Yoki the dragon pattern review and changes

For Christmas I made my kids two dragons from the Yoki the Dragon pattern I bought from Etsy. 

 They turned out really well.  My daughter especially loves hers.  My sister asked me to make one for her son's birthday, so I set out to make another one.  However, I decided to make a few changes.  There were some things that bothered me about the original pattern.  Mostly, there is so much hand-sewing!  I don't enjoy hand-sewing, and I don't feel like it's as secure as machine sewing.  The head especially was hard to get on securely.  I'm positive that my kids are going to end up pulling them off.  So this second time around, I set out to do as much machine sewing as possible. 

 I was able to eliminate all the hand-sewing except the nostrils and sewing the hole up at the end. 

 I machine sewed on the wings and arms and ears.  I should have had the ears point up instead of down, but oh well.  In order to machine sew on the head, I had to adjust the pattern.  Basically I just figured out where I wanted the neck to be in relation to the head, and cut the head pattern there.  Then I taped that piece to the other end, overlapping a bit to account for the seam.  This worked out perfectly, though you can see he's looking upward a bit, so I probably should have moved the neck forward on the head a bit more. 

 Because the neck is where it's turned in the original pattern, I left the back open, and hand-sewed that up at the end.  I also made a change to the belly lines.  In the original, you're supposed to use embroidery thread to make the lines.  I only did this for my son's because both my husband and I really disliked how it looked.  And sure enough, several of them have popped off since Christmas time.  So for this one, I stitched the belly lines on in a lighter thread.  Oh, and I interfaced all the satin pieces.  My son's had some popped seams because satin ravels at the edges really easily.  This one for my nephew should be as secure as the minky one for my daughter.  Oh and one more change--the original pattern calls for felt spikes.  For my kids' I used tulle and for my nephew's I used some velvety scraps.  I like them much better than felt because they are softer.

Still cute, right?  And hopefully much more secure and long-lasting.