Fire Breathing Dragons

November 01, 2017

Fire Breathing Dragons

I hope everyone had a safe and fun filled Halloween yesterday. We had a blast with our fire breathing dragons.

Our Halloween celebration was an all day affair. Lieutenant Amazing started at our library's special Halloween story time with stories read by Wonder Woman. Followed by trick or treating in the park with treats given out by the Mayor, the local police and firefighters. It was so much fun for him. But that was just the beginning. Then we headed out to Captain Awesome's elementary school and got to enjoy a kindergarten Halloween party followed by the school's costume parade and monster dance party in the cafeteria, even little brother got to participate. Before heading out to trick or treat we carved two giant pumpkins, one with a smiley face the other with a mad face. The boys then had a very successful night trick or treating, consuming as much candy as their little mouths could chew.

While yesterday was tons of fun and full of activities, my favorite part of Halloween was already complete. I LOVE creating and bringing costumes to life for my boys. This year they both wanted to be Fire Breathing Dragons. So here is how I made that happen for them. I started with a rough sketch.

Rough Sketch

Measurements and Pieces Needed

Choosing material was the next step. I took the boys with me to JoAnn's so they could pick the material themselves. When they first decided to be dragons, one wanted to be red, the other wanted to be blue. Then they both fell in love with this material.

Croco Green Material Photo Credit to Lt. Amazing (not bad for a 3 year old)

We agreed on black for the inside of the wings and the pants for variation. Plus it was mentioned to me, if the pants were made out of the green, they may look like MC Hammer pants.

Croco Black Material (It is definitely black, just does not appear so in this photo.)

For the spikes and dragon bellies, I already had gold shiny material from dinosaur costumes I made three years ago.

Throughout the creative process the dragon costumes transformed slightly. The boys wanted to be able to breathe fire as dragons. In order to create that effect, I decided masks would be better than hoods and the boys agreed. Here is my mask sketch.

Mask Sketch

Once we picked out all the material, it was time for me to draw out the pattern. I wanted to take advantage of my new Cricut for some of the costume. In the past I've drawn the pattern pieces by hand, but since I have such a wonderful new tool I wanted to use it. So I drew out the wings and the masks, but all of the spikes, the fire, and the belly pieces were patterns found on the Cricut Design Space. It definitely helped to make them more uniform. I ended up cutting the felt fire by hand, because I had not tried to cut felt with the Cricut yet and didn't have the necessary backing. I've since cut felt with the Cricut for my mother-in-law's costume, but I'll get to that in a later post.

First Dragon Wing

Like any great energy conserver (or lazy person), I conserved both my time and energy by simply flipping the pattern I had already drawn and proceeded to draw the other size wings on the opposite end of the paper. I like to use tracing paper when I draw patterns. It is similar texture to the paper that commercial patterns are made from and it pins nicely to the fabric. In this instance I had to tape two pieces together to get it large enough for my drawing.

Second Dragon Wing (same paper flipped to conserve time and paper)

The following are screen shots taken on my iPhone of the Cricut Design Space projects.

Back Spikes Pattern using Cricut Design Space

With the back spikes I had to become more familiar with the Cricut Design Program. The pattern I was trying to cut was longer than the cutting mat and so I had to learn how to "slice" the image. It was a great learning experience.

Mask Spikes Pattern using Cricut Design Space

Fire Pattern using Cricut Design Space

Dragon Tummy

For the pants, I used a kids pajama pants pattern that I already had. Once I had all my patterns cut out I then laid them out as if I were going to cut them, to figure out how much material to buy. I ended up buying three yards of the black material and two yards of the green material. I have leftover of both, but not an excessive amount. I wanted to stay within a reasonable budget for these costumes and ended up spending about $25 each. Of course that's not including my time (which I didn't keep track of at all). For the shirts, I figured it would be easiest to buy t-shirts and attach the dragon tummies to the shirts, so that's what I ended up doing.

Green Dragon Wings

Black Dragon Wings

Black Big Pants

Black Little Pants

Cutting material can be tedious and time consuming, well not the cutting so much as the pinning. It's so exciting and rewarding to see all my pieces cut and it really gives me a sense of accomplishment. That's what the following picture is about.

Done Cutting

Back and Tail Spikes

Once the spikes were sewn, I was ready to put the wings together. These pictures made me smile. I could see what I had imagined coming to life.

Green outer wings and spikes sewn

I knew that I wanted to attach the elastic straps to the inside of the wings before I sewed the green and black together. So I needed my little boy models to figure out where those straps would go. One was very cooperative, while the other, well...he's three and anyone that has ever had a three year old will completely understand.

Captain Awesome's wing strap fitting

Lieutenant Amazing's wing strap fitting

Once the straps were sewn on, I attached the green outer wings to the black inner wings. The toughest part of that, was sewing the tail spikes. The spikes had to be rolled, tucked and pinned, which caused me to keep sticking myself with the pins that were holding the spikes. I was quickly reminded, that it's not truly sewing until there's blood, sweat and tears involved. As you can see only one of my boys cooperated for this fitting.

Black and Green Sewn Together

Now at this point I was kind of at a standstill. I thought the wings looked really funny and I had messed up one of the straps. So I took some time to rethink the project. While I was thinking about the wings, I sewed the pants. My husband jokingly asked me to sew him a pair (sexy). I like how they turned out. I'm glad we went with black and not green. Green may have channeled MC Hammer.

Dragon Pants Complete

I'm not sure why I took the time to rethink the wings, because I ended up going with my original plan. I redid the stitching of where the strap got stuck and then top stitched the entire outer edge of the wings, which made the wings lay nicely. Then I proceeded to put pleats at each point, which I forgot to document by photos (oops...forgive me, I've never done anything like this before.) Here are the completed wings and pants. I'm really happy with how they turned out.

Completed Dragon Wings and Pants

Once they were complete I began the masks. Now with the masks, I was a very bad photo documenter. My apologies. I think I got so wrapped up in what I was doing, I forgot to take photos. Here is a photo of the masks already cut out with the fire laid out underneath to see what it would look like when complete.

Cut Out Dragon Masks

Ready to Sew

This was the first mask I did. For the second mask I didn't pin the flames before sewing around the mask, because when I flipped this one right side out, I accidentally stretched some of the flames and had to remove stitches and fix it. Second time around I left the mouth opening unstitched and attached the flames after I flipped the mask right side out and attached it with a top stitch alone. It was much easier and turned out so much better.

First Mask

The eyes were really hard for me. I was trying to stitch them first then cut the holes with a seam ripper thinking that would be easiest. I ended up doing one that way and the other I cut first then stitched. I'm not sure one way was better than the other, just different. I did an overcast stitch along the eyeholes for both comfort and looks.

Attaching Nares

For the nares (nostril holes) I cut out black material and stitched it on with an overcast stitch. I just realized I never took a completed mask picture. So this picture was taken just now, after the kids wore them multiple times. They held up pretty well. We lost part of an orange flame yesterday at the costume parade, probably related to the stretching it underwent when I sewed it in and tried to flip it, but other than that, they look great. Capt. Awesome has lines on top of the dragon's nose, because that's what the original design was that I drew. I didn't really like how they turned out so I never did it on Lt. Amazing's Mask.

Finished Masks

Once the masks were complete, I'll I had left were the shirts. I bought long sleeve t-shirts at Walmart, thinking it may be cool Halloween night, plus the look of long sleeves would be better than short sleeves. While I was there I bought my husband and I both t-shirts too, because I had an idea brewing in my head. Here are pictures of the dragon tummies and placement.

Dragon Tummies

I sewed the lines in the tummies before placing them on the shirt because it would be easier than manipulating the tummy and the shirt together. Then I did an overcast stitch around the tummy. This material is really fussy to stitch with a machine, it stretches and doesn't move well under the foot of the machine, so it's easiest to cover it in tissue paper while stitching. That's what you're seeing above.

Dragon Tummy Attached

Apparently I only took a picture of one of the shirts. Oh well, they look the same, one's just bigger than the other. And that was the last step to making my boys' dragon costumes. Here is the end result taken at the Trunk or Treat during Fall Break last week.