How to Make a Kid’s Light Fury Costume

My daughter (8) has been asking for a Toothless/Night Fury costume ever since I started sewing again as an adult but I’ve never had the confidence to attempt it. One viewing of the latest movie though and I just KNEW I had to attempt a Light Fury! So here is a run down of what I did.

Patterns I made use of:

1. The Kid’s Cosplaysuit by Rad Patterns. The main body of the suit was created using this pattern. I also based my self drafted tail on the Steggy one. The only changes I made were to add a zip facing (see below) and tack down the seam allowance of the hood where it meets the zip.
2. The free Night Fury Hoodie hack by Choly Knight (Sew Desu Ne). I used the patterns for the wings and small spikes from this although I skipped the first line of top stitching that runs from where the wing attaches to the body to the top of the wing. See below for why.
3. The free Dragon Addon from Twig + Tale. I used the instructions from this to attach the wings. I did this so I had no double lines of stitching on the wings and so I knew where to place them on a child’s outfit.
4. The free Night Fury Plush pattern by Choly Knight (Sew Desu Ne). I used this for the ears as the scale was better for a child hoodie. I did round off the top though as the Light Fury has much rounder ears than Toothless. I also used this to scale the eyes although I copied the eye design from elsewhere.
5. The Gabriela Onesie and Babe Hoodie from the DIBY Club. I used these as reference so I could self draft and apply a zipper facing. You should be able to find this info anywhere online for free. I just used the patterns as I already had them.

Fabric

The white fabric is an Oeko-tex certified medium weight cotton lycra jersey (95/5%) from Mibs. I also got a 22″ white nylon zip from there. The eyes were from scraps of cotton lycra that I had in my stash. The blue was actually the background of a zebra fabric! I used Vlieseline iron on fleece wadding* for the ears and tail and Vlieseline Bondaweb* for the eyes. I also stabilised the zip with Wonder Tape* and used a lightweight woven Vlieseline interlining* to stabilise the outside layer of the wings, tail fins and head spikes.

What I learned

Well, the first thing I learned is that a Light Fury is not in fact a white Night Fury but actually has different ears, a fin rather than head or back spikes and a different tail, wings and eyes! I decided to leave off the fin but did self draft a new tail based on some pictures I found online.

I was so determined to make the eyes perfect that I hand cranked all three layers of appliqué then tied the threads at the back.

The zip application on this was an absolute nightmare and I’d be reluctant to sew it the same way again. It was done the classic way of basting the seam shut, pressing the seam open and then laying the zip face down over the seam. You then use a zipper foot to sew down both sides of the zip before unpicking the basting stitches.

I usually sew the zip tape to each side of the opening separately which obviously leaves the teeth showing in the centre (unless you’re using an invisible zip) but means I can attach the zip to the fabric with Wonder Tape and have a ripple free seam. When I tried to use Wonder Tape here, it just attached the zip to the seam allowance and the seam allowance and the underlying fabric slid away from each other. Nightmare. So then I applied a SECOND strip of Wonder Tape to tape the seam allowance down to the fabric underneath and this worked but then I realised I’d forgotten to add the zip facing…

By the time I finally got it right I’d unpicked the zip enough times I’d made a few holes in the fabric because the stitches were white on white. Oh well, no-one will look that closely right? And the recipient loves it so that’s all that matters 🙂

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