Indian Holi Festival Elephant

The Indian Holi Festival is also known as the Festival of Colour and is celebrated at the beginning of March.  It is a celebration of spring and new life, as well as love, repairing relationships and new starts.

The beautifully decorated and painted elephants that form part of the festival have always caught my eye and I decided to make an amigurumi version as a birthday present for a friend. 

I collect all kinds of fabric, ribbon, buttons etc from car boot fairs and charity shops to use in my amigurumi making, and I dug out my collection of beautiful Indian-style motifs.

I started with a basic elephant (with small high-set ears, naturally as it's an Indian elephant), and then made a blanket and head decoration for it from bright cotton fabric, gold fabric and ribbons.  I'm delighted with how beautifully he came out!

The saddle blanket is made from layers of fabric & ribbon, with a gold ribbon girth, gold braid edging hand sewn on and Indian decorations.

 It is fully removable, via a hidden press-stud:

The headdress is made from a heart shaped and a flower Indian motif and pink ribbon.

His outfit is completed by ribbons round his legs and some Indian bells around his neck.

He also has the roundest, cutest rear end ever!

A few more pictures:

It was very hard to give him away, but my friend loved him as much as I do :)

Dogs & Their Mini-Me Versions!

I am thrilled to have been sent these incredible photographs of Troy, Molly and Penny posed with their amigurumi versions. I can only imagine how hard it was to tire out these energetic little dogs enough to get them to sit still!

Normally I'd add photos like these to the original post, but I love these pictures so much that I felt they deserved their own post!  Enjoy!

Christmas Terriers

A very dear friend of mine commissioned me to make three amigurumi dogs as a special Christmas present for her sister.  The catch - they were to be mini versions of three real dogs - those belonging to her sister of course!  The dogs might be small; various types of Jack Russell terrier, but they have huge personalities.  I have had the honour of meeting two of them, and they are wonderful characters. The challenge to capture them in amigurumi form was on!

 Meet Troy, Penny and Molly!

My friend sent me lots of photographs so I could see all the markings from as many angles as possible.

The first thing I did was work out a general shape & from that formed a basic pattern.  This would then need modifying to capture the unique appearance of each dog, so I sketched each dog showing their distinctive features as clearly as possible.

 I spent some time working out the best way to show their markings.  The problem with doing it by changing stitch colour (however neat and careful) is that unlike knitting crochet stitches aren't symmetrical and don't line up perfectly neatly above each other.  After a few unsatisfactory attempts I decided to embroider the 'eyebrow' and shoulder pale patches rather then try to do them purely using colour changes.


Once I was happy with my plan I got on and made them.  They took a few days each, but I think they came out pretty well :)

Troy

Troy is a very handsome boy with striking Rottweiler/Doberman-type colouring.

The main challenges with him were to get the facial markings correct, and to get his white bib the right shape.

The white bib was made using basic colour change as part of the otherwise black body, with a little embroidery over the top to neaten the edges.   The shoulder markings and "eyebrows" were embroidered on after the amigurumi was sewn together.  Troy has flopped-over tops to his ears.

Troy also has a beautiful long tail with a brown stripe underneath running most of the length.  I embroidered this on at the end as colour changes would not have resulted in a neat stripe.

 

Molly

Molly is mostly white, but has a little beige patch over her left eye which I carefully created using colour change, and perfect brown flopped over ears.

 
She is also a longer-haired dog, so to achieve this I used a wire pet grooming brush on the body, paying particular attention to her tail, chest, belly and cheeks.   It needs to be one of the very fine brushes with bent wires, for stripping loose hairs, or it won't work properly.

This is always scary to do but the final result is worth it!  I suggest practicing on a scrap piece of crochet if you haven't tried it before, and some yarns work better than others too.  Experimentation is the key.  Once you get the hang of it you can make some super fluffy things!

Penny

Penny was the hardest of the three to make.  She has quite complex markings, including a lovely speckled/dappled coat and a near-perfect brown circle on her back.  She also has huge upright ears.

As with Troy, I chose to use embroidery for her facial markings.

I made a brown crocheted circle which I sewed in place on her back (as using colour change would not have been neat enough) and I used a fine-point brown Sharpie permanent marker to create the dappled look.

I eagerly, if nervously, awaited news on Christmas Day to hear how they were received.  I need not have worried - my friend's sister loved them, and even the dogs themselves seemed to like them.  Molly apparently started holding 'conversations' with them on the shelf. Awwww.  :)

Bruce the Deer

 I love doing commissions - I get to make some very interesting characters - and the most recent one was no exception.  A friend of mine is a huge fan of the Animal Crossing series of games (as am I) and requested her favourite character - Bruce the Deer.  She sent me some pictures, including some screenshots from the Nintendo 3DS version of the game and I was sure I could do a good job.

After a rummage in my *ahem* extensive stash, I found the perfect DK yarns - a dusky slate-blue and a paler version for his head stripes and muzzle.

Using the pictures as reference, I began by making his head first as that contained the most detail and would set the scale for the whole figure.   The head stripes were then made as one separate piece that was sewn in position, followed by his muzzle.  His nose was embroidered using a small amount of black yarn and his little smiling mouth with one unraveled thin strand of the same yarn, using back-stitch for the lines and couch-stitch to shape it into the curve.

His eyes were made using 6mm safety eyes and ovals of white felt - I took a while to decide if I wanted to give him eyelids, as in some of the pictures, but he didn't look so cute with them so I make the decision to leave him wide-eyed.  I think it was the correct one :)

His ears were crocheted as slightly round-based pyramids, flattened, folded over at the base and sewn into shape.  The detail was then added with orange and yellow felt hot-glued carefully in place.

His body was made to scale based on the size of his head and sewn in place.  I then made his little legs and rather than stuffing them which would have been unsatisfactory as they were so thin I put dark blue pipe-cleaner inside to give the necessary rigidity to allow him to stand up straight, and to be invisible through the stitches.

 His arms also have dark blue pipe-cleaners in them so he can be posed as desired.

His little outfit was made from felt.  His undershirt in red, sewn on at the back, and then the little black sleeveless jacket over the top, open at the front.  His 4 shiny buttons were made from gold brads (paper-fasteners) which had the backs removed with snips and then were carefully hot-glued in place.

His horns were the hardest part.  I originally made them from felt but struggled to make them look right - they didn't have the right curve and weren't large enough.  They looked like horns, but not like Bruce's horns.

 I eventually removed them and remade them using a 1mm crochet hook and pale yellow embroidery cotton.  Fiddly as anything but very effective.  I then used a single strand of dusky grey-blue embroidery cotton to back-stitch the spiral around them as a finishing touch.

The finished product came out really well and exactly as I had hoped.  Really pleased :)

The best part of a commission, the part I enjoy the most, is handing it over to the new owner, and this one was no exception.  She was delighted and later posted this lovely picture on Twitter of Bruce with her 3DS running Animal Crossing and showing his virtual self.

Please note: The character Bruce and the game Animal Crossing are owned by and copyright Nintendo.