A special swamp dragon for your Hogswatch tree

For those who are not familiar to Discworld you have two choices- go away and read all the wonderfully funny Terry Pratchett books you can get your hands on, or just skip to the part where I talk about making a pom-pom dragon and ignore the weird references to explosions and the Hogfather.

For everyone else, this is a little project that I wrote up for my Hogswatch card recipients this year (I wanted to send the supplies to go with it but sadly this would've made my envelopes too large to be sent as letters, let alone cards, and postage is expensive enough to the other side of the world without making parcels.  So they, like you, will have to scrounge up some supplies to work with.  As you will see though, this is not particulary hard- pom-poms can be made, pipe cleaners are necessary and glue, felt and googly eyes are fun to buy and not expensive.

This project is to make a little swamp dragon to hang on your tree- or a bunch of them, stitting in the tree, flaming softly, inadvertently exploding when the crackers are pulled, drooling and disolving the presents underneath...  it wouldn't be Hogswatch without them*!




Pom-Pom Swamp Dragon
Materials needed

• 1 Large pompom
• 1 Medium pompom
• 3 or 5 Small pompoms
• Pipe cleaner
• Felt
• 2 Googly eyes
• Glue
• Scissors
• String

1. Glue the small pompom for the dragon snout to the medium pompom (the head). Glue this head to the large pompom for the body. Glue the googly eyes onto the head.

Glue small pom-pom to medium for snout and googly eyes above this to make the head.

2. Cut your pipe cleaner to 12 cm in length and bend into a M shape. Use two shorter lengths of pipe cleaner wrapped around the two top corners of the M to make the wing supports for each wing (see picture)

Step 2 and 3- Pipe cleaner and felt guide

3. Cut the felt to the shape of your wings. Glue the felt to the wings, then glue the wings to the body.


4. Cut a long triangle of felt for the tail. Cut a short length of pipe cleaner and glue to the tail felt. Glue this to the back for your swamp dragon tail.

5. Glue the remaining small pompoms for the legs of the dragon. You can also glue another two for the arms but I ran out of pompoms!

Awe, how could you not want to make this little guy?

Tie a short length of string around the body so you can hang up your Hogswatch decoration! And leave a comment or send me a picture if you make one.  I'd love to see!



* Swamp dragons on trees are not part of official Discworld cannon.  But they would be brilliant, don't you think?  I mean it's not that far in terms of insanity to the Victorian tradition of the tree filled with burning candles, right?