When I learned to crochet last March, a major motivation was that I wanted to be able to make cute amigurumi critters. Although you can knit amigurumi too, I think the crochet style is more distinctive. To date, a fair number of attempts at amigurumi crochet have ended up in the bin, although the odd one has been acceptable.
Anyway, I decided I needed to swot up a bit more so I purchased June Gilbank's book, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Amigurumi and read it from cover to cover, which I hardly ever do with craft books.
Armed with my new knowledge, I set about this PDF pattern for dust bunnies I'd had for a while from Voodoo Maggie's Etsy Shop.
For my bunny, I used Debbie Bliss Cashmerino Aran with a size E (3.5mm) hook. This was one size smaller than the pattern suggested but June's book suggested that size E with worsted weight yarn was the best combination for amigurumi.
All the pieces of the bunny are crocheted in continuous spirals. I used a padlock stitch marker to make sure I didn't lose my place in each round. As I've found previously, the main challenge was keeping my tension tight and avoiding holes when increasing and decreasing. My decrease rounds at the top of the head are a bit holey but better than previous attempts.
When making the body, I applied a number of June's tips, including turning the crochet the other way out so the right side of the work is showing and putting a bag of plastic pellets in the foot of a pair of of tight to weight the body.
The ears, arms, eyes and tail of the bunny are crocheted separately and then sewn together.
I think this is my best amigurumi attempt to date, although I'm not out of the woods yet. After this, I had two unsuccessful attempts at making the hamster pattern from June's book so more practise is clearly called for...
Melx
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