What’s your favourite dinosaur? Mine’s a triceratops.
It therefore seems odd that it’s taken me so long to make one. I’ve been sidetracked by a number of octopuses, an owl, a stegosaurus, and a dragon.
There was a particularly tricky yarn in my stash, the now-discontinued Sublime Extra Fine Merino DK. I had bought a whole bag of it, many years ago, and used some of it to make a super cute and utterly impractical baby sweater. Impractical because it needs washed at 30 and that’s not really how baby clothes work. But cute as a button. Any road, I had 165g of it and thought that might be enough to make a triceratops.
It was not.
But I also had a whole skein of Sirdar Hayfield Bonus DK in stone marl, which is pleasantly mottled between khaki and grey and ended up being a great match.
If you’ve read my past posts you’ll be familiar with the process: make the shapes (50 in this case), sew in the ends, join the shapes, sew in the ends again, stuff, add eyes, and take pictures. This time I didn’t sew in any ends; I used the recommended 1.75mm crochet hook, even though I wasn’t using the recommended yarn weight, and it’s all nice and snug, so my hope is that between that, and the pressure of the stuffing, the ends stay inside.
As other makers have noted, I had trouble following the pattern’s directions for the horns, and ended up freestyling those. I used buttons for eyes instead of wooly ones, so if I end up gifting the triceratops it’ll need to be to someone old enough not to eat buttons. She came out at about 20 inches from tip of horn to tip of tail, and about 10 inches from ground to highest point of frill. That’s just over one and a half times as big as if I’d used finer yarn (based on the pattern’s predicted size).
The frill was the only part of the project I blocked, as I hadn’t found that blocking made too much difference last time I made a crochet friend. The frill needed to stand up, and the shapes when just made tend to curl in on themselves, presumably because I crochet too tight in the final round? But they relaxed just fine after a short soak and a stretch and, as you can see, sit up nicely when sewn on.
This is Plod the African Flower Triceratops (Ravelry link) by Heidi Bears (Etsy link). I used DK yarn: Sublime Extra Fine Merino DK in grey, 125g, and Sirdar Hayfield Bonus DK in Stone Marl, 65g. I used a 1.75mm crochet hook.
