Finnfactor design: Toothless Dragon Costume Mini Tutorial

Since we have been on a dragon theme, lets do at least one more post related to Toothless the dragon. When searching for cake ideas for my daughters party, several images of toothless hoodies and costumes popped up too. I thought it would be a fun thing to make her a little play toothless outfit too, and since halloween was right around the corner, I could kill two birds with one stone.

The Pinterest board of Dragon birthday party ideas has the inspiration I used for the outfit. Here are a couple of the hoodies that I looked at:

I was on a time limit as usual, so instead of creating all the bells and whistles for an outfit for a 3-yr old who has the attention span of a goldfish, I wanted to take the most important things and pare them down to the basics. I took some pics along as I went of materials and will try to explain a little what I did to achieve the final product.

*I will have to say that I totally winged this project as I went along, so I don't have any measurements or a pattern to share.*

To start the project, I got a black fleece hoodie and pants from WalMart for about $14 total. I wanted to make a piece that would sit on top of the hood and act as the head of the dragon. I started with some scrap paper and through trial and error got to the shape that the head piece should be. It basically is one large piece with two sickle shaped slits on the sides to form the sides of the face.

For the inside, I cut out a piece that was just the top 1/4 of the head and sewed it on to form the flaps. To make the head more rigid, I used spacer mesh I had at home to first glue two layers in the big flaps before turning inside out. The ends of the mesh ran out an inch or so that they would help the flaps stay up.

Then I cut a piece of fleece that would cover the rest of the head and a piece of spacer mesh that i sewed into shape individually. Next, I sewed the fleece on the head and cut pieces of fusible webbing to fit both the top and bottom of the mesh, to basically glue the mesh to the fleece both top and bottom. Ironing was a little tricky, and a nail biter. I wasn't sure if the iron was going to melt the mesh on the inside, but everything got glued up and nothing melted. Below is a shot of the mesh sewed up.

Here is the head without the eyes after fusing. I like the soft roundedness that the mesh gave it. For the eyes, I used craft felt in yellow and black and cut two eye shapes out of it. I first glued them on, but realized that kids will rip them off, so had to go back and sew them on properly. When the head was done, I just hand stitched it on the hood of the shirt.

Next up Wings:

Started with two coat hangers. One I opened and bent into the large horn shape. The other I made smaller and made the small shape on the bottom to use as a stabilizer so the wings wont flop upside down. I covered it with a strip of felt and then duck taped it around and around. Now it looked like a longhorn head.

Then I laid the shape on the fleece and cut out a piece that looked like wings. Then cut out a piece of black jersey for the reverse side of the wings. I pinned it all together and inserted black elastic on the top for the arm loops and sewed around, leaving a large hole on the bottom.

Then, clip and trim seams, turn inside out and insert the clothes hanger inside the form. This was a little tricky, and I had to seam rip a little to get it to go in there. Then I sewed around all the edges, encasing the hanger in its own little pocket. This was pretty tricky too, since the hanger isn't super bendy and I have a wall a foot behind my sewing machine.

Lastly for the wings, I sewed the arm loop elastics about half way down the wing as close as I could get to the middle stabilizer. I left them long, in case they didn't fit and I had to adjust later.

For the tail, I took a piece of 3" thick batting and shaved it to a taper at the skinny end. I cut a long triangle out of fleece to fit around it and pieces of jersey for the flaps at the end of the tail. The jersey has pieces of thin craft foam in between to keep it together. Again, I used the fusible webbing to hold things in place before stitching around. Worked great and did not melt this kind of foam either.

Then I sewed the fleece tail triangle together with the flaps rolled up at the end. The last two steps were to add black velcro to the hoodie and top of tail to attach them together and to sew a zig zag on a folded piece of fleece to make the ridges on the top of the tail. The ridge I just hand sewed on again.

(I took some pics of the tail construction but realized that they are still in my phone. I'll update the post with the pics soon)

It was finally finished completely, on Halloween. She already wore the hoodie to school a week before Halloween which was fun. Here are some pictures of the finished outfit in action: