Tag: Dinosaur

Come Rain, Come Dinosaurs!

When the world still doesn’t think adults should wear dinosaurs, you make it yourself!

I finally, finally (!), managed to cut into the most expensive fabric that I’ve ever bought a long length of. This softshell fabric with dinosaurs has been hiding in my hoard since September 13, 2017 when I bought it at the Stoffenspektakel in Goes. The 13th of September 2020 was coincidentally the day that I started cutting out a new rain/fall coat. I only found this out when I went looking for the date when I bought the fabric and was pleasantly surprised.

On to the coat. The pattern is the Pattydoo Susan with optional add-ons of a concealed zipper in the hood and cuffs. One teeny, tiny problem with this pattern is that it is in German. My German is nearly non-existent. Why choose this pattern then? Well 1. Because it’s awesome and only 3 euro (HOW?!). 2. Google Translate exists and 3. They made an instruction video in which they show all the steps (still in German though). I hoped that with the video, I’d manage to figure out how to make this thing. So about 296 replays on – I kept repeating every second sentence they said to figure out what to do – and I have my coat!

Finished inside neckline and hanging loop, neck protection and hood snaps, concealed neck zipper, double sided zipper.

I’ve never made as many trips to sewing stores as I have done for this coat. That’s partially because I kept forgetting that I should bring the fabric if I wanted to colour match. I’ve gone for thread, and then for elastics, and then for velcro and then for zippers, and for more zippers and for cuffs and for the adjuster-things on the hood.. Let’s just say that the local shops must be fed up with me and my stupid German project. Anyway, once I’d gathered most of my materials, I had to start cutting into my precious fabric *Gollum noises*.

Hood with adjusters, hood back adjustment strap, concealed zipper and pieced center hood piece.

Once I had nearly all pieces cut out, I had about a meter of fabric with both selvages left. However, I also had a pattern piece that would need to go lengthwise and therefore would steal a further 40 ish centimeters from that rectangle, just by itself. For some reason I couldn’t bear the thought of cutting into my pristine fabric and therefore cut it from a bit that was too small. My hood thus has two extra seams in the top where I pieced the ‘Kapuzenstreifen’ together. It’s not noticeable at all, so I’m quite happy with this solution. Next to the hood thing, I only made minor changes to the pattern. These include a hacky swayback adjustment (taking in the back seams from armpit to waist by a up to 2 cm) and shortening the sleeves by 3.5 cm or so. Apart from that, I pretty much followed the movies exactly.

Pocket opening, pocket inside and sleeve cuffs.

While the pattern has pockets, they are quite shallow, so I can’t stuff them full of whatever my heart desires. This is unfortunatly a feature of the pattern since the pockets are set in the side front seam and extend to center front, which isn’t very far. However, the way they have you sew them in is ingenous. There’s a built in zipper and it is automatically concealed. I also really love the concealed zip at the neck so you can remove the hood. This version is much nicer than the one I cobbled together on my red coat.

All in all, I enjoyed working on the project. The cutting and sewing stage only took three days, but the gathering of materials and taping the pattern together added another couple of hours. I seamripped maybe three bits in total? The pattern itself is completely glorious in its markings that all fit together absolutely perfectly. I’d already bought another Pattydoo pattern for a sweater that may be jumping ahead in the queue a little. For now, I’ll just continue to swan about in my dinosaur coat and be quite proud of myself for finishing this thing!

Overenthusiastic Masks

Since I still had blue fabric left, I decided to make a few masks.

Sadly, I got carried away, and I now have 17 more masks for my one-person-household. They do all have wonderful images on them, which is the reason there are so many. I got trapped in a cute images hole on Pinterest and just wanted them all. Since I had the capability, I made them all.

From left to right and top to bottom: Up, Meow, Fish, Sheep, Not Today Cat, Cactus, Bear & Hedgehog, Combined Snow Globe, Rabbit, Triceratops, Free the Bird, Apatosaurus, Stegosaurus, Tea Rex, Sleepy Panda, Pterodactyl, Plesiosaur

They are effectively the same as the six I made previously, the only difference being that I eliminated the middle layer. Sewing the chin seam 35 times was enough – I accidentally made a lining to many, which is why there are 35 chin seams. I enjoyed locating my other fabric markers and playing around with them. The plesiosaur and the little triceratops are my favourites. Although Not Today Cat is a mood that happens a lot. I don’t think I’ll ever dare to wear the meow one, but the font was so funny that I had to use it too.

The pattern I used comes in different sizes, I made the size S for me. However, I’m unsure if people around me have the right amount of face if I ever wanted to gift one (or more) of these. As of today, they are mandatory in public transport in the Netherlands – not in everyday life though. But I’m sure I’ve got enough to see me through plenty a rail-journey.

Christmas 2019

As always, I have sent out Christmas cards. The process this year started very late. I’d been thinking about it a little, but couldn’t really figure it out. I knew it needed to involve the following:

  • Have a RAWR-ing 2020!
  • A dinosaur, to make the above make a little more sense
  • And something Christmas

The first idea involved a dinosaur with a Christmas hat, the second was to create a snowglobe type affair with a dinosaur in it. In the end, I settled on something much simpler. Just a dinosaur, with the text above it, in a circle with a cut out star; to represent Christmas ornaments. The ball would then be attached to a very Christmassy piece of card for me to write a message on the back.

I set out by looking for inspiration for my dinosaur. Parameters included: cute, mouth open (for RAWR!), possible to be re-drawn by my with my very limited skills. I tried a few dinosaurs from pinterest, see efforts above (the fox was just because it was adorable). In the end, I settled on a very lovely dinosaur in the public domain here. I drew my dinosaur facing right, since that made more sense to me. He’s also got spikier spikes, different hands, his tail flows from his body and his eyes are the same size. As such, there is still resemblance to the original but it is clearly not a complete copy.

Once the dinosaur was drawn, I needed to get him onto paper. So I traced the drawing with a black pen, took a picture of that and vectorised it. Then he was put into word with a circle around him and the text above. He was first printed in a 10 cm circle (since he still needs to fit in an envelope), but by then I had figured out that white paper was a bit.. sad looking. Then I printed him on some A5 pearl linen card stock. When I touched the ink, it smeared horribly, so that wasn’t really an option either. So I looked around and found some paper with somewhat sweet prints and used that. Since I wanted to get more dinosaurs out of my paper, I reduced them to around 7 cm, so four could fit on one 15×15 page. I printed those out and then used a super handy circle cutter to cut out the circles. Lastly, my trusty star hole punch was employed to make a hole in the top.

After that, I grabbed the very Christmassy 30×15 cm card stock that I’d bought earlier. Those sheets were cut into threes to become a nice 10x15cm card. Punched another star in the top and then had to attach the dinocircles to the card. I wanted something red, and I was lazy, so I repurposed a graduation tassle. Cut those little threads in half and attached the two bits of card together. The circles can now also swing, which I think is cute.

I combined different prints of circle and paper, so the above are not the only options. However, I do think they are very cute, and I’m real happy with my Christmas dinosaur!

In any case, I wish you all a RAWR-ing 2020! May the crafting work out and joy spark in your life.

Yellow Dinosaur!

I recently knit a yellow dinosaur! When I was browsing around Ravelry, I discovered a pattern of a scarf in the shape of a dinosaur. The pattern is aptly named Apatosaurus and was made by Carissa Browning. The idea of another wearable dinosaur really appealed to me, so I grabbed the one skein of yellow hand-dyed yarn and got to work. The only thing I forgot to keep into account was how much yarn would be needed for my dinosaur project..

So about three quarters through that skein, I determined that I was at most going to finish half the dinosaur. This meant nights and nights of looking online trying to find yarn to sort of match my existing yarn. This was going to be really difficult because the original skein from Dragon Hoard Yarn (great name!) was labeled OOAK, one of a kind. If only I’d known what that meant before… In the end, I settled on some Sticky Toffee yarn by Diva DK Star, which also had yellow in it. They do not match, but they do look quite nice together. Both yarns are 100% merino superwash, super soft and knitted up beautifully.

There was only one change to the pattern and that was to leave out a few rows in the middle because I was afraid that even the additional yarn wouldn’t be enough. In the end I had a little yarn left over, so that wouldn’t have been necessary. However, the finished scarf is very long, so I’m not upset about it. I managed to keep track of some of the progress here.

When it’s worn, the colour difference are less noticeable, but I don’t really care about that anyway. The Sticky Toffee gives more colour variation, which shows up quite harshly in the pictures but I feel is less in real life.

I wore it yesterday with a scarf pin and it makes me real happy, so yay!

Spiders and Dinosaurs

I made even more shirts from the free fun summer tee pattern. These ones were cut from jersey fitted sheets. I got a blue one and a white one. The pattern has shoulder seams that are far towards the front. Since the white fabric wasn’t very long, I only managed to get two fronts out of it. I then determined what the shape of the shoulder piece needed to be and cut that out of the blue.

Once the actual sewing was finished, I couldn’t figure out which side was the front. Then I had the bright idea to add some embroidery to the front. So I looked through my pinterest boards for some inspiration. I’d already decided to do a lace-collar-spider thing, but on blue, so that wasn’t an option. So, dinosaurs it was. I pinterested a lot and couldn’t find something that I totally liked, but I used this as my inspiration to draw something myself. It’s a little sitting dinosaur that is looking up to the sky. This shirt has been worn quite a lot so far. It’s very cute.

I also cut the complete shirt from the blue fabric. Then I went in search of the perfect lace to fake a spiderweb. I found some in Amsterdam that I bought, but then I went to a local shop for something else and thought that I might just take a look. There I found the perfect lace. This lace was sewn partly around the neckline and then covered by the neckline binding.

Throughout an episode of Blown Away (Netflix show about glassblowing), the lace was handsewn down. At the end of the lace, a bit of embroidery was added to mimic a spider. I think this one is very fun. It’s also been worn regularly already.

Paper Models

In the past two weeks or so, I was browsing the internet again and found a model of a paper dinosaur and a nodding sheep that were extremely awesome. I found them via instructables on a site called robives.com. Some patterns are provided for free and require printing on card. So I searched around the city for some card as specified and printed the patterns. I got out my little knife set, glue and scissors and got to work. A few hours later, there was an adorable nodding sheep on my table.

Some card, some glue, ink and two coins. It’s amazing how little it takes to create such a fascinating thing, that can actually move by cranking. So after the success of the sheep, I made the little dinosaur. This one doesn’t move of it’s own accord, but it is posable. The mechanism that allows it is very easy but works really well. Since I was an idiot and didn’t realize that the pattern has both a coloured and a white version, I printed the two designs in full and therefore twice. So I now have two nodding sheep and two dinosaurs.

Then I figured out that there were so many more awesome dinosaurs on the Rob Ives page that I bought a few of the models there. So I also have a sheep that shakes it’s head no and a dinosaur inspecting a little mouse. The disagreeable sheep has an interesting vertical mechanism, still with a crank. The Rise of the Mammals has four gears (these were an absolute pain to cut out) and a crank. It moves both the dinosaur and the little mouse. It’s still incredible that this can move, at least to me.

For now, bye from my new collection of paper critters, and I expect more in the future.

Unsmellers

As you may be aware by now, I play roller derby. Roller derby comes with quite a lot of gear: helmet, mouth-guard, wrist-guards, elbow pads, knee pads and skates. It also comes with sweat. Sweat means that all that gear starts to smell funky quite quickly. Now, I’d gotten some pouches filled with something to soak up sweat to put in my skates since they were the worst offenders. This was actually super effective, however, I managed to lose one after the last game we played. This meant that only one skate would get dry again. I wanted to buy more but they were sold out, so I decided to see if I could figure out how they work.

I opened up the seam and it looked like matte crystals with a few purple ones in them (on the left). I figured they might be part of de-humidifiers, so I bought one. Turns out that was filled with some form of flaky stuff that was not exactly the same. I still wanted to try, so I grabbed the off-cuts of my plaid and made some little bags. Popped the stuff in and put them in the skates. However, these things reacted differently to what I’d hoped in that they got very wet, and hard and just weird. So I googled a little more and determined that the contents might actually be silica gel. Apparently, some cat litter is made of silica gel, so I got some of that and made some more pouches from the plaid leftovers. I also took out the stuff from the first iteration, washed them, and filled them with the cat litter (on the right).

There will be another derby practice tomorrow, so we’ll see if they work after I’ve sweated up my gear again. Fingers crossed!

Stegosaurus!

Do you know what happens when you end up with an overworked arm while knitting the body of a Stegosaurus? Said Stegosaurus ends up in a corner, in a plastic bag, for quite a long time…

A, mounted skeleton in right lateral view and B, laid out with missing elements reconstructed before mounting. Images copyright The Natural History Museum.

I did work incrementally on some of it’s yellow parts, the big purple parts mostly being completed in the session that finished my arm. It still took over a year to complete this Jurassic monster. According to the Ravelry, I started it in August last year. However, after knitting a big scale here and there to get back into knitting, I finally managed to get all 35 parts finished today! Then it took all afternoon to stitch the scales to each other and to the body of the purple giant.

Since it didn’t seem to be completely symmetrical, stitching on those scales was quite.. annoying. It felt like I stitched each one on at least twice, to much chagrin. However, they are fairly equal now, even if you can’t really see that on the pictures. I think a real Stegosaurus is also not supposed to sit like a dog, but since its legs move, I wanted to position them in an alternative way. It’s still pretty cute, so perhaps I’ll start a new dinosaur in the future still.

Baby Booties

(This post was written on the 25th of March. Since it is a gift, I waited until it was received to post this account of the project)

You may or may not know that I have not really been able to knit for a long time now. My arm starts to hurt and it’s just not fun. So when a friend had her first baby, I wanted to see if knitting would be possible again. What better way to test than with a small project: something for baby. I searched ravelry for some baby booties patterns and eventually found one for Baby Hausschuhe. Now, just a boring booty wouldn’t work, you understand. I needed to.. do something to make them stand out just a little.

Cue some dinosaurs! What else?

I’d found a chart for a cute little dinosaur that I figured could work here. It transferred it to an excel file so I could work it. The dinosaur would be on the left outside of the first booty, facing backwards (otherwise he would get caught up in the toe decreases). But before I could start on the body of the shoe, I had to work on the bottom. So I cast on two booty soles in yellow and started knitting. Once the soles were done, I followed the first rows of the pattern until the purl how, then I knit 6 stitches and started my dinosaur pattern there. It all worked out pretty well. After following the pattern for the toe decreases and about 5 cm of ribbing, I was bored. My arm also hurt again – stupid.

On Saturday I felt like working on the second one, but I wanted a different pattern. I’d first looked over ravelry for a fun dinosaur chart, but I couldn’t find one. So on to google I went. Eventually settling on a pterodactyl. I found this picture of a Pterodactyl slipper that became the basis of my pattern. I made something resembling it in Excel and again kept my fingers crossed. This one also worked remarkably well. I knit until I got to the same hight as the other one and then transferred them both to a circular needed so I knew that they were the same hight. A few more rounds, some stretchy bind off and two booties were done! I think they are cute, but I hope the new owners also like them. We’ll see.

More Miniature Dinosaurs

I’ve discovered the benefit of preparing to move to a different house. You find all the unfinished projects languishing in a box. Some are a quick stuff and finish, like the mini dinosaurs I’ll show you in a minute, some are a case of straight into the old rag bin and some may be salvageable with time and effort. I have by now managed to reduce my stash of 6 boxes of scraps and UFOs to only one box. I’m quite proud of this actually. It also, in a way, frees you to put your mind to other things than the old projects still hiding away in a corner.

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During the big clean up, I found a bag with some old knitted mini-dinosaurs parts in it. Back in the day (here), I finished three of them, but apparently I didn’t complete the last two. So I took an hour or two and stuffed and sewed up that last pair. They are just the simple version of a toothless T-rex, but I still think that they are quite sweet.

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I’m still trying to get all my yarn, fabrics and sewing accessories into plastic bins that I already own, so wish me luck!