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2025 March Newsletter
Sun, 09 Mar 2025
Welcome to the Silver Seams newsletter! Yes, this is the March newsletter. Yes, originally it was the November newsletter. Welcome to my life!
New Products
I've an art-doll dragon to list this month, which is half of my goal, except it took me five years. Hoping to speed up production a bit...
Dragonheart
Dragonheart, a/k/a the Love Dragon, has quite a story. Here's the original blog entry, and its original head:
I picked up a couple colors of Ben Textiles Royal Velvet that looked like they might be leaving fabric-dot-comās stock, and then when they arrived I questioned all my life choices. The teal is nice (though dark, which is why I hadnāt ordered it before) but the fuchsia? Itās a great color but it is definitely not a dragon color.
... unless it was a ridiculous Valentineās Day dragon, anyway. So I started noodling around with hearts in the wings, hearts in the frills, and somehow ended up stitching the thing out and thinking āwell now I have to get it in the shop by V-day to have any hope of selling such a crazy thingā which gave me a deadline to work toward and, well, here we are.
Iām kind of embarrassed that my first finished ārealā art dragon ā one made without the peculiar constraints of all-in-one-piece sewing ā is a novelty dragon. Whatever it takes, I guess. Itās a funny little hybrid critter, with the Celestialās ānoodleā body and the crimson Draco Splendensā fish face (with hearts replacing the betta-fin frill).
It did not sell, mostly because that was February 2020 and people became distracted about that time.
I messed around with more interesting, less fishy head shapes. I wanted to build a head shape around some Swarovski-clone crystals I had, but to make it fit the existing dragon I had to scale the head down a bit. No problem, I said, it'll just have a kawaii look.
It did not. It became the Pink Squirrel Dragon In Weird Sunglasses, and it sat on the shelf for another few years.
And then I got stuck on the Indicolite's teeny tiny head. I didn't want to start a whole new dragon (well, I wanted to, but that's how I end up with a lot of stalled projects taking up space) and I was looking through my Heads folder (yes, really) and remembered Dragonheart. I mocked up the fish-head eyes on the sunglasses head and yes, that would work.
So I ran another fuchsia head, opted for slightly larger eyes, and I'm happy now, and she'll be relisted next Sunday, March 16 at 6 - unless someone here speaks up first. Drop me an email and I'll set up a listing wherever you want to buy it. She's $399, US shipping included (if you're outside the US, let me know and I'll see what it would take), and I can make a private listing on Ko-Fi or Patreon for you. Next Sunday she'll officially be $499, though the magic discount code at the bottom of the page will work.
Scarlet Scimitar
I don't usually name the plush dragons, and I didn't really do that here, it just looks that way: it's made from Cuddle 3 in Scarlet, and it has Scimitar horns, that's all.
I mean, insofar as you can say "that's all" about horns like THAT.
I bought an assortment of Bextraordinary Creatures 3D-printed horns. Most will require me to adjust the design so they stand at the right angle, but the Scimitars don't. They're a bit large, but this dragon is the 4.5", largest I make in this style, and it works... barely.
I had a request for a made-to-order in Scarlet in this size, and they are made two-to-a-hoop, so this is the color I had. And the horns come in solid black (or white) which in hindsight was a poor combo, so I glazed them a color-shift gold/red/violet paint. They show almost entirely violet in most lighting, a little disappointing. It's not my favorite color combo, so if it's yours this may be your only chance at it. As with Dragonheart, it'll be listed next Sunday, but for this week she's $99.
Purple Glass-Horned
Like the Scarlet dragon, these are the extras from a made-to-order. I prefer short-pile minky in the smaller dragons, but a customer preferred the shaggy look. So three woolly babies, two adults. The spike horns are resin beads, the glass horns, just slightly iridescent, are discontinued glass beads.
Wine Glass-Horned
Merlot is a new-to-me Shannon color, and I had Wine short-pile, so the little dragons are the only batch I made specifically for this drop. And boy, is their name awkward. Merlot Glass. Wine Glass. Neither really works! And "Dark Purplish-Red Dragons With Glass Horns" is awkward.
Anyway, the babies are all slightly unique: two have transparent amber horns, two have tortoise luster horns. Two have antique-gold eyes (one of each horn type) and the other two have subtly different copper/bronze-y eyes.
The listings on the purple and wine dragons includes a closeup of all the dragons' eyes and horns, so if you'd like a specific one you can identify it by number. The adult dragons are $89, the babies are $79. I'm starting to run short of the glass horn beads, so there won't be many more of these.
Previews
The Indicolite Dragon
I know I promised the real Celestial, but I decided to fall back to a smaller version first. This one is a dark teal, a/k/a Midnight Green, so know that constructing it meant "Fly Eagles Fly" was on endless repeat in my head while working on it. I can only conclude that it brought our team luck. (I am not so much an Eagles fan as an Eagles-fan fan - we moved to Eagles country ten years ago and I have been very entertained by the escapades of the Eagles fandom, and the local ability to use "go Birds" to replace every small social phrase: "hello," "thank you," etc.)
Anyway, the dragon: the regular-size Celestial has stumpwork talons like Dragonheart's, but the bantam Indicolite is too tiny for that and instead has some of my treasured, discontinued mini talon beads. Its head doesn't have quite the sculptural detail of its larger cousins but has the same stitching detail. Where Dragonheart has quilting-fabric wings, the Indicolite has oilslick foiled spandex.
Blog roundup
It's a little weird to do a "since the last newsletter" section in what's effectively the first newsletter, but here's what's happened in the last month or three. Most of my blog entries lately have been about the wind-down of the memberships and then the re-creation of the memberships - I've run two tiers of embroidery designs, generally plushies made "in the hoop," for some time now, and I downshifted to just the smaller type of design and just on Patreon... just in time for Ko-Fi to introduce the missing feature that I'd shuttered the Ko-Fi tiers over. So now you can subscribe to the Charm Tier on Patreon or Ko-Fi, if you have an embroidery machine.
I also talked a little bit about the Celestial design. It's a funny coincidence that I've jumped in with both the Shield and Celestial, since if you know me you know I am funny about dragon wing designs. No elbow-fingers, five digits, etc. Even Dragonheart obeys that rule! And both these dragons have six fingers. The Shield has, canonically in D&D, two "thumbs" on its wings, while the Celestial has an extra finger. That's also canonical, because the Celestial is more-or-less Temeraire. A bit less-then-more, these days; originally the wing fabric was a blue-spotted black cotton, but I'm leaning toward a gray foiled spandex right now.
Other business
Congratulations to Lisa Mayfield, winner of the subscriber drawing! I'm going to do a drawing for a Cupcake Dragon on Bluesky soon, probably whenever I get close to a nice round number of followers. Follow me there!
If you've read this far, you deserve a reward: [only in mailed newsletter] will get you a discount on either of my shops: Ko-Fi or Patreon until the next newsletter. It's good on both physical and digital products! (Yes, non-members can buy in the Patreon shop, though it's all digital items over there.)
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