Saturday, May 13, 2017

Crochet Dinosaur Appliques for Party Hats


Back before Rowdy's first birthday I spent a lot of time thinking about what I wanted to do for his birthday photoshoot.  I decided to keep many of the details similar to Lucky's cake smash, but Rowdy was going to have a Dinosaur birthday party.


I still had some of the crochet applique whale birthday hats that I made for Lucky's first birthday.  I was able to make these hats using the same color yarn as the turtle butt diaper cover Lucky wore for the smash cake.  The yarn colors were on backorder at KnitPicks and I didn't have time to wait, so I decided to try to match the colors with some food coloring.


Each miniskein I dyed was 6 g of worsted weight wool.  There was more than enough yarn for me to complete 6 applique dinosaurs.  


The Bronto and Steggy the Dino-Rawrs Applique crochet pattern is absolutey darling.  I love that the pattern includes step by step picture instructions in additional to the written pattern.  This made it really easy to understand the placement of the stitches.  


The dinosaurs needed some blocking but they look so much like the sihoulettes of the species they represent!  The instructions for fastening off were particularly fantastic.  It was one of the cleanest projects I've ever finished.  I'm going to change how I fasten off from now on!

Before blocking
Blocking the dinos
The finished dinosaur appliques are perfect.  I know that so much thought went into these designs and I really appreciate that they are so small and simple to create.  



I loved the sparkles at the top of Lucky's 3rd birthday party hats, so I decided that I would create rainbow garland pompoms.  I didn't have enough yarn to create yarn pompoms like I did for Lucky's first birthday.  I purchased a couple of garlands with this project in mind.


As much as I love the stars, with the bigger garland you can almost see lime green in there.


First, I cut a 6" piece of tinsel and stripped an inch of the sparkles from either end (to expose the wire.)  


Next, I folded the garland in half and twisted the ends together to form the bobble.  If the bobble looks too rounded give it a twist in the middle to make it more pom-pom-y.


Finally, I inserted some ribbon into the end of the wire so that I could easily hold the pompom in position on the hat when I glued everything together.  (My hands aren't small enough to grip the wire inside the hat and my glue gun can't reach all the way to the top, either.)


I had all of the pieces ready to go so now it was time to assemble the hats.  


I used some hot glue (on the inside!) and the ribbon closure to attach the tinsel pompoms to the top of the hats.  


I love the applique stegosauruses, but since they are two color they don't quite have enough contrast on the hats.  I really wanted to make sure I had two opposite hats for the photo shoot.  Ulimately, I decided to use just the long neck sauropods on the hats.  Keith and I ended up pinning the crochet stegosauruses to our shirts for the party so they didn't go to waste!  


I love the rainbow sparkles at the top of the hat.  I think that the dinosaur complements the colors in the bobble wonderfully even if there is no lime green.  


Soon I will share the pictures from Rowdy's first birthday photoshoot, hopefully before Rowdy turns 2!  I love being a crafty mom, but it takes way less time to create the projects than it does to edit the images and finish up the posts.  I plan to go big for the kids' first birthday parties but to hold back a bit for future birthdays.  Stay tuned for many more dinosaur crafting projects!