u/Material_List_8833

NOW I CAN FINNALY HUG MY DRAGON!!!!!

Hello Dragon lovers I wanted to share the plushie of my OC I’ve made and talk about what to expect as a beginner (from someone who rarely picked up a needle before this plushie). finding tutorials even on the normal plushie making videos are a rare sight on YouTube (maybe except teddy bears and baby dolls). it was a real gold mine when I found two videos on dragon plushie making by Neffretity ( http://youtube.com/watch?v=Pohn0OV5l5w , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azJNxt9J_gA ). It gave me confidence to make these plushies. (you should definitely watch these, her videos helped me a lot ^.^)

(I realized felt tends to frizz out after a while ;-; does anyone know any trick to smooth out the felt again, rough brush seems to not work for me lol :)

I want to start by saying, it takes longer than you might first initially assume lol (HUGE respect to the people who make these kinds of plushies, as I experienced from firsthand it really requires patience xd). Mine took close to 100 hours of crafting (most of it was because I learned things along the way and I had to start all over for few times because the body shape didn’t turn out well when I turned the plushie inside out). Now I think with better planning and designing it might have been a bit faster.

I used a bit of an interesting fabric where I bought it from a 2nd hand market, it had a non- stretchy fabric on one side and felt on the other side. I think this made the final plushie more durable.

For designing my plushie pattern, at first I thought about making a 3d model then using a software to create a completed plushie pattern, but I decided to go with a much more simpler (in design wise) approach: I went with just drawing a 2d shape of my dragon and then sized each part appropriately and cut fabrics accordingly. This However wasn’t ideal for the main body of the dragon and I had to design a belly part and sewed 3 pieces of fabric together for the main part of the body and a bit of tail & neck

For legs & paws, I mostly followed Neffretity’s tutorial and tried to stuff the poly fill really hard into the feet and legs because I wanted them to be rigid and not deform.

 For eyes I used blue fabric and used contact glue to glue black fabric to make the pupils and the white glitters.

Sewing the limbs to the body was much harder than I anticipated and spent around 4-5 hours just trying to properly align legs with the body and sew.

For the beans and claws of the paws I used hot glue gun. Maybe I should’ve stick to the sewing because hot glue is usually permanent. I think I miscalculated the size of the claws in the hind paws, so it turned out a bit odd looking

Wings might be the hardest part of this imo, because if you want wings that you can shape and pose you have to put bendable metal bars inside the wings and this was a really pain and for few times I accidently misaligned the metal and broke the needle in the sewing machine.

 

Here are few recommendations from someone who had no clue about plushie making before this:

Try to sew small details (like different colored fabric) to your plushie BEFORE you turn it inside out and fill it, otherwise it becomes much harder to sew it into 3d shapes.

I sometimes used contact glue on the main fabric to glue weaker colored fabrics to the stronger main felt like fabric. Try to avoid doing this, because the contact glue can create permanent smudges on the fabric, if you must do this, then try to spread the glue as much as you can before gluing the weaker fabric (do not directly put glue on the weaker fabric)

If you want to make paw beans, do not put the hot glue directly on the fabric. First try to use a baking sheet to make “bean” shaped beads and then glue them on to the fabric. I, unfortunately, haven’t realized this for the first paw so it looked odd :(

For monetary cost wise I would say it was around 20€ (main fabric was around 10$€ and the poly fill was around 6€, I also used poly pellets for weight which was around 5€) for the materials I bought, but it should be noted that I mostly salvaged and recycled random fabrics I could find on my home find with little to no price

for a bit of refection: I know the plushie didnt turned out perfect (but thats 100% fine imo), probably improvements can be done, but I am still very happy about the end result, he looks very cute (which is super important xd) and the fact that I made him from scratch makes the plushie look much better for me lol

Thank you all for reading to this point, I hope I could help few people who also want to make dragon plushies ^.^

(She is an OC I am trying to make, her name is Puppeteer)

Always lurking in the dark, giving fear to dragons, and more importantly fearing from dragons, knowing what might happen to you if you ever get caught...

2nd image of my OC the puppeteer. She is actually used to a nice dragon, she was a good artist, painting the castle walls, she had a happy life.

Sometimes she thinks if there is still a chance to leave this puppeteer legend behind and maybe, just maybe, act like as if nothing happened, as if the queen personally ordered her guards to be controlled by a puppet.

but she knows she cannot be the only one who suffered this fate, and she knows most other dragons weren't as lucky as her...

She is a character vaugely based on one of my older artworks

I made this character based on a really quick AU I imagined

She is a Skywing and most dragons call her the Puppeteer, her real name is a secret.

She used to be a normal dragon with relatively happy life but in the time period where she lived, her queen was a paranoid Skywing who obsessed over controlling all of her subjects, so she ordered her personal animus dragon to enchant 10 needles and queen gave these 10 needles to her most loyal guards (these guards called Crafters) to make as many puppets of her "problematic" subjects. any puppet that had been sewed with these needles has the power to control that dragon as long as the controller made the puppets very similar to that dragons face. (the reason the needles weren't more powerful because the animus dragon was very hesitant to give the queen that much power so she found a cunning way to convince the queen that Crafters can use these needles against her)

she was one of the subjects that the queen deemed as "problematic". when they brought her to one of the crafters to make her a puppet, But they locked her up loosely so she managed to escape, and steal one of the needles along with few puppets.

she was really scared about the whole idea of becoming puppet so she decided to hide her face so no one can make her a puppet anymore (Her mask is made out of plaster so sometimes it can break, just like the part in her left horn)

Most of the time she lurks in the dark corners of Skywing kingdom, making puppets of those who are close to the queen, some dragons report seeing a strange masked dragon in roofs of the houses, or in dark corners with unfinished puppets in her hand. thats how she got her Puppeteer nickname

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(okay this was my first time trying to make a propper WoF character with some "interesting" backstory, I know there are MANY plotholes, but hey the concept sounded cool to me, and I mostly focused on the art lol)

I never drawn front-facing or angry dragons, now I have (thanks to that viltrum empire meme).
I somewhat aimed for an uncanny look xd, buuut, I think I prefer side facing and happy dragons lol

(Art by me)

Art by me

if you want to draw angry and front facing dragons that viltrum empire meme is a really good excuse :p