Dinosaur cuddly toy

Last Saturday was my nephew Charlie’s 3rd birthday party. He is mad for dinosaurs  and could tell a spinosaurus from a T-rex (I’d never heard of a spinosaurus before he told  me showed me one). I remembered that I’d seen a tutorial to make a dinosaur soft toy last September over on the Green dragonfly blog. Janette’s dinosaur  was my inspiration for the dinosaur I wanted to make for Charlie. However I wanted to make him something a bit smaller so he could take it to bed with him. As he favours the upright dinosaurs I thought I’d design an one like this.

I began by drawing out a template on a piece of paper.

Here (creative pixie dinosaur template) is a PDF of the template for you to print out any size you want (a seam allowance hasn’t been included so cut out your design 1cm bigger than the template). I then selected the fabrics I wanted to use. A sage green fleece for the body, a Tilda print fabric for the spots and felt for the eyes and spikes.

I cut the spikes off the template, placed 2 pieces of fleece right side together and pinned the body onto the fleece. I then cut round this (allowing for a seam).

The spikes were cut out from the brown felt, the eyes from the white and black felt. I ironed some fusible web onto the back of the Tilda fabric so that it wouldn’t fray when I cut it. I then arranged all the pieces together to see how they look together.

I selected my threads…

and got out my trusty sewing machine.

Little Elsie was fascinated with the machine. On the right side of the fleece I sewed on the eyes…

sewed on the spots…

and I sewed arms by doing a straight stitch for definition.

These actions have to be done for both sides of the dinosaur (unless you want a plain side).  The spikes were then pinned to the right side of the fleece, as shown. The other side of the dinosaur was placed on top of this (so the 2 right sides are facing each other with the spikes in the middle.

When this is all pinned together it is sewn together allowing for the a 1cm seam allowance, leaving the bottom of the feet unsewn to allow for stuffing.

The dinosaur is turned right side out and then stuffed with some toy stuffing. Stuff depending on how firm you want the dinosaur to be, the more stuffing inside the firmer the dinosaur. The open seam was then hand stitched closed with invisible stitching.

So here he is…..tah dah!

Charlie was very happy with his dinosaur present and immediately introduced it to one of his dino friends 🙂

I hope you’re inspired to make your own dino friend.

Jean