Amigu... What???

But what is this Amigurumi?

According to Widipedia, Amigurumi, or 編みぐるみ is the Japanese art of knitting or crocheting small stuffed animals and anthropomorphic creatures. The word is derived from a combination of the Japanese words ami, meaning crocheted or knitted, and nuigurumi, meaning stuffed doll.

In a few words, I make crocheted dolls.

I don't make many, nor often, but they are indeed one of my most pleasant hobbies...

In this first post, I will share some of the first amigurumis I have prepared so far. I hope you like them, although, as it is obvious with some of them, I am really a beginner!

Note: the photos are the best I could do today. If I manage to have some better ones later on, I will change these.

So... here they are:

My first amigurumi: the objective was to prepare a little dog, finally I got an alien dog... take a look at the photos and you will see what I mean ;o)

It is a little strange, isn't it? The first lesson I learnt from my first amigurumi is that it doesn't matter if the separate parts (head, body, legs, ears) are correct, if you don't sew them together correctly, the result will be.... let's say funny. And using a multicoloured yarn didn't help either.

After this I took my lesson and decided to do something that wouldn't need any joining... and is very simple to do. So I prepared an egg to give to my mother for her eggs collection:

Although sewing the felt to prepare the cheeks troubled me a bit, I liked the egg quite a lot. (Now I can give it to my mother, after so long!)

Next I prepared another funny amigurumi... the ice cream-crazy-artist:

With this amigurumi I learnt something else: the right stuffing is as important as sewing together the different parts. How can someone understand that this is supposed to be an ice cream with the overstuffing?

For the next one I did everything according to the pattern, but finally the pattern was a bit strange, as I thought at the beginning. So here goes the really wide heart:

At some point I will change a bit the pattern and prepare another heart.

I really loved the next amigurumi, because it was the first one that I really liked:

The picture doesn't do it justice, but I think it is a really cute pear.

After the pear, I thought I should try again something with legs. And I think I overdid it. It was quite hard to sew the 8 legs of the octopus! But I was very satisfied with the result:

I wanted to prepare the octopus' kid as well... but it is still pending ;o)

Finally, I found online some really cute christmas trees and I started experimenting with them. The results are the following:

I liked the first one quite a lot... but it was a bit difficult to find buttons to use as ornaments. So I tried a single coloured tree next:

I did like it, but I wasn't very satisfied with the colours.

Now I am preparing a series of Christmas trees that I will give as presents for Christmas to family and friends. I haven't taken photos of them yet, I will prepare them when I have finished all of them. So long, I have prepared five in different sizes ;o)

As for the patterns, I found the ones for the heart and the christmas trees in Ravelry. The rest of the patterns are from the books of Ana Paula Rimoli. Take a look at her blog to see her really cute amigurumis... hopefully one day I will be able to make my amigurumis as cute as hers!