Tag Archives: dragon

Rainbow Dragon

Since Lockdown 1.0, I haven’t done much sewing – the majority of things I made were face masks for friends and family. I wanted to sew something as a Christmas present for K, but what do you make a young boy who loves dragons? A dragon backpack of course!

I’ve made plush toys before, but this would be the first backpack I’ve ever attempted…. I like to make things challenging!

My original plan was to use some glow in the dark fabric paint on the eyes to add an extra fun little detail. However, the glow paint I’d purchased online was a ‘lucky dip’ when it came to colour, and I ended up with pink – perfectly fine, but I didn’t really want this dragon to have pink glowing eyes! So I stuck with the pattern’s recommendation and appliqued the felt eye pieces onto the face.

This fleece fabric is surprisingly slippy – it behaves almost like a fake fur rather than fleece when you’re sewing. As a result, the zip on the main pocket isn’t the neatest of stitching.

I had a Union Jack patterned fat quarter lying around, which worked perfectly for the pocket lining. I didn’t want anything too dark, as it would make it quite challenging to find something in the bag otherwise.

After a while of fighting the fabric, I tried an alternative technique – placing a layer of calico fabric against the feed dogs when sewing. That worked like a dream, allowing the fabric to feed through evenly, and no more squished stitches!

Because the dragon needed to be stuffed and the fabric had a slight stretch, I wanted to make sure the seams would allow some stretching, so I trimmed down the calico to as small a piece as possible. Ideally I would’ve used a tear-off fabric stabiliser or even tracing paper, as both of those could be fully removed after sewing. But as usual, I didn’t have either to hand, and I really needed to get this dragon finished!

As an optional extra in the pattern, there’s a hidden pocket in the dragon’s tail. I thought this would be a neat addition (which I didn’t point out when I gave K his present – I wanted him to discover it for himself), so not only is this my first backpack make, it’s also my first attempt at sewing in an invisible zip (albeit without an invisible zipper foot)!

My only other slight mishap was when I stitched the strap to the wrong side of the dragon’s paw (oops!) and had some well-nigh impossible unpicking to do to resolve it. But thankfully you couldn’t see the mistake once I’d finished.

And I can safely say that K loves his new backpack – after he’d opened it, he put the bag on his back and ran round the room shouting “I’ve got wings”!


Pattern: Dragon Backpack by Choly Knight
Fabric: Rainbow Fleece from MIBS

Strawberry Dragon (finished)

Strawberry is finished! When I started, the only alteration to the pattern was going to be printing the pattern at 150% for a larger dragon. In the end, I made a few more alterations just to hopefully end up with a sturdier dragon.

I cut the spines from two layers of fleece rather than using felt. With a dragon this size being given to to my cousin’s little boy for his third birthday, I wanted something that would be soft, yet sturdy if he was picked up by his spines.

The arms and wings are meant to be ladder stitched onto the body, but I cut a slot and machine stitched them on the inside just to make sure they stay attached! This gave Strawberry a small dart-like shape on his sides, but the fleece is quite stretchy so once he was stuffed you couldn’t really see the dart shape.

A slight error in reading the pattern meant I machine stitched the tail base to the tail sides and bottom part of the body, rather than leaving that gap to add the stuffing. So, as I was finding the foot pads challenging to sew by machine, I stuff him through that gap, and hand stitched the foot pads at the end!

Hopefully K will approve of his not-so-scary, cuddly dragon.

 


Pattern: Yoki the Dragon
Fabric: Red apparel fleece from Fashion Fabrics
Safety eyes: Hobbycraft

Strawberry Dragon (UFO)

You’d think that with a blog called Dragon’s Flame Designs, I would have sewn several dragons already. But while I’ve sewn lots of bears, I’ve never tackled a dragon…. until now! I’m reliably informed that K likes dragons, so Yoki Dragon looked like the perfect early Christmas present for him.

I thought the original size might be a little fiddly to sew, so I scaled the pattern to 150% before printing. I’m using some red clothing fleece rather than minky, as I think it’ll stand up to rougher play.

So far I have the head sewn, and you can just about see the dragon shape starting to emerge.