So everything on here is my design, start to finish. That takes a while, and pattern making isn't for everyone. But say you want to free hand an idea that has popped into your head... where to start?
Before we get to actually free-handing, let's back up a bit. This is not something you can pull off the same day you look at a crochet hook for the first time. For amigurimi (making 3D figures out of crochet) specifically, and also for crochet in general, there's a lot to learn. Making projects using patterns that have already been published is great for figuring out the basics, techniques, and most importantly, shapes and direction changes.
Now this is not to say you go, make something someone else designed, change the colors and it's yours. What it does mean is that figuring out the way a structure works is much easier if you have a blueprint you already know works. My first amigurimi was a bear commissioned by a friend, by a creator called Ahooka. Her design was fantastic, her pattern stylishly put together and clearly explained. Those details were very important to me later - I've worked with some patterns out there that are barely explained (and so not beginner friendly) or very oddly set up, making them difficult to follow. More specifically though, that bear taught me about the difference between "right side" and "wrong side" crochet, how to attach limbs both open ended
and closed to a body piece, and it was a great example for proportions.
There were two more pieces that I made that taught me very important lessons - a dinosaur plushie from stringydingding.com taught me more about attaching parts and continuing as a whole (and inadvertently, more about right side / wrong side, as I initially did the project inside out), and a succulent from Michael Cao's book Knot Monsters started teaching me about shapes.
Now at this point, I understood things a little better but I still wanted some reference when it came to figuring out my own designs. I had years before lucked into finding an out of print fiber arts reference guide at a second hand book store - Reader's Digest's Complete Guide to Needlework from 1979. That is one of the best starter books I've ever seen, but since it's long since stopped being printed, it can be a hard one to find. It also has dated designs, but since it explains so much about the nitty gritty of them that never bothered me.
Amigurimi, however, it does not have. Two books I spoiled myself with last year were fantastic for filling in the gaps in my knowledge, and I still flip through if I can't quite figure out a shape - Crochet Cafe by Lauren Espy, and Edward's Crochet Imaginarium by Kerry Lord, both beautifully put together and well explained. Again, this is not to take those designs and call them mine.
"Then what are you doing with them?" you might ask. Learning. When it comes to crochet, there are only so many ways of doing things when it comes to getting the shape you want. "Right side"/"wrong side" make a huge difference in getting the result you want, for one thing. So when I'm figuring out a new piece, I look around. I look at pintrest, I look at the patterns I have, specifically for similar shapes. I had to learn how to make tubes when it came to limbs on amigurimi - and that's where my start for my Potion Vials came from. I learned the difference adding another row can make to a shape, by working on the bear from Ahooka and the flower pots in Knot Monsters - and by playing with where I added a row without increases, I eventually ended up with my Potion Bottle Dice Bag. I then realized I'd done both with "wrong side" out, so I went back and tested them with "right side" out, and in a few different combinations of the two ... only to find out that all my testers liked the original version best. Figures.
Then there was another hurtle - all the tips and tricks I was finding for making nice, neat lines at color change points were for "right side" - so they didn't work right for "wrong side", i.e. everything I had designed so far. Here's where another bit came in. All the patterns I mentioned are right side out, going under both loops. Decreases and color changes are especially noticeable if not done right, and I had both in my patterns, so that was a bit brutal for my designs. But all the tutorials had something they played with to achieve better effects - they changed if you were stitching around both loops of the stitch underneath, the inside loop, or the outside loop. Now a lot of tutorials out there call the inside and outside loops front and back loops respectively, and while that works with a flat object like a scarf, with 3D objects (for me at least) I find it easier to understand if I'm looking for a loop that is on the outside of the object or the inside, especially as sometimes I switch the direction I'm working. Experimenting with which loop I used is how I ended up with neat color changes, in spite of using the "wrong side".
So all that's great, but how do we use it? Time for the object lesson! So my example today is my Polarbear Penguin, a homebrew cousin of the Owlbear common to fantasy games. After I made the bear off of Ahooka's design, I had a friend request a small bear instead. I used what I learned from that bear and from my experiments with proportions to make my own bear pattern, which is much smaller and has completely different stitch proportions. Because you can only make a shape so many ways, certain things are similar - I used the original bear to go "ok, this goes out this far if I increase with x many single crochet inbetween. That's much wider than I want. When it was increase to this point, how wide did it get?". That might seem like only so much help, but you'd be surprised how much of a difference it can make.
So by the time a discussion with my D&D group ended with the brain-child of the Polarbear Penguin, I had made my own bear design, and it was about the size I wanted my new creation to be. So that was my base. I learned about making something of a cone shape from the tail of the dinosaur from stringydingding (again, only so many ways to make a shape), so I made a tiny cone for the beak... and then added a safety nose to it to bring it a little more towards bear than penguin. I mapped out the color changes using the small bear I'd made for a friend - it was a pride bear, so there were already plenty of changes in there. When I originally made the pride bear, I ended up dividing it into equal pieces based on the number of colors I wanted. This can work to a point, but some parts of any figure will be unseen when it is standing, so in the end I made a second small bear and put in pins to mark where I wanted to change colors, then counted down from round 1 to figure out where that was in the pattern. (Blog post about reading your rows here!)
So now I had color changes figured out, an applique round piece to finish out the belly and make it rounder, and the body part done. Ears I also learned from other pieces I worked on, so those got plopped on along with the beak and tail. The Feet I made by seeing how few of
stitches I could do and still get a tube - anything round starts with six stitches in a magic ring usually, so I simply didn't increase to make it any bigger. The little flipper arms? I learned how to make fin shapes when I made the succulent - instead of evenly placing your increases, put them on opposite sides of your shape, and only in those two spots. TA-DA! My Polarbear Penguin was now complete.
I realize there's a lot here, so in summary, When figuring out how to make a figure:
break your figure down into basic shapes
find patterns that use those shapes / tutorials on those shapes
make a few of them until you understand how the shape works, moves, can be changed, and can be joined to other shapes
use your new knowledge to experiment and make your own designs!
It can take a while, it's not for everyone, but when it's done and you make someone's eyes light up (even your own) with joy, it's so incredibly worth it!
Questions? Leave a comment, I'd love to talk about it!
Tutorials on different shapes are coming soon!
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