OhSewCrafty: Sewing FO: Dinosaur Costume

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Pattern: Simplicity 1765, View B minus wings & spots
Materials: Royal tie dye Blizzard fleece, felt, cotton lining, polyfill
Size: Child size 4
Time to sew: About 20 hours

My 3 year old son picked this costume from the pattern book the fabric store. He's very much into dinosaurs for the past year or so. It was a bit more than I bargained for however!

The first hiccup was in the cutting. This pattern has dozens of pieces, mostly cut from polarfleece and felt. My shears were not quite equal to the task. I actually gave myself a blister on the base of my thumb from wielding the shears with such force. Fortunately I started a few weeks before Halloween. The cutting took maybe 5 hours. Then I had to search for something to mark it... Chalk didn't work. Graphite pencil didn't work. Eventually I found a yellow pencil which did the trick.

The pattern is fine but it has a gazillion steps. And whenever I started winging it, I had to break out the seam ripper because I forgot to install the elastic channel on the interior of the mittens, that sort of thing. My only real problem is the directions say to glue on the plates that embellish the front. Perhaps I was using the wrong sort of glue (Ailene's tacky glue) but I glued each one several times and they kept falling off. Eventually I had to sew them down, which was not easy to do with the costume fully assembled.

My favorite parts are the long spiked tail (stuffed firmly) and the spiky-claw shoe covers. The mittens are similar, sewed into individual claws and stuffed. All the work and seam ripping was worth it when my son tried on the costume and started stomping around and roaring with great gusto! It's also a very warm costume, good for the chilly Halloween night we had with temps in low 40's F. Sorry for the blurry pics. It's very hard to take photos of my busy toddler!