Clyde the giant dragon

Hi all. I'd like you to meet someone: this is Clyde.

Clyde is a giant dragon. He is 135cms nose to tail and has a wing-span of 86cms. Here he is sunbathing and snuggling on the mermaid blanket along with other crochet goodies. Clyde was a birthday present to my son. This year, knowing that I make them something for each birthday (which is now a tradition), Finn was really helpful in changing his mind every five minutes over what he wanted. The mini Spider-Man to go with his other Avengers was a given as he's been asking for that for ages. But he didn't get finished, instead he was presented in bits like this:

Not ideal but hey he gave me a "ok mum" and a pat on the back because he had already had Clyde. As some of you may recall from past posts my son is a bit obsessed with dragons and this year he wanted a "really big, cuddly dragon". He first saw Clyde like this:

He leaped and squealed and hugged him and told me I was the best mum ever! Totally worth staying up until 4am finishing him to get that reaction. I have to say 4am is a record for me, the record that was broken this year was 3am and that was those same pesky Avengers!

If you remember one of the first amigurumi items I made was this Fierce Little Dragon which was also for my son's birthday but that was about 5 years ago...I think. Quite simply I scaled that up using a bigger yarn and hook and that was pretty much it. It's exactly the same pattern but just big instead of little. Below are the baby dragons curled up with Clyde.

So how was Clyde made? Well I found some Noodles yarn which is great as its made from "leftover material from the fashion industry". So it's recycled and its mostly nice to work with, it kind of depends what you get. Finn had asked for a turquoise dragon but that colour wasn't available so the blue and spotty almost-turquoise had to do. I had my pattern and I had my yarn now to experiment with different sized hooks. Basically anything under a 15mm was too small and awkward so a 15mm it was. I even managed to break my hook to start with but luckily super-glue and a loaned hook from a friend helped me solve the issue.

I stuffed Clyde with some bits of foam bought as cast-offs from factories and they worked really well. However, they did show through the bigger holes so I had the challenge of unstuffing, creating a lining out of an old duvet cover (show below) and restuffing. Now the idea with this pattern is that you stuff as you go along, partly because the body is made in one and once you get past the neck stuffing becomes difficult. So when I tried to stuff a giant dragon with foam stuffing I haven’t used before and and improvised liner it was a long process. But I found my 8mm Tunisian crochet hook and didn’t have to undo any of my work. Luckily I realised before I got to far.

For the lining I cut up an old duvet cover and basically sewed it into the shape I needed. I had ideally wanted a shape the same as the dragon but the neck would’ve been too thin to squeeze the stuffing into for the head. So I went with a rectangle and let the dragon shape it. The extra material provided a little extra stuffing and as it was the same colour as the dragon the liner didn’t have to be pretty.

The trickiest part of the crochet was keeping the wings on! Oh and my hand getting cramp several times. The noodles yarn was lovely but not easy to work with for hours at a time. If I did it again I would limit myself to an hour a day to eliminate the cramp.

So here he is. What do you think? He’s integrated well into our household.