My sister has a collection of adorable baby dragon figurines, which I asked to borrow for inspiration.
I wanted 'cute' baby dragons, and not fierce-looking ones like their parents, so I started with Winston's head pattern and made some major alterations to it, shortening the muzzle, then scanning it in and shrinking it several sizes. I made a first test head using the fabric I had chosen for one of the babies. I don't usually like to 'waste' the good fabric, but I needed to know exactly how it would stuff. The first head wasn't quite right. It looked like a lion, so I made some more adjustments to the pattern, and made a second head. It looked right as a base for soft sculpturing.
So the next thing was to design a body. I decided they were all going to have the same body, which could work for either a sitting or standing dragon. The body would be wired from the tip of the nose to the tip of the tail so it would be posable. Which meant I'd need the neck to be almost straight, so the seams wouldn't pop when it was bent into other positions.
The test body reminded me of a velociraptor when it was stuffed, so I figured I was on the right track. After all, dragons and dinosaurs do look a bit alike. But the pattern still needed a bit of tweaking, and then I cut and sewed a body out of the good fabric. I sewed the wrapped wire into the tip of the head, then stuffed it. I made teeny, tiny ears and back spines....
I had originally planned to make three, but when I went through my fabrics, there were four combinations that spoke to me....so it would be four. So I cut out three more sets of pieces.