First Steps

So after messing around with different needles and stitches, watching various YouTube tutorials, I decided that the best thing to do was to leap straight into making amigurumi.  Probably not as easy as granny squares and washcloths, but... I wanted amigurumi, dammit.
The first thing I made was this little guy, nicknamed Rice Boy by Lisa after the comic character of the same name.

Rice Boy came about from my attempts at learning to make a ball in continuous rounds. I figured out the whole increase / decrease pattern fairly quickly, and translated that into the ball head and mushroom-stem body. The hat is a failed ball, folded over and made into a mushroom-cap-like hat.
Of course my son also wanted something, specifically a 'tube rat' - his name for a ferret. So... I made a tube and gave it legs , a tail, and ears, along with pony bead eyes and a length of copper wire embedded in its stomach so he could bend it into weird shapes and pose it.

At this point I was hooked on crochet, no pun intended. But I wanted to try some more complicated patterns, so... I looked for a crochet Cthulhu. (Cthulhu pics and story next time.)

Why crochet?

It all started with a flash game, actually.

Several years ago (circa 2007) I found a game called "Farm Hustle". It was a fun little Bejeweled-style game, nothing super special. The website it was on, however, talked about "Amigurumi", a word I'd never seen before. So I googled it.

Amigurumi are crocheted or knitted (and almost invariably cute) stuffed dolls. As I looked at the profusion of cute little animals and dolls and whatnot, I said to myself, "I want to get one of those amigurumi things someday!" Cut to early 2010, just after the Winter Olympics Extravaganza rolled through town. Out of the blue it occurred to me that I didn't need to GET an amigurumi, I could MAKE an amigurumi.

All I needed to do was learn to crochet.

So I borrowed needles and yarn and an instruction book from a crafty friend. When that was insufficient I looked for instruction videos on YouTube. I bought more yarn. Expensive yarn. Cheap yarn. New needles. More yarn. Another book. Ergonomic needles. And so it goes.

I quickly got to the point where I was designing my own patterns. Those patterns (and the things I'm learning along the way) will be the subject of future posts.