Girly Dragon

I was asked by a friend to knit a "girly" dragon for a little girl who has a hard time finding girly dragons. I purchased the pattern for this little gal here, and began my project. Life has been rather busy, so this took a couple months of picking up and putting down to complete. As each piece of this puzzle has a few things going on, it wasn't a piece I could just knit without looking :)

It seems that every toy I knit becomes a member of that elite northern club..."The Misfit Toys"

The finished product is alright. I ran across a few things in the pattern that I decided to change to make it tighter, and I didn't seam her correctly. Since this lovely lady is for a little girl, I figured she wont notice all my mistakes.

Instead of embroidering the eyes on, I opted for cat eyes. I love the way they make a toy come to life. However, once they are on there....they don't come off. So make sure to place them just right, and do it before you close the head... otherwise its a pain. I hadn't thought of putting them on there until after I had closed the head, so I had to stretch some sts behind the ear to slip in the back pieces. When I snapped in the eyes they looked fine, but later I noticed they weren't quite level...

I also decided not to do the little daisy's. I had a cute little flower I sewed on instead.

The wings are made with short row shaping, but I made a couple small changes to part of the pattern half way through. Instead of slipping one, I did wrap and turn, then knitted in the wraps, this fixed some holes that were being created by the slipping. Also, every time I came back to the wing edge I just knitted to the end, this eliminated an elongated stitch that was creeping in on me, and made it look more uniform.

If I tackle this project in the future, I will definitely rewrite some of the pattern. I have a hard time seeing the point in knitting the entire thing flat, there are plenty of places to knit in the round and avoid having so many loose pieces and later seaming.

I did enjoy this project, but I was very happy to see it come to fruition.