Knittin' Crap: Cute In Any Language!

Last weekend I made my first amigurumi off a Japanese-language pattern. It was a monumental feat, but I pulled it off:



Yes, thank you, I was amazed with myself, also.

For an encore, I decided to move up in complexity from two crocheted parts to... a lot more.


... which becomes...


(Gratuitous action shots with cats clearly not in action:)

I also made this little baby seal. The baby seal has a few technical problems. There were weird short rows to do the snout shaping. I sat for about 20 minutes looking at the chart, saying, "um, that row ended here, so why does the next row start all the way over there?" and then decided I should just try it. My snout ended up all puckered, unlike the pattern photo, so I either didn't do it quite right or just not very well. I'm not sure if actually being able to read Japanese might or might not have helped in that situation, but it's a moot point since I can't and staring at it for 20 minutes didn't magically make the small amount of text pointing at the snout make sense. Oh, and the yarn I used for the grey nose was too thick, but it was all I could find, so that probably didn't help. Also, my seal's belly isn't as flat as it should be, so he tips over onto his nose. Oh, well. He's still really cute. I just hope the bunny costume I make will fit. (I'm not joking. The book has a bunny costume pattern for the seal, and I am going to make it. I think I'll pass on the baby chick costume, though. No, I'm serious. How many costumes does a baby seal need? He's not Elton John.)

And let's not discuss why, but I've also set up to make two garments from Japanese patterns. Actually, the first one is a tunic I'm sort of designing on the fly from a Japanese crochet block pattern. (Yeah, good luck on that one.) The second one is from this book's cover pattern, if you can see it under the glare. I'll need even more luck on that one.


Oh, I almost forgot to give Pandora her shout-out for helping me by keeping the pattern book open to the page I needed. Actually, this photograph shows the one time she managed to keep the book open without lying on top of the page I needed.