smaller body but also smaller wings and a larger head, but I have all five colors made in that scale so those ones are going together as-is.

But about the time I got things all figured out, I snapped three needles in quick succession, stabbed myself with a bamboo skewer, and decided that was enough for the day. I’ll finish the hand-sewing bits of the already-made five, but me and the embroidery machine are gonna take a break from each other for now.

Oh, and the owlbears? I have had them all set up at the conventional machine for several days, ready to sew the linings in, and just can’t bring myself to sit down and wrestle with that (topstitching the drawstring opening is tetchy). Sometimes ADHD brain works like that, but it can work to my advantage: I can be really productive in things that are avoiding doing something I “need” to do. So I made a lot of dragons to avoid finishing owlbears, and now I’m much happier with that pattern.