If you follow my blog at all, you may vaguely recall that back in September 2014 I learned to crochet. From those first simple crocheted squares, I made several mug cosies, cowls (mine and Granny's) and some simple dish clothes for stocking stuffers. I also had a go at crocheting a wine bottle tote but found it a bit too challenging at the time so decided to revisit that pattern at a later date once I'd had a little more experience under my belt.
However, if you want to do any of the really, really cool and cute stuff with crochet, you really have to learn to master crocheting in the round. I mean, seriously, you have to. And that's a bit daunting when you first start out, because it takes a lot of counting and a different level of spatial orientation ability.
Anyway, one weekend I was completely bored out of my gourd and I decided it was high time I tackled this crocheting in the round. Primarily because I wanted to learn how to make those adorable amigurumi toys. I mean, be honest, how could anyone not want to make these? So I searched through my Pinterest crochet pins and found what I felt would be the absolute basics to get me started: baby monsters.
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| OMG, need to make these! |
Now, my original pin took me to a very nice photo-assisted tutorial, but I still found it tricky to fully understand what I was doing and more importantly (especially as I'm a visual learner), to see where I should be hooking. So, back to YouTube I went and to my great joy, I stumbled upon a video tutorial version of these exact baby monsters - yeah! Want to make these yourself? Here's the video I used:
The video is half an hour long and goes through making the monsters from start to finish, including adding the faces (safety eyes, stitching features), stuffing and closing. I felt it was well explained throughout and the one or two times something wasn't directly shown, I was able to figure it out with minimal trial and error. And after an afternoon of excited stitching, I had this little fellow completed:
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| My Squishie! |
Isn't it adorable? Squee! I just can't help but squish it every time I see it. I didn't have any safety eyes so I used small buttons, which incidentally were originally white and I coloured them black with a Sharpie marker.
Once you get the basic process down, these whip up super quickly and easily. In fact, I thought they would be the perfect little end of school year treat for my students so now I'm busily crocheting 23 of them! I'm also thinking I'll make a few extras for my classroom as fidgets for students that need to move while listening.
