Dragon Ball and a heap of dragon t-shirts

Once upon a time, a highschool friend, Frances and I made up something called the Dragon Tea Society. It was very simple: get dressed up; go to a fancy place that serves afternoon tea; bring a stuffed dragon; consume. The trickiest part was getting to the restaurant, which invariably was in downtown Toronto.

My Aunt Sue, when I was describing this to her a couple of years ago, thought this sounded like the best thing ever, except that it didn’t go nearly far enough. So last year, Frances and I headed down to Ottawa and, together with Aunt Sue and Uncle John and cousin Shauna and her children and Mary, a family friend, we had a Dragon Tea Society weekend. It involved stuffed dragons, tea and little sandwiches, of course, served at a historic mill by a river; it also involved dragon cupcakes and handmade dragon jewelery.

When my Aunt Sue was describing this to my Aunt Heather last year, Aunt Heather thought this sounded like the best thing ever, except that it didn’t go nearly far enough. So this year, Frances and I headed down to Aunt Heather’s cottage where–together with Aunt Heather, Uncle Brian, Aunt Sue, Uncle John, cousin Sarah and her family, cousin Shauna and her kids, and my brother Matthew and his family–we had a Dragon Ball, involving Dragon Egg hunts, dragon crafts, a talent show, contests and prizes, tents, feasts, a dance party, an unbelievable multi-person dragon costume (I wish I had a picture that did it justice), and my main contribution to this enterprise: a small stack of dragon scale t-shirts.

Whew.

The dragon scale fabric was the main inspiration; once it had been seen, it could not be unseen, and it demanded to be made into something appropriate for young children loose in the woods on a dragon-themed weekend. It came from Glimmericks‘ shop on Spoonflower, and I bought it on the organic cotton jersey. A few fabric notes:

1. It is thick. A very beefy knit; just a layer of fuzz removed from sweatshirt jersey.
2. It has a decent but not overly generous amount of stretch.
3. It’s very soft.
4. I’m glad I ordered swatches. Some of the prints didn’t print as well and were quite pixel-y (the ones I ended up going with are tree dragon and sparkle blue ice metal dragon). All were run through the washing machine and the dryer to test for fade, and both of these passed nicely.

My serger absolutely hated this cotton. Don’t ask me why. I had to turn the tension dials all the way to 8 to prevent an unbelievable amount of grin-through; it was like every seam had teeth.

The original idea was to make Frances dragon-y pajamas, because this is a girl who adores dragons in every incarnation you can picture. She has a small mountain of stuffed dragons. She has every remotely child-appropriate dragon novel ever published. She has a small collection of dragon movies. She has a bazillion dragon figurines. She makes dragons out of polymer clay; we have about ten and the family is constantly growing. And so clearly she needed to have dragon-scale pajamas, so that she could be a dragon while sleeping or lounging around the house. Right?

And then dragon-scale pajamas for the Dragon Mistress became dragon-scale t-shirts for child attendees of the Dragon Ball, or at least, for those whose parents cooperated with my request for height and waist measurements. This totalled four.

I used three patterns, all from Ottobre magazine.

Ottobre is a quarterly magazine of patterns for children’s clothing, made in Denmark but published in several languages, including English. Their clothing styles are simple, modern, comfortable, and stylish. No dresses or pants loaded down with five pounds of ruffles, and no weird quilting cotton monstrosities. Just good basics, mostly out of knits. The magazines themselves are a good quality, with good photographs and good (if short) instructions on assembly. The sizes cover newborns to teens and there’s something in every issue for every size range. There is a fair amount of pattern tracing, but it’s totally worth it.

With the five issues of the magazine I have already, there were lots of t-shirt patterns in a variety of sizes to choose from. Two of them I’d already used to make Frances all of the (non-dragon) t-shirts she needed this summer, both with and without sleeves, and they needed only minor tweaks to the sleeves to get a good, comfortable fit (plus the standard fitting adjustments we make to every pattern).

– widened and lengthened the sleeves
– slightly enlarged the armhole on the sleeveless shirt (but not enough, per the recipient. Rats. Sorry, Dani!)

I added the seam binding, too, and embroidered each kid’s first initial onto it so that I could tell them apart when we got there.

The boys got black ribbed trimming at the neck, and black cotton jersey sleeves, for a bit of colour-block style and a touch of added toughness (not that dragon-scale really cries out for street cred–right?–or would that be cave cred?). And also to preserve the very expensive spoonflower fabric. (Shhh.)

The smallest recipient was shorter than the size range of the patterns I’d used before, so I experimented with a smaller drop-shoulder t-shirt pattern. It seemed to work.

I ended up grabbing measurements for the last two kids at the camp, so I’ve got two dragon t-shirts left to make.  And then most of a year to figure out what we’re going to do for next summer!