Some amigurumi gifts

I made my friend a couple of amigurumi gifts recently to celebrate her birthday. Actually, I finished them more quickly than I thought I would so they sat around for three weeks before it was time to mail them out to her :P She was born in the year of the Rabbit so I made her a couple of cute bunny-themed things as well as a Gromit like the one I made for Willy earlier this year. I was actually going to make a third bunny but decided I didn't really like that particular pattern so I left it out.

Anyway, now that she's finally received the gifts I can post some pics. Happy Birthday again, S!

Latest crochet baby blanket

I haven't made anything in a while but a friend recently invited me to her baby shower and of course I have to bring a gift so to the yarn stash I go.

I've realized that a lot of the blanket patterns on the LionBrand site are too small to be practical (c'mon, a 24" square blanket is just not that useful, even to a baby), but they're cute so I just have to modify them to make them bigger. The only problem with this project was that I really needed at least 3 skeins of Caron's Simply Soft yarn in a single color to make the blanket big enough, but I only had 2 skeins of about three different colors and I just really didn't want to go buy more. So I decided to add bands of a contrasting color (the blue) to make my stash work. This was the final result.

I think I'll add one of the little elephant amigurumis to round out the gift. Hope she likes it!

Edit: Here's what the final package looks like. The red tag is care instructions. I missed the shower on Sunday as it turns out because our volleyball tournament went waaaay late so I'll be giving this to the mama-to-be later this week.

More amigurumi presents

We celebrated my sister's birthday yesterday and I had recently come across the most perfect amigurumi gifts for her. The first is a character from the Wii game Raving Rabbids. It's sooooo much fun and both of my sisters and I love playing it. Yes he's sort of demonic-looking, but in a good way :)


The second one is to commemorate the fact that she was born in the Year of the Snake. It's pretty hard to find cute snakes, as you can imagine, so when I came across this Hello Kitty with a snake hoodie outfit I had to make it for her. It wasn't working up too great at first so I was a little worried, but I tweaked it a bit and it turned out better than I expected. You can even take the little hoodie off--so cute!



I think I need a little break from the amigurumi projects now. I've started working on a top for myself, but we'll see how it turns out. I'm being ambitious and trying an intermediate pattern and the baby cardigan I tried a little while back wasn't so great so we'll see how this goes.

Another kind of crafty project

A couple of months ago we cleaned out my grandpa's apartment when he moved into a nursing home. In his closet I found these old chairs that used to be a part of my aunt and uncle's restaurant yeeeears ago. I really like the lines of the chair and decided rather than selling or donating them that I'd try to give them a new life.

Originally I was envisioning a silver chair with a cool fabric covering the nasty, old, red plastic-y seat. But when I got the chairs home I realized that I didn't really have a good spot in the house for them. Someone (maybe Willy?) suggested I put them out on our back deck instead. We'd been looking for a couple of chairs and a small table for that area anyway, so that was the new plan for their home.

But silver chairs wouldn't really work for an outdoor patio style, so I decided to paint them brown instead and find a colorful, canvas-y fabric for outdoors. After removing the cushion (it was held from underneath with a few brackets that were easy to spin out of place and release the seat), I sanded everything down. That took a loooooong time, several hours for the first one and then I got lazy with the second one and only spent half as long on it :P. I really didn't need to sand it as much as I did since I wasn't planning on staining it but I just got tunnel vision I think. Certainly didn't hurt the chair, just my tired fingers and legs!

Given my current employment situation I didn't want to spend a lot of money so I got creative in acquiring the paint and fabric supplies I needed. On one of my local Freecycle boards someone had posted about a free paint shed at a nearby town's recycling center; anyone can pick up free paint there. Cool, huh? So I found a small can of brown enamel paint there and even got a great tinted primer. The color turned out much more matte than I had originally envisioned, but did I mention it was FREE? So, yeah, I'm cool with it.

I also suck at painting. I started out trying to use a mini roller on the flattest parts and a brush on all the other sections but the roller wasn't very useful and I always seem to load it with too much paint. So after the first coat dried I had a bunch of drippy paint sections that I had to sand down again before putting on the second coat. I also missed a few spots during the first coat so, yeah, I suck at painting. Somehow I managed to work it out for the most part.

As for the seat, I hit the remnant bin at Joann's Fabrics and scored with a yard of summery-colored, striped, canvas-type fabric. Not only was it in the remnant bin, it was 50% off that day and one yard was more than enough for the two chairs I was working on. Total cost, about $4. Score!

I borrowed a staple gun from my family and started recovering the cushions. Can you see how the old red plastic was held down by individual little nails? They were tiny, like 1/8" long and some of them started to pop out as the staple gun fired. You can also see some of the nasty black, kinda greasy crap that was on the underside, probably from having been in a Chinese restaurant for all those years. My mom helped me with the first cushion and then I did the second one on my own.

I got the two chairs done just in time for Willy's BBQ birthday party so we put them out for a trial run. No one fell through the chair, got paint on them, or had any other disasters so I guess the job got done :) Here's the final product and a side-by-side before and after (or after and before?) comparison:

It was a fun project, and besides some elbow grease the only cost was the $4 for fabric. Can't really beat that!

Crocheted blankets

Recently I crocheted a bunch of blankets to give away as gifts to various friends and family. I think everyone's received their packages by now so I can finally post some pics of the projects.

I started out with baby blankets and sent these to two different friends, both of whom are due this summer. The green one turned out a little smaller than intended (~16.5" x 26.5") but I've been told it can still be used as a stroller blanket, which I hope is true. I gave it to the smaller couple thinking they might have a smaller baby :) The yellow blanket turned out a bit better at ~27" x 24.5".




Then I got to work on an adult-sized blanket for my sister as a birthday gift. She had asked when I would make one for her and I had enough lead time to make sure it was done on time. I gave it to her over the weekend and I think she really liked it.


I am totally addicted to crocheting at this point. I will say that it's a lot cheaper than my beading hobby, which I haven't picked up in months. It's also easier in that I don't need to come up with my own designs--I'm such a crafty poser, haha!

Amigurumi Cow

I've finished several crochet projects recently but many of them are gifts that are on their way to the recipients so I can't post them yet. The metaphorical slow boat I sent them on should be arriving soon though so I'll post pictures as soon as I can.

In the meantime, though, here are a few (bad) shots of the cow I made for my aunt. I'm not giving it to her until next month for her birthday but no one in my family really reads this blog so I doubt she'll ever see this. She was born in the year of the cow and when I started making these amigurumi she requested one. I had to make some modifications to a pattern I found online here but overall I think it turned out really cute. The collar and bell are my own additions--I like the little jingle it gives now!

More amigurumi cuteness

I am having way too much fun making these guys. They're just so cute! And it's amazing how many of them you can make when you don't have a job ;) The giraffe was kind of a pain in the butt to do--he's much bigger than the other guys, as you can see by the last "group" photo, haha. The legs were super tedious to do so when I got around to doing the arms I made them a little shorter than the legs. He turned out cute though, so it was worth the effort. I especially like his cute little tail--you can kinda see it peeking out on the left side of the photo.

And here's the turtle I mentioned earlier. I might make him with a funky red colored shell next, just for fun. But first I have to finish a teddy bear I'm working on. Then maybe I'll move on to something useful like a blanket. Not sure I'll ever make clothes, at least not for adults, as I don't think I can make anything fashionable enough that I'll actually want to wear. A hat or a scarf maybe, but a sweater I'm not so sure. Baby sweaters would be cute though, like Sabrina makes. Anything is cute when it comes in miniature :)

I've learned that the hardest part of making these guys (at least for me) is stitching the different parts together. The appendages are all made separately and then stitched onto the body. I never did learn how to even sew a button on appropriately, so I'm learning this stitching stuff as I go. I found a decent online tutorial for how to do it neatly so these guys are already much improved over the first elephant I made. Speaking of which, I'll have to make one of those for myself since I gave the first one to my sisters.

Goodbye from the amigurumi zoo for now!

Looky what I learned how to make!

When my grandmother passed away I inherited her crochet and knitting needles. She had taught me a couple of basic crochet stitches many, many years ago and I promptly did nothing with it. Now that I'm older and feeling more crafty, I really wanted to put her needles to good use and, I suppose, feel a connection to her now that she's gone.

Similarly, my friend Sabrina also inherited her grandmother's needles but she's been doing the crochet/knitting thing for much longer than I have. She even gave me a great fuzzy scarf several years ago that I still use regularly. Well on my last trip out to the bay area several weeks ago she showed me these great crocheted animals she's been making called amigurumi. This is an amigurumi octopus she made me, which her hubby said is appropriate for me because I'm a multi-tasker :)

Well, I'm a sucker for cute. Sabrina re-taught me some crochet stitches (thanks, Miss Sabrina!) and then I was off to decipher the foreign language that is crochet patterns (work 6 sc in first ch. *2sc in next sc, sc in next sc around...huh?!). With the help of some books and Sabrina's suggestion of YouTube lessons, I eventually got it. And looky what I made!



I am so stinkin' proud of my crafty self ;P They're a little rough around the edges, but I think not bad for my beginner efforts. I made the elephant first because he's all one color and I wasn't sure yet how to switch yarn colors mid-project. I gave him to my sisters because the college they went to has an elephant as a mascot. Then I made the penguin for my mom. Sabby's made the penguin for her hubby and a friend of ours and it's a perpetual big hit. I also finished a turtle last night that I haven't taken pics of yet.

This is my newest obsession and I can't wait to make more! Have to get more plastic eyes from the store today and I think I'll be attempting a giraffe next. I think my grandma would have been proud, albeit a little critical too of the aforementioned rough edges, haha! Then she would have told me how to make it better. I like to think she's smiling down at me as I'm working on these.

Miss you, grandma.