Dress-up Tail

Getting a kid to turn into a dinosaur!

So, I just made the thing that I’ve been sort of vaguely but not really wanting to have for a while now. I’ve not made it for me though. It’s a *children’s* dinosaur (or dragon if you so prefer) wearable tail. With some fleece blankets, a lovely tutorial from Andrea’s Notebook that I only vaguely followed and a few hours and I’ve hopefully made someone’s new favourite item of clothing.

I chose some blue/green fleece that has been in the stash for the tail and some yellow for the spikes. The measurements from the tutorial were loosely followed, although I did sew a tail with a flat bottom and as such had fewer cut offs. The spikes were drawn and cut very loosely and then sewed together to be turned inside out. There’s an overlap on the spikes because I didn’t really measure and sort of eyeballed everything. The Velcro on the waist straps was some blue stuff I had left over and I thought it would look nicer than black or white. For the same reason, I didn’t zig zag topstitch the straps but just used a normal topstitch. I’m firmly of the opinion that it does indeed look nicer.

The last real change from the original pattern was to add a zipper to the underside instead of stitching it closed. I figure if this kid would wear his tail and then run around in the mud, his mum or dad would appreciate chucking it in the laundry. If the innards are removable, then that’s much easier. I didn’t have a coordinating zipper colour, but I did have a coordinating zipper pull. So I stitched in a rainbow zipper with a nice teal pull. All in all, a lovely quick project that was completed in a few hours. It also made me giggle when I put it on the 100+ year old mannequin. Somewhat.. anachronistic. I hope it’ll be enjoyed by the intended recipient!

Dragon or Egg?

Making a little reversible gift in the shape of another dragon.

It’s always nice when I get to make something that will have a special purpose rather then just for my own enjoyment. So I was super exited when I heard that someone needed a birthday gift for their child and they like the stuffed animals I’ve made in the past. The kid’s favourite colour is orange and he likes dragons. Easy right? I decided to buy a new pattern for this project. This reversible dragon that turns into an egg, made by CholyKnight/SewDesuNe.

I’d bought some weird almost striped stuff on a fabric market that didn’t have a goal but I just thought it was cool. I decided it would probably work pretty well for the egg portion of the dragon. It was a little thin, so I did put some fusible interfacing on it and got on with sewing the spots and other markings on the different pieces. The pattern is very clear and explains what you need to do in great detail. I always love how CholyKnight makes patterns as both the free and the paid for versions are really good.

The dragon came together nicely and it does turn into a egg pretty well. I’ve recorded a little video how he goes from dragon to egg. You can find it here. It does feel a little weird when you are actively stuffing something into itself. But it’s a lot of fun to be able to actually do it and then put the little loop around the orange button and have a completed egg or dragon.

The pattern has different options for horns, wings and different types of spikes. I chose to mainly do the spiky spikes and pointy horns. The dragon wings where the most obvious option for me as I didn’t really think butterfly wings were appropriate in this specific case. I think I want to make another one of these for me, but perhaps not yet. Need to first empty out the bin of plushies some way or another.

New Shoulder Friend

When the perfect shoulder dragon pattern comes your way, you have no choice but to craft a new friend!

Have you ever had that moment that you spot a pattern for something online and you just.. had to have it? I had that Monday a week ago when I found the pattern of a plushy shoulder dragon by Choly Knight. In the basket it went and out of the printer it came. All the pieces were cut and taped together, and some were printed again so I could optimize my layout. The main colour was blue, it’s belly would be a light blue, then green claws and a white spine-spikes. Coincidentally: my new best friend is a lint roller and I don’t think my vacuum will forgive me if I force it to suck up another bit of blue fuzz.

I then started the process of putting my new friend together. I chose to make a western style dragon with clawed legs, and the pointy spine-spikes. From the free add-on pattern, I chose the toothless style horns and face-spikes. He’s got the lizard style eyes and the lizard scales on his forehead and legs. The pattern is extremely comprehensive and easy to follow. My machine didn’t particularly like the enormous amount of layers along the spine-wing attachment, but he got through it. This was also the first time I used armature wire, and it wasn’t nearly as scary as I thought it would be.

So last Saturday at around 7 o’clock, Pjotr the Shoulder Dragon was completed. He’s a slightly sub-par scarf, but still a lot warmer than nothing. So far, he’s been received with universal acclaim and he’s literally the cutest thing in my house.

Taking a Dragon on a Walk

Now that I’m working from home, I need to see more friends on a daily basis. So I decided to make a friend who wouldn’t be influenced by quarantine. I bought the dragon backpack pattern from CholyKnight in December and never dared to actually start. It took until the stay-home-order and throwing the budget out the window to get going.

Getting the fabric was the biggest mental hurdle. Initially I wanted minky, which was what the pattern make advised. However, I was only able to find flat minky in Chinese webshops and not in any local-ish ones. There was some that had raised bumps, and I didn’t think a bumpy dragon would look good. In the end, I settled on something called wellness fleece and got a meter each of bright red, dark grey and black. Where the colours would go was to be the next hurdle. After some deliberation, the back was going to be grey, the belly red and the nails and horns black.

The pattern pieces were taped and cut from the fabric. My floor was COMPLETELY covered in fluff. Fluff everywhere. I only made two changes to the pattern and the first was to change the shape of the wings. There are four types of wings included in the pattern but none of them tickled my fancy. So I googled toothless wings and drafted a pattern based on that. I also decided that I wanted the wing-spine to be a different colour, so I cut that and figured out the order of operations. I was amazed that my sewing machine managed to get through 6 layers of fleece and a layer of foam.

I didn’t have many problems when sewing this new friend, although there were some. According to the pattern, an ‘advanced skill’ was to install a hidden tail pocket with an invisible zipper. This posed no problems. For some reason however, just basting on the bottom straps was the thing I had to rip out multiple times. Very frustrating.

The second change I made was to change the straps. The original pattern includes straps that are just webbing, but that isn’t very comfortable if you ask me. Therefore, I decided to draft some curved straps, based on the straps on my larp backpack. I even used the same fabric as I used for the bottom of those straps. The plan was originally to use back webbing and strap adjusters, but the local sewing shop only had 2 cm and 3 cm wide webbing and 2.5 cm adjusters so that wasn’t going to work. I was very happy to find 2.5 cm wide red webbing in some deep dark recesses of my hoard. That was sewn on top of the straps with some dense zigzag.

Finally, I managed to put the remainer of my new friend together – taking some extra care around the straps to make sure they weren’t sewn into the seam. Cursing a little here and there when there were lots of layers and finally handsewing the last details in place. Once he was done, I took him on an outing to the supermarket to show him life outside my house. He’s probably going to be quite useful since his main pocket is quite large, I can fit most of my underarm in there.

So far, he’s wonderful and I hope that I can show him around to more people.

 

Dragon Shirt

For my birthday this year, I got a meter of stretch dragon fabric from my friend. It languished in the stash until the day before yesterday when I pulled it out to make a shirt. It was always destined to be a shirt because, one: dragons, two: limited fabric and three: stretch. I had located a new to me sewing pattern called the Supersnel Shirt (here). Only two (or three depending on how you count) pattern pieces and 8 pages.

It fit together well and I cut the size S from my dragons. The first attempt at binding was a disaster since the binding was way to short (and/or my shirt did not have enough stretch). Even after lengthening, the centre front still pulls slightly. However, the binding attachment method is very nice. I broke the twin needle I was finishing all the hems with so I had to wait until morning to finish all the hems and the neckline. It was still a fairly quick make. Next to the lengthening of the binding, I also added a small pocket to break up the dragons a little. Not sure if it works, but I liked adding the detail.

I need to wear it for a day before I can decide whether I need to grade to an M on the hips for the next iteration, it does feel fairly tight over there. Again that may be that the fabric has slightly less stretch than the pattern would like. I do think the dragons are totally cute.

Toothless Gift

A friend of mine seemed to fall in love with my Toothless when I finished it last year. She implied or asked (long time ago, I don’t really remember) she would like one for her birthday, and I decided to try and do that. I failed in having it finished on the birthday, but it is done by now. It took slightly less than a year in little increments, but still a substantial project. I made a few changes compared to my own one. This one has a semi functional mouth with a stomach that can house a fish. His eyes are also a little different and the face does not look the same. However, it is still quite cute, I think.


And here he was, hiding on my chair during construction.

Toothless

It all started a long time ago when I watched the How to train your dragon movie. I immediately fell in love with the cutest dragon in the film: Toothless. A while later, I found a picture on Pinterest of a giant Toothless plush. I knew that I needed one of those for myself. The picture, this one, contained a free pattern of said Toothless from a DeviantArt user named nooby-banana. So in May last year, I printed it out, cut out all the paper pieces and put them in a folder. Only to have it stay at the back of a drawer until a few weeks ago, when I organised said drawer. Immediately, I felt the need to make the toothless dreams come true…

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I’d already collected most of the materials and set to work last Sunday. I cut out all the pieces, for which I needed one fleece blanket and a tiny strip of another one and started sewing up my little monster. It all came together much quicker than I could have anticipated, especially for a critter that is 1.10 m long and with a 1.15 m wingspan.

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The instructions were mostly clear and I followed them closely, the only deviation was that I sewed the top of the head first, not the bottom and that I added a little line of stitching above the eyes. I don’t think that the head order made a big difference in the final project, but it made my life a lot easier. I also followed most of the instructions for the eyes from Katy-A here. Although I used safety noses as I have a lot more of those hanging around that I won’t use very often.

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All in all he was made from 1 and a 10cm strip of fleece blanket, a little left over brown fleece from a hood project, his nails were from my medieval dress fabric, polymer clay eyes, some plastic pellets (75 grams per foot in a bit of pantyhose) and a lot of stuffing. I think he’s really cute, and it’s real nice to cuddle with him as he is so big. He’ll probably live on my bed or on the chair as pictured below for a while.

october-2016-9 Toothless

The view below shows his wings and his wings lifted up.

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I really like it, so thank you nooby-banana for making this wonderful pattern available to us all.

T.M.A.K.P.E or The Dragon!

The Most Awesome Knitting Project Ever.

I have accomplished my life’s dream and made a Dragon. Some time ago I found, I don’t even know how, a free knit pattern for a dragon by writer Kim Harrison. After I’d convinced myself that I would be able to knit on multiple tiny (2 mm) double-pointed needles, I decided to go for it and buy all the supplies. I spent hours and hours knitting on what felt like something we in the Netherlands call a satéprikker, it’s loosely translated as skewer in English. Very thin sticks that you would ordinarily stick through meat to put on the barbecue. I was actually excited to come home and continue knitting..!

I followed the pattern almost to the letter, but I have no idea of what my actual gauge turned out to be. I have the feeling my Dragon is a little bit smaller than others, but I don’t mind. I think he doesn’t mind either, as he’s happily sitting on my window sill.

After knitting the entire thing, I had to decide on his finishing. This mainly concerned the eyes. I followed the instructions and initially had the treads come out next to his nose, like a sort of Oriental Dragon. However, he’s more Western in appearance, and I decided to give him a moustache trim. I think I prefer it, but here’s the comparison.

Dragon Dragon

Dragon Dragon

And the wings open and closed. For the next one (and I think that there will be a next one, maybe rainbow coloured wings?) I want to put the wings on with the purl side down, such that he can be displayed with spread open wings.

Dragon Dragon

Anyway, this was one of my most favourite projects of the year. It’s a dragon after all. For notes from Ravelry, check here, and this is where the knit-along is posted. Thanks again Kim Harrison for providing us with the nicest dragon pattern I’ve seen so far!