Tuesday, February 25, 2014

A Dapper Dinosaur

I'm thinking about calling this collection of yarn animals the "Loopy Zoo Collection." Here is the latest installment, a super cute dinosaur with a dapper bow tie and top hat!




The basis for this pattern came from a free pattern available on Ravelry.com by Nicki Sandoval.  You can find it here. However, I made quite a few adaptations, including redesigning the head so that his nose (snout? What does one call that part of a dinosaur's face?) was a little larger. In the original pattern, the nose was not very differentiated from his face. 


I also redesigned his feet so that they had more of a foot shape, instead of being simply round. I did the little chap's left foot first, just sort of making it up as I went along. When I tried to recreate it for the right foot, it came out quite a bit larger, as you can see, and I'm not sure why. I'll work on it a bit more and give you guys the pattern later, once I have the bugs worked out. 

I decided to give him a bow tie because when I sewed the head and neck together, there was a rather obvious seam, and I wanted something cute to cover it up. Because this dinosaur is a boy, and is a gift for a little boy, I decided on a bow tie. 


And then I thought he was looking a little bald, and I figured a top hat would go quite well with the bow tie. And he was starting to look so dapper, I loved it!


Then my mom suggested giving him spikes down his back. For the spikes, I tried my hand at steam blocking for the first time, and I don't know if I didn't let it sit long enough and get completely dry or what, but I was not that impressed because the spikes never did get quite as pointy as I wanted them to. 

I'll post my patterns for the dinosaur's bow tie and top hat, and if you want more details about the way I adapted the dinosaur pattern from Nicki's original pattern, let me know. 

I realize this is not even remotely accurate to any sort of real dinosaur...for one thing, I don't think dinosaurs even sat on their bottoms like this, much less wore bow ties and top hats, but we're just gonna roll with it...and I think he turned out very handsome. Hope you enjoyed!

Love, 
Emily


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