The Dragon's Cave - More work in progress

WHEW! I spent most of friday night working on this tail, and I've got quite a bit to show for it now. I started early friday evening after the kids were in bed.

First, I wanted the tail to have a 4" diameter at the thickest part, and a 2" diameter at the tip. Using the math I learned in school (yes, there ARE practical uses for school math!), I calculated that each side of the tail's material should be 6.2" at the wide end, and 3.1" at the narrow end.

Using four sheets of 8.5"x11" paper taped together, I drew out a pattern for each side of the tail's main body. Here's what it looked like after pinning and cutting:

Patterned and Cut

I went ahead and laid out all of the unfinished spines along the top side of the tail to get an idea of where I wanted each one to lie.

Spines laid out #1

I fed one side of the main body through the sewing machine twice--I laid the stitches about 1/2" apart, creating a channel that would end up along the underside of the tail. I wanted to run some galvanized wire through there later to give the tail some structure. After sewing up one side, I turned all of the spines right-side-out and laid them more or less where they were going to end up.

Spines laid out #2

Once that was done, I folded the main tail body over the spines and pinned everything like crazy to keep it all in place.

CRAZY PINS!

The next part is what took up the bulk of the night. I spent hours sewing, pinning/unpinning, and stitching by hand in order to stitch the top side of the tail together without sewing each spine shut. That meant that I had to sew in between each spine, then sew each side of each spine individually to the tail's body. I did make a couple of mistakes, and I had to pick the stitches out of spine #6 and re-do it, but this is how it ended up by the time I went to bed at 4:30 AM:

All attached

On saturday, my wife graciously got out her glue gun and glued a smooth little nub on the end of a length of 14-gague galvanized wire. I ran this wire through the channel on the underside of the tail. With that in place, I can now bend the wire and give the tail some shape and structure, instead of having it hang straight down.

Wire Pic

Next came the stuffing. I used up the whole bag of batting that you see in the pic below:

Stuffing it

It came out just about right for filling the entire tail! Now that it's all stuffed, it's looking very close to the finished product. Before the convention starts (this THURSDAY!), I need to close off the wide end and create a couple of denim belt loops so I can hang it on my belt.