Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Jumping on the Bandwagon??

The latest craze in the knit/crochet world is amigurumi. In Japanese, it means small knitted or crocheted toys. I think it's a requirement for them to be cute and easy to make in order to be considered amigurumi.

I went looking on the internet to see what I could find, and do you know that there are thousands of sites that feature nothing but these cute little critters? I had no idea. There are even sites dedicated to "monster" amigurumi creations. Go figure...

It seemed silly to pass up the opportunity to make some toys while they're in vogue, so here are my first attempts at making these adorable little guys. I'm not very adept at crochet, so they weren't quite as easy at first as the websites say they are, but I got the hang of it pretty fast. My biggest problem is making the faces. Embroidery and cross stitch baffle me to no end, so while the actual toy only took a few hours to complete, it took me 2 days to get the face on so it didn't look horrifying--another learning experience and another huge learning curve.

I started with the free patterns on the Lion Brand website, but there are hundreds of free patterns out there. The first one I made is a lion--just in case you can't tell what it's supposed to be. He actually looks more like a pop tart than an animal, but the fuzzy head helps his looks tremendously. I had trouble keeping track of my rounds and counting, so he's got one leg shorter than the other and one arm that's too fat. Oh well, forge onwards and upwards.


The second one is a bunny and I really hope that it's self-evident. I did a better job of counting and keeping the stitches in order. I like this one much more and I'm encouraged to continue on, even though it looks a little like it's showing signs of male pattern baldness with the placement of the ears. My daughter Abby is making a ducky that's going to be great and I'm working on a blue androgynous and nonspecific animal guy. We'll see what happens...



So here we are jumping on the bandwagon, but hey, everybody's doin' it!

4 comments:

CAMILLA said...

All lovely little soft knitted animals Woolyworks,well done, wish I could turn my hand to them, sadly I am not gifted with knitting or sewing.

They would sell like "hotcakes" in our little shop here in the village. Love the photo of your dog by the way, gorgeous.

Camilla.xx

Westerwitch/Headmistress said...

Oh but they are absolutely adorable - I love small - there is something about small isn't there.

Milla said...

never fails to amaze me just how many sites there are out there when you click on Google. And bandwaggons are there to be jumped on! What about trying to theme them to, well, a bit late for Easter, but little wintery ones (scarf), or summery ones (handbag, any excuse for a handbag!) or something??

Kathleen said...

I thought you said you didn't crochet very well. Looks good to me!

I have tagged you again for another meme: http://fuzzknitter.blogspot.com/2008/03/another-meme.html