It can be hard to find a nice skin-tone yarn. So, I’ve compiled a few suggestions for you!
Keep in mind that it’s going to be hard to find a yarn that’s exactly like a skin tone… remember you’re crocheting a toy, not painting an exact likeness! Keep your mind open, and you’ll find a yarn that’s at least close!
Doll Day is tomorrow!
Don’t forget, tomorrow is the release day for my new, super-exciting doll patterns! I think you’ll love them!
And… now I know you’ll be able to pick the perfect color for your doll!
Do you need to crochet skinny parts for things like antennae and legs? If there’s one part of an amigurumi pattern that can make people feel cranky, that’s it. They’re tiny and sometimes they wind up inside out! Eep!
Today, I’ll show you how to make sure you’re crocheting right-side out and how to count the rounds without a stitch marker.
Crocheting skinny parts right-side out
When you’re crocheting a large piece, it actually doesn’t matter which side is out. If it’s wrong-side out, you just turn it around once you’re done. No biggie. (Read am I crocheting inside-out for more details)
However, the antennae of the slug (and legs of the ladybug and mosquito and fly) are so small, it’s important to crochet with the right-side out.
Let’s say your piece looks like this after round 2:
You can tell it’s inside-out because the pretty ridges (from the front loops) aren’t showing up on the outside. All you need to do is turn it right-side out!
Ta da!
Now, keep your piece like this, and continue crocheting. It’ll be right-side out when you’re done!
Did you forget and now you have a long, inside-out tube? No worries! Thread the tail from starting your crochet onto a tapestry needle, poke it into your tube from the bottom and pull it out the top, then pull on the tail to turn your tube right side out. Easy peasy.
How to count rounds without a stitch marker
For parts as skinny as an antennae or a leg, you can crochet without a stitch marker! (shocking, I know!)
Here’s a little video to help you out: (to see full-screen, click play, then click the box in the lower right-hand corner)
Happy crocheting!
Hopefully, these two tips will have you crocheting skinny parts with ease!
Here are handy links to all the crochet troubleshooting posts. . .
It’s inevitable. We all make mistakes. Maybe you attached a part on your amigurumi in the wrong place. Maybe you crocheted the piece in the wrong color. No problem! I’ll show you how to fix it!
In the example I’ll be showing you today, I attached an orange beak on my owl… when the customer actually wanted a yellow beak. Ooops! But as you’ll see, it’s a problem that’s not too hard to solve.
Step 1: Remove the incorrect piece
The first thing you need to do is cut off the incorrect piece:
If you’re very careful, you can cut through the attaching thread, and preserve the piece (here, a beak) for re-use. However, the most important thing is to not cut your main body (here, the head). If you cut through the stitches on the head, it will be nearly impossible to repair.
Therefore, I err on the side of caution: I would much rather cut through an important piece of my beak (and re-crochet it), than to cut a stitch on the head.
Once you’ve cut the piece, pull it off:
Ta da!
You’ll notice that a little bit of orange remains, that’s where I tied the knot to secure the beak. It’s okay that it gets left behind: it’ll be covered up by the new beak. Remember: the most important thing is to not cut through body stitches, and the risk of doing so would be too high if I tried to remove this knot.
Step 2: Attach the new piece
Attach your new piece where you’d like it to go:
When you’re finished attaching, tie a knot. It’s not possible to attach the knot on the inside (the preferred way of making sure the knot is invisible), since the piece has been stuffed, so you’ll have to do your best to make the outside knot as invisible as possible.
Now, insert your needle through the body, and pull… this will pull the tail in and help to hide the knot a bit:
Today’s guest post is written by Alyssa, MonstersToyBox on Ravelry.
Alyssa is a student in Linguistics and Japanese, as well as a very talented knitter and crocheter. Who better to tell us what ‘amigurumi’ means?
What does the word ‘amigurumi’ mean?
You probably know that amigurumi are incredible cute toys made from yarn. And you probably know that amigurumi was originally Japanese.
A collection of amigurumi knit & crocheted by Alyssa
But what exactly is amigurumi? There are a couple different answers for that, and one of them is looking at what it originally meant in its native Japanese:
The first kanji (Japanese symbol of writing) is the character for “knit”; it can also mean several other things, but the knitting is what is important here.
And it is not just knitting; this character can apply to both knitting and crocheting. Japanese does not have two different words for knitting and crochet like English does. In fact, to crochet in Japanese is actually “to knit with a hook”.
So now we have the “knitted and crocheted” part of amigurumi. However, the second kanji is a bit trickier. One of its meanings is “wrapped”. At first, it doesn’t seem to have a lot to do with toys, however, “wrapped” implies that there is something being put inside. What is put inside amigurumi? Stuffing, of course! So perhaps a better meaning for this part, at least as it applies to amigurumi, is “stuffed”, although a native Japanese speaker told me that it is not limited to just stuffing. All sorts of things could be put inside amigurumi to give them shape, rubber balls, for example. The toy part here is assumed… what other knitting or crocheting is stuffed?
Does it have to be worked in the round?
Almost all translations will say that amigurumi means “knit or crocheted stuffed toy”, however, the majority of amigurumi (and especially Japanese amigurumi) is crocheted. That doesn’t exclude knitting as a valid form of amigurumi nor does amigurumi have to be worked in a particular style. I have found that many Japanese amigurumi are worked in joined rounds, but not all amigurumi has to be worked that way, and it certainly does not make it any less of an amigurumi!
Ready to start looking for Japanese amigurumi?
In Japanese, amigurumi is rarely written using the kanji anymore. Instead, it is written using the much simpler, syllabic hiragana (a phonetic alphabet):
If you are interested in looking for amigurumi in the original Japanese, this is what you are most likely to see.
Highlight this piece of text: あみぐるみ and pop it into Google… it’s your trick to finding oodles of images and even Japanese amigurumi books. Most Japanese books are charted, so they’re accessible to you even if you don’t speak Japanese!
Today, I’m going to talk about an instruction that can be confusing the first time you see it. Rotate your piece to work the bottom of the foundation chain.
What does that mean? I’ll show you both in photos and in video how to do it! It’s a great technique for achieving an oval shape in your crochet work (what I’m showing in this demo) but you’ll find it in lots of other irregular shapes as well.
Crocheting into the both sides of a foundation chain lets you create all kinds of shapes!
Photo Tutorial
Okay, so you’ve crocheted your first row, and your piece looks like this:
Now, you encounter the instruction to ‘work the bottom of the foundation chain’. What does that mean? First, rotate the piece 180 degrees clockwise so that the row you just crocheted is on the bottom:
Now, crochet along the bottom loops of the foundation row (working from right to left), just as if you were working a regular row!
Once you’ve finished the row, you’ll have a lovely oval piece!
Want to learn how to make adorable crocheted stuffed animals with an easy online workshop – totally free?
Sign up for Let’s Make Amigurumi here. You’ll learn how to get started, the tools and supplies you’ll need, and how to make an easy amigurumi from start to finish using simple crochet stitches.
It’s a fun, inexpensive, and totally portable craft. You can do it!
Before I start chatting about today’s tip, I want to thank everyone for making the FreshStitches Celebration Sale such a success! Deals were had far and wide… and the most popular pattern snagged was… you guessed it! The Choose Your Own Dragon Adventure pattern! Looks like we might have some more folks joining in on the CAL… yay!
Have you done that, yet? Good! Now, we can’t just leave it like that for two reasons. One, the stranding prevents the fabric on the tummy from stretching when you stuff the body, so you won’t get a nice, plush look. Two, the looseness of the stranding has probably left you with some goosey looking color changes:
Look familiar? We’d like those to look a little neater. So, what we’re going to do is cut the strands down the center:
Now you can see why it was important to make those strands at least 3″ long, right?
For the next step, we’re going to tie together (using a simple square not) each color-change pair: one MC tail and one CC tail:
When you’ve tied off all of the tails, the inside of your dragon will look like this:
This dragon sports a differently colored tummy, which may seem hard, but is actually quite easy once I show you some helpful tips. There are two important pieces to getting a nice looking tummy:
Changing colors cleanly so that you have a nice edge along the sides of the tummy.
Managing the not-in-use color of yarn so that you don’t end up with a mess.
I’ll show you how to do both today, so that you can finish crocheting your dragon’s body! On Thursday, I’ll show you a third part, how to snip and knot the ends so that you can stuff your dragon nicely.
Do you want to know how to change colors?
Of course you do!
So, I made this little video of me doing the first color change: (click on the square icon in the lower right corner of the video to view it in full screen)
Not so hard, is it?
How to carry your yarn
There are lots of ways to manage your yarn when you’re doing color changes, but the technique I’m going to recommend is stranding your yarn, and then cutting and knotting it. The advantage to this technique is that it’s comfortable for crocheting (i.e., you aren’t interrupted by cutting the yarn twice every round) and it achieves the desired look.
If you’ve crocheted Nelson the owl, then you’re probably familiar with the technique. But, I’m going to review it, here… because the dragon adds in some complicating factors!
When you get to a color change, you want to carry the unused color of yarn along the back. But, since we’re going to cut this yarn later on… you need to make sure you have at least 3″ carried along the back. See how loose my pink strand is?
If you pull the yarn tightly, you won’t have enough yarn to cut and tie the ends, later!
So, keep doing this (carrying the unused color of yarn across the back of the work) every color change. You’ll start to get lots of strands:
By the end… you’ll have a lot!
In this post I show you how to snip & tie off these ends – including why you don’t want to just leave them as is!
Frequently asked questions
My stitches on the edges look very loose and icky. What did I do wrong?
Nothing went wrong! That’s normal. It’s just because we’re doing the strands so loosely… we’ll clean them all up tomorrow!
The dragon’s tummy looks crooked, what gives?
When you work in the round, the crochet stitches always bias a little bit to the right (if you’re right-handed). This actually happens all the time, but you don’t really notice until there’s a color change to show it off. There are some ways to fix it, but honestly, they’re a bit of a pain. I like to think of the curving tummy as a feature… it gives the dragon some sassy character!
This color change thing is really annoying.
That’s not a question! Anyway, yeah, I know. There’s no shame in crocheting the dragon’s body all in one color, and skipping the color changes. In fact, I’ve already spotted some finished dragons in our Ravelry group that did just that… and they look fantastic! Your crochet shouldn’t annoy you – do what works for you!
I also really like ears that fold from the side into the center. You can see both sides folded to the center here on Boone Bunny. . .
. . . and also just one side folded in to the center on this Maxwell Monster.
However you decide to do it, folded ear is a great technique. It looks complicated, but it’s all about the attaching.
Okay, let’s assume that you’ve crocheted the ear as instructed.
Whipstitch the opening of the ear closed
Press the opening of the ear flat, and using the long tail and a tapestry needle, whipstitch the opening closed. I stitch through one stitch on the top of the opening, then one stitch on the bottom of the opening, until I’m the whole way across.
It’ll look like this when you’re finished.
Don’t cut the tail… you’re still going to use it!
Fold the ear
Just like it sounds! Fold the ear however the pattern, along the edge you just whipstitched. This is an ear from the Mix & Match Dragon pattern and I’m folding it in half.
Remember that tail you have? It should be on one corner of the ear. I like to run the tail (with tapestry needle) through the other corner, so that the fold stays closed.
Attach the ear to the head
Now, just attach the folded ear to the head using whipstitches all around. Take one stitch in the ear, then one in the head. Repeat, working your way all the way around the base of the ear.
One of the trickiest parts of crocheting this dragon is positioning his snout so that it lines up with the color changes on his tummy… since there’s a temptation to attach the snout before you’ve crocheted the color changes on the body. How do you know where to put it?
I have three possible solutions… and I’ll tell them all to you, since different ones might work for different people.
Option 1: Attach the snout after crocheting the color changes on the body
This is my favorite option. If you look closely at the progress photos in the pattern, you might be able to spot that this is what I did when crocheting the original sample:
The downside to this technique is that you’ll need to squeeze your hand into the tiny neck. However, you only need to get inside the head for tying the knot to secure the snout… since the rest of the attaching is done from the outside.
The advantage of this method is that you’ll know exactly where to position the snout, since you’ll be able to see the color changes. Also, I find the crocheting of the body easier without lots of heavy head features attached… but that might just be me!
Option 2: Visualize the color changes
I’ll be honest: this blog post was going to be about how to use your locking stitch marker to mark the end of round and visualize where the color changes would be so that you can attach your snout properly.
I took all of the nice step-by-step photos…
And then I realized that I visualized the color changes as being on the wrong side! Gah!
So, here’s the theory: the color changes for the tummy happen on the first 1/3 of the stitches after the end of round marker. If you’re good at spatial orientation, then it’ll be a snap for you to look at the stitch marker and picture where the snout should go.
But if you’re not… well, this option is going to be frustrating. Move onto option 3 (which is what I ended up doing to fix the photo-shoot!)
Option 3: Move the end of round
For the spatially-challenged (like me), this option is by far the easiest!
Attach all of the features to the head. Your end of round marker (the point where your round begins/ends) could be anywhere… it doesn’t matter. You’re going to move it!
Once you have the head attached, continue crocheting until you get to the round with the color changes. Instead of changing colors where you are (which may be at the back of his body), keep crocheting with the main color until you’re up to the snout.
Move your marker, and that’s you’re new start of the round! Continue following the pattern like nothing happened. In the grand scheme of things, the extra 10 or so stitches you’ve added won’t matter… and your tummy will be in the right place!
Do what works for you!
One of these options will work for you (sorry, I can’t tell you which one will be your favorite)! Hopefully, attaching the snout in the right place (after reading this post) will be no problem!
They say that eyes are the window to the soul. Maybe your crocheted stuffed animals don’t have souls, but the eyes add quite a bit of character! Today I’m going to share a great tip for giving your crocheted eyes some extra pizazz.
Eye Options
You have lots of options for eyes on your amigurumi! You can. . .
crochet baby-safe eyes and add specks of light… the focus of today’s blog post!
Plastic eyes reflect a bit of light already. It gives them a nice, lifelike sparkle. But what about baby-safe felt or crochet eyes?
Well – you can add a little speck of light to those, too.
Adding specks of light to crocheted eyes
I first talked about adding a little yarn speck to your eyes in Cuddly Crochet, but I was reminded of the technique when I saw some fabulous projects by Stacey (a different Stacey!) on Ravelry:
Aren’t these fabulous? Stacey’s used the crochet baby-safe eyes, and embroidered the cutest little reflections on them!
Stacey’s done an adorable V-shape, but you can use a little knot or a simple line. To do this, you’ll want to embroider your detail on when you’re assembling the features on the head.
You can use this trick to add a unique flair to the eyes on any pattern! Give it a try!
