Monster Stockings: The Dragon Foot

I've been making different monster themed stockings for a while now, and this past Christmas one of the new ones that I made was a dragon foot monster stocking.

I found this awesome, metallic silver snakeskin fabric at Hancock Fabrics and was inspired to make something with it. It ended up looking great, but the fabric was really problematic because it frayed quite a bit as I worked with it. The hang tab and claws are made out of black felt. I also made a lining of black felt as well to give it shape because the silver fabric was very limp and didn't hang very well on its own. I stuffed the claws and the toes with recycled cotton batting that came out of some old pillows that I keep around for just that purpose. Here is how it turned out when it was finished.

No two of my monster stockings are exactly the same, but I do have a basic pattern that I began with.  I used the Bare Foot Christmas Stocking pattern from the Disney Family Fun website and made some adjustments to it. Instead of cutting out all four toes, I used the edge of the toes as a guideline to make more of a webbed-toe look. I then took away the cuff and added on the claws for a rawrrr look. I think it turned out pretty well.

I posted a picture of this one on my Facebook page after it was completed and one of my high school friends said he wanted one too. I swear there was a whole bolt of this fabric two weeks before that, but when I went back for more there was none at all and no one remembered seeing it ever. I checked around at all of the fabric stores in the area, and no one had anything even similar. 

That was in December. While I was traveling in Iowa just a couple of weeks ago for a renaissance festival I found some even better snakeskin / dragon scale fabric. It was at Hancock Fabrics in Ankeny, Iowa. The fabric is a black, stretch knit with red metallic snakeskin print on it. Since it's a knit, I didn't have the awful fraying issue that I had with the silver fabric before. Also, what really adds a nice pop to this fabric is that the surface is scaled with tiny clear squares of a plasticy material that creates an awesome scaled look and feel.  I will give a heads up if you find any of this fabric and decide to use it. Sewing through the plastic scale material gummed up my sewing machine needle after a while, and every now and then the needle would just slide across a scale rather than through it, which caused a few skipped stitches that had to be fixed later.

Rather than do the webbed toes on this one like the silver one, I took the original pattern and connected toes two-three and toes four-five together to form three big toes. I made the claws more conical in shape. The claws, the pull tab, and the cuff were made from black pvc material purchased from Joann Fabrics. I lined it the same way as the first one with black felt and stuffed the claws and toes to fill them out more. Here is a picture of the red one.

I'll be posting up more of my stockings probably closer to the holiday time to share how I made those. So far I have in my repertoire a ballerina, monster ballerina, high heeled boot, victorian boot, pirate boot, ice skate, furred monster,  wolf, fox, mouse with cheese (for my kitty Buster), and elf stocking. 

What I'm Hoping to do Here

My friends and I do a ton of crafting and crafty things. Knitting, crochet, quilting, costuming, corsetry, canning, cooking, gardening) ... you name it, one of us or all of us does it. We each might share a project here or there on sites like Ravelry, Facebook, and LiveJournal, but I thought it would be fun to have a place to share and document my crafty endeavors all in one place. 

Most recently I've been absorbed with wedding items like wedding favors, handfasting cords, and designing wedding attire. If you stick around for long on here as a reader, I'm sure you'll see and here about more of these than you want to. I'll try not to inundate you with too much wedding stuff though.

Around the holidays, you're likely to see a lot of birthday and Christmas/Yule gifts that I've made for people as well as holiday themed home decorations, clothing, and purses. Some of my favorite items that I've made during the holidays recently were the aprons that I made for my aunts, cousins, and grandmother for Christmas and the monster themed stockings that I was quite enamored with this past year.

During the summer you're likely to see more projects centered around Renaissance Festival costuming. We go to several different faires in the Midwest and enjoy quite a few costuming themes. I've made wench, pirate, nun, and woodsmen costumes so far, and I have several more in different levels of development. You'll quickly discover that we pounce on any reason to dress up and go out and about with friends. When we aren't doing that we enjoy gardening and subsequently canning what we grow. I consider preserving to be a home craft or art, so I'm likely to include recipes and processes for this as well here.

Inbetween those key times of year, I satisfy my crafting urge with all sorts of small projects either sewing, crocheting, knitting, or whatever else catches my attention. I hope you enjoy browsing through my projects as I post them. I'd love to hear what you think and hear about what your own crafting experiences are. When available I'll post tutorials and/or patterns for how to make what I've written about.