Ella Nunn
Thu, 21 December 2023
It takes around four hours to dress the dinosaur in its bespoke Christmas jumper - LEON NEAL/GETTY IMAGES EUROPE
A family business has knitted a giant Christmas jumper for the Natural History Museum’s resident T-Rex.
The museum’s animatronic Tyrannosaurus Rex has had its own festive jumper designed and made by Jack Masters, a family-owned knitwear manufacturer in Leicester, for the past three Christmases.
The jumper takes around 12 hours to complete, with each stage – from mapping out the pattern, to knitting together the panels – taking two to three hours.
Once they get to the sleeves, the jumper is almost ready: “The T-Rex has such tiny arms, it’s basically like knitting sleeves for a two to three year-old’s jumper,” said Jenny Billington, a Jack Masters employee.
A paper pattern with the dinosaur’s measurements has been made up so that the team can quickly lay out the design once it is received.
“We know exactly what size and shape it will need to be to fit the T-Rex,” Karen Bowring, a Jack Masters worker, said.
The jumper takes around 12 hours to produce from scratch - LEON NEAL/GETTY IMAGES EUROPE
The final product weighs more than 3.5 kilograms, which is equivalent to around eight to 10 “human-sized” jumpers.
Once the jumper is ready, the Jack Masters team heads down to London for an overnight mission to fit the jumper after the museum closes.
It takes around four hours to dress the dinosaur and finish its outfit off with a giant Christmas hat.
This year, the team arrived at around 6pm and were working until midnight.
‘We’re quite attached to the T-Rex’
Once the jumper is fitted, attention quickly turns to brainstorming ideas for next year’s design.
The employees have already started planning for the T-Rex’s 2024 Christmas costume, and will aim to pitch around five to six ideas to the museum.
The team also makes sure to check up on their creation over the festive period: “We’ve all become quite attached to the T-Rex and go down to visit it when we can,” Ms Billington said.
The idea for a giant T-Rex Christmas jumper was pitched by Snahal Patel, director of Jack Masters, in 2021, as a way of promoting the Natural History Museum’s annual Christmas jumper sale.
In 2021, the team visited the model dinosaur four times to take measurements and fit prototypes, and the entire process took around 100 hours to complete.
Now, with experience and the paper pattern, the group has managed to streamline the process.
The jumper measures nearly 1.2 metres around the neck, 2.8m around the shoulders, and just over 3m around the body.
This year’s design incorporates motifs of the museum’s notable dinosaur skeletons, including the Titanosaur which features in the museum’s current temporary exhibition, Titanosaur: Life as the Biggest Dinosaur.
It is made from sustainable materials, including recycled plastic bottles, and is available to buy in human sizes from the Natural History Museum store.
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