Crocheting has been around for centuries and is seen pretty much all around the world. Naturally, there are different techniques and ways of making them. While I did touch upon my personal journey with this craft and gave a quick rundown of the techniques used, amigurumi was left a bit on the sidelines.
What is Amigurumi?
It is basically the Japanese style of crocheting stuffed dolls and objects. They usually utilize normal crochets, such as single crochets, and a basic magic knot at the beginning. If these terms mean nothing to you, just hit up our beginner’s guide to get an idea.
What makes it so different?
Granny squares are fun and all but with the basic understanding of how to make the shapes, you’ll quickly discover that with them you can literally crochet anything! Once one gets the hang of it, a little figure can be whipped up within a day. If you make your own pattern (it is really not that hard once you understand the basics), you can binge something on Netflix and before the end of the season, you get yourself a little something.
One example of this is the Bernie Sanders’ photo that went viral. A photo of him sitting on a chair with mittens and a warm winter jacket caught the world by storm and one lady from Texas, Tobey King to be precise, whipped up the little woolen figure, which she auctioned off for about $20,000.
Many other public figures have received the crochet treatment and their patterns can be found on the internet either for free or for a small fee on pages like Etsy. Remember Tiger King? Even the "protagonist" of that Netflix docu-series got an amigurumi version of himself.
So many ideas to explore!
With the help of the internet and the pandemic keeping folks at home, people have come up with interesting ideas. Lately, there has been a push for making amigurumi cat couches! Thanks to their basic shape, many have taken to it and Pinterest is flooded with free patterns to explore.
Some like to make woolen food for the kids to play with or make a full cast of their favorite video game, from Pokemon to Among Us.