DIY Hobby Dragon Tutorial

Thanks to this awesome post I came across from Talking Trash and Wasting Time, it gave me a great idea to make Hobby (or stick) Dragons!  I've seen the hobby horses before, of course, but most of them looked so silly and fake to me.  When I saw her idea redone for dragons I was hooked.  I ended up making a bunch of these for birthday and Christmas gifts this year and thought I would share a tutorial on how to do them.

Now, I'm not really a tutorial type of person, so I don't have pictures of every step along the way, and the pictures I do have are from all the different dragons I made so the colors and shapes jump around. But there are a lot of tutorials out there for hobby horses so I'm sure you'll be able to figure out anything I left out or is a little confusing.

Your going to need: Material of your choice (I made some dragons out of fleece, others out of cotton with a sparkly mesh overlay).  Fleece for spikes, nostrils, eyes, and teeth.  A 3/4" wooden dowel that is 4' long.  A glue gun. And lastly, some embroidery floss, thick thread, string, etc to tie the horses head on.

 The first thing I did was lay out my fabric, folded over, and I cut out a dragon (or horse) shaped head.  Since you folded it over, you should have two pieces the same size.  You can use a template (the one pictured was cut out of 11x14 construction paper) but I found it easier to free hand it and I love that each dragon I made is a little bit different for each of the kids I made them for.  (And some advice, make sure your fabric is facing the right way when you cut.  The crowns on the one above all ended up being upside down on this dragon.  Oops.) 

You also want to cut out whatever you want to do for spikes (or fire) at this time. Lay one piece of your horses head down, fabric side up.  Place you spikes, facing down, on top of your fabric.  Likewise, if you decided to make some fire coming out of your dragon's mouth, put that down facing inwards as well. Lastly, place the second piece you cut on top, wrong side facing up.  In the picture above, instead of felt spikes I used tulle. 

I suggest pinning everything together so things don't shift inside.  Then just sew along the edges leaving the very bottom of your dragon open.  Hem the bottom edge up to prevent unraveling.

 Turn your dragon inside out and admire how cool those spikes look! (Sorry for the dark photo, I did a lot of these at night once the kids went to sleep).  For the one above, I didn't hem the bottom but it ended up starting to unravel while I was working with it so I hemmed the bottom edge on all the rest of the dragons at the same time.

Now cut out your face peices from different colored felt.  You can get away with only using black and white if you don't have different colors, but most of my dragons ended up with blue eyes.

 

Now here's where I took the short cut for crafting and broke out my glue gun.  You could hand sew the eyes and nostrils on, but I'm not that talented and trying would have taken me hours.  Instead I just used the hot glue to put the eyes together, and then glue the face onto the dragon.  I didn't put any teeth on the one above that has fire.

Now the fun part my kids liked helping me with, stuffing it!  Stuff your dragon head up to the head.  When it's stuffed full and just to the neck take a little break.  Here's the part I didn't get a picture of but here's a great tutorial on youtube that's generally what I did.  I put some stuffing on the end of my dowel to pad it and wrapped extra fabric over it.  This helps prevent the dowel from sticking out the top of your dragon over time with rough play.  The tutorial shoes thread, grooves, and a lot more work then I did with mine.  I just hot glued the fabric on the dowel instead of doing thread.  It's inside the dragon so I don't expect this to come loose since it won't be played with directly.

After that, stick your now padded dowel inside the dragon head (It shouldn't go all the way to the top since you already put some stuffing inside the dragon head).  Finish stuffing your dragon the rest of the way, leaving about a one inch gap at the top.  Hot glue all around the dowel and push the fabric down on the glue until it holds tight.  Now take your embroidery floss and tie a knot around the bottom to secure.  I wrapped it around the dowel with a drop of hot glue to hold it all together, making a nice, tight binding.

And that's it.  The finished one above was a birthday present for a friend.  I've made five all together and they all came out just a little different.  I had so much fun making these.  If you try it yourself let me know how it goes!

Weekly Wrap Up - The one with the awesome fieldtrip

It's been awhile since I've posted a weekly wrap up.  We've done a lot of fun and interesting things over the last few weeks but I somehow always forget until Sunday to post the wrap up!

Monday was a normal day for us of running all around.  We got all our school work done in the morning, had lunch, and packed the kids up for our musical theater class with the Tom Thumb Players and then speech for Green Bubbles.  Only one more week of class and then it's time for the play!  Little Miss and Green Bubbles love the class.  They were assigned their roles last week and they both are playing the part of food.  Green Bubbles is bread dough and Little Miss is an onion.  Can't wait to see the final product!

I'm always thankful for days we are home all day long without any errands.  On Tuesday, I took the kids on a walk through the neighborhood stopping occasionally to dig for worms for a science experiment we are doing.  We also stopped by our local polling place and I made all three of them wait with me while I voted. I had my Mother-in-law take the bigs to swim lessons and I took advantage by trying to clean the house.  Megatron had other ideas so I didn't get my entire list done, but it made me feel better to make some progress.

I kept our Wednesday trip a secret from the kids until Tuesday night.  Little Miss has been begging to go back to Sea World ever since we went on our last field trip there.  A friend organized a trip again so we jumped on it.  The educational field trips only last until 1:30pm but that's plenty of time for our family because by then Megatron and Little Miss are ready for naps.  We spent the entire day with some new friends of ours and had so much fun.

The kids were able to see penguins, turtles, sharks, bulga whales, orcas, some walruses, and of course, a lot of fish.  Holiday decorcations were alrady going up as well so I made the kids pose infront of some of them for pictures.  We even got to talk to one of the trainers of the orcas about his job, how he got to be where he is and what other animal training he has done before.  I also was very interested to learn that Sea World San Diego uses the ocean water in Mission Bay for its tanks.  They filter it in, and then after a few hours put it back out into the bay.  The trainer, Conor, told us they put the water back out 80% cleaner.

Unfortunately,  Green Bubbles was starting to feel sick by lunch time.  He actually napped a little in the car on the drive home.  I can't remember the last time he did that.  By the evening he had a slight fever and was vomiting.  Thankfully it was short lived and by Thursday night he was feeling much better!


Since he was sick we did end up finishing our read aloud book, The Witches by Roald Dahl.  We followed it up with the movie they made in 1990 and Green Bubbles told me all the parts that were different between the movie and the book.  The book had him bouncing up and down in excitement.  The movie left him wandering away about halfway through.  Although he did say he enjoyed the ending in the movie much more than the book.

Today we're going to hit park day.  And then it's time for me to get everything together for Little Miss' birthday party tomorrow!  We're going with a My Little Pony theme, but I'm keeping it simple.  No party games, prizes, contests.  Just kids playing on the playground at the local park.  It should be a lot of fun.