Mr Zigzag the Dinosaur

Cheatersaurus....

I've been very slack in term of making things out of the last few issues of Sew Hip magazine. So, when Issue30 dropped through door at the end of May, I thought I should make a little effort.

Now, obviously I love soft toy projects so I was immediately drawn to Helen Smithson's Mr Zigzag the Dinosaur. However, I was slightly less drawn to the idea of making each of the spines on the dinosaur's back individually. I have another dinosaur pattern from A Bit of Whimsy Dolls that I haven't made yet that suggested using jumbo ric rac for dinosaur spikes and so a cheat was born...

For the main fabric of the dinosaur, woollen tweed fabric is suggested in the magazine. The only woollen tweed I had in stash was purple, which prompted a comment from my husband about whether there were any purple dinosaurs (apart from Barney). Having established that: (a) there might have been purple dinosaurs, (b) in any case, my version probably wasn't going to be used in any documentaries about the correct colour palette for dinosaurs, and (c) hubby didn't want to come shopping for green tweed fabric, I stuck with the purple.

The template for the dinosaur body was provided on the pull out pattern you always get with Sew Hip. I noticed in this issue that the patterns were all printed on one side and the quality of the paper has improved, which was a bonus.

I folded over the fabric and cut out both sides of the dinosaur body together to ensure a proper mirror match. As the fabric is pretty thick, I decided not to iron on any interfacing, but I did have to drown the edges of the fabic in Fray Check later on as tweed frays like nobody's business.

The next step was to sandwich the my mint jumbo ric rac (bought from Ebay) in between the two top parts of the body and machine sew the them together. After that, I inserted the black safety eyes before finishing sewing the body together, leaving a gap under the belly for turning.

Turning was fairly tough as the neck and tail are actually pretty narrow and I had to be careful not to poke through the seams with my turning chopstick. I stuffed the dinosaur firmly with toy filler and then hand sewed the gap.

I had also opted not to attempt to sandwich the tiny felt claws into the legs as part of the machine sewing, so I glued these on afterwards.

I decided at this point that my dinosaur needed a spot of decoration, so I glued a couple of felt hearts to each side of the body. I also chose on a whim to tie a cute pink bell around dino's neck with a ribbon. My husband also took issue with this, but had to accept he had no evidence whether dinosaurs might have worn little bells round their necks and what role, if any, this might have had in their eventual extinction.

So, in summary, a cute, girly, lazy dinosaur with a bell...

Melx