Green Guy

I had been working on a piece called sibling rivalry for about 2 weeks when I finally gave up. The piece was going to be two bunnies giving each other black eyes. After finishing the first bunny’s head and body I started to work on the face and I could not get it right. Then I realized that I did not even like the idea all that much. So the bunny got dumped into the UFO corner of my stash awaiting the day I can think of something to do with a faceless white bunny.

So I started drawing out this little guy that I had in my head. I had this cute image of a big overbite and huge white teeth forming a grin. I wanted to make the toy child safe so the eyes, toes and fingernails are safety eyes. Also this is my first time stuffing with shredded foam. For right now I am calling him Green Guy until I come up with something better or the child he is for gives him a better name.

Look at that grin!

Safety eye toes. Eyes are not just for the head any more.

I hope I am not the only one who gets excited about finishing their last crochet stitch only to realize that there is about 3 hours of finishing work left to do.

Original sketch and the start of the head.

Pac-Man!!!!

Around January this year a friend of mine hinted that he would like me to make him a Pac-Man toy. I ended up designing him not only packman but also a full set of ghost to go with it. After showing off on Craftster and Flickr many people begged for the pattern. So here is is at long last the Crocheted Pac-Man brought to you free thanks to the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial- NoDerivs 2.5 License.

download pattern

Experimenting with joints

This year has been full of toys for me so far. I am also finding myself drawn to making toys with joints. I have found Dritz Doll Joints work well with crocheted toys. The axel of the joint makes slip’s easily between stitches. I used them in my Softie Awards entry Kitsune.

Now I have started work on a pair of bunnies and I wanted to have their joints be exposed so I started working on adapting traditional button joints to crochet. I decided it might be easiest for me to just make buttonholes and line them up rather then trying to sew the button thru the legs. While it did not occur to me at the time I really love how this gives me the ability to remove legs and arms at will. I think this will make attaching the head much simpler.

I really like the way the yellow buttons stand out with the blue thread.