Tag: #SewDesuNe

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.

  • Wings
  • Spine Spikes and Leg Scales
  • Tail Spikes

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.

  • He’s right facing
  • Has purple eyes
  • And is exceptionally cute

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.

  • Adorable!

Brian the Big Brained Derpy Kraken

Making a little stuffed kraken that turned out more adorable than angry.

Way back when I purchased the dragon backpack pattern from CholyKnight, I also got a pattern for a Kraken plush and an Octopus/Animal plush. On Friday, I finally decided to make the adorable little Kraken.

I’d already purchased some dotted minky while getting the dragon fabrics precisely for the purpose of making something octopus-related. I thought the dots could perfectly represent suckers. So I got my grey fabric and some of the yellow dotted stuff and set out to make a Kraken with ‘angry eyes’. When I sent a picture of the finished plush to a friend of mine, he immediately suggested to name him ‘Brian’. Or even better, ‘Brian the bigbrained bracken’ [sic]. He also told me that mine is a little more derpy than the original, with which I totally agree. The pattern does not specify placement for the angry eyes so I sort of.. guessed based on where the regular eyes were positioned. Turns out that I put them a little too close together and now he looks derpy instead of angry.

He’s still magnificent and really soft. The eyes and spots are made of felt and stuck on with some vliesofix. Then I handstitched around them to secure in place permanently. The handstitching was done in a few hours while watching/listening to some old climbing competitions on YouTube, very relaxing. I may need to make another Kraken because I have some more dotted stuff hanging out in my fabric hoard.

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.