I've made a terrible discovery ...

I can't believe I'm typing this, but it is true, I've made a terrible, shocking discovery ... I like crochet.

I've always seen myself as a knitter, and been happy as such. I've dabbled in crochet, but I've never warmed to it, and it's never come close to replacing my love of knitting. But, over the last month, I've discovered that there is a part of crochet that I do like - Amigurumi. Which, according to Wikipedia is the Japanese art of crocheting/knitting small stuffed animals and anthropomorphic creatures. The word coming from a combination of the Japanese words ami, meaning crocheted or knitted, and nuigurum, meaning stuffed doll.

Fascinating as this all is, I'm getting away from the point of this post, which is to confess to my changed feelings towards crochet. The cause is my brother, who is very difficult to buy gifts for, however, he has always liked my handmade gifts, or at least pretends to. So, I was browsing Ravelry looking for inspiration when I came across loads of amigurumi based on the Zelda games which he loves. But, they were crocheted and the patterns looked complex. Not wishing to bite off more than I could chew, I scaled down by first attempt from complex Zelda figures to more simple Mario ones.

Meet chain-chomp and BobOmb; I think they are quite cute and, yes, I enjoyed making them. The patterns are free ones from Linda Potts, and are available here. I filled BobOmb and the ball of the chain chomp with a mix of toy stuffing and popcorn kernals, so they could work as paper weights, or door stops - and I believe they are now residing in my brother's office at University.

It turned out, once I started on amigurumi I was hooked (pardon the pun). The lovely L who I work with is a big fan of Despicable Me and especially the Minions, and it turns out there are a lot of patterns for crocheted minions - I think you can see where this is going.

If possible, these are even cuter! These are another free pattern, which you can find here, and I made them from aran weight yarn from Tiger (which is rapidly becoming my favourite shop). So there we are four crochet items in under a month! I don't think I'm in danger of being totally won over to crochet, and I can't think that my new love will extend much beyond amigutumi, but based on these project I'll certainly be whipping up some more little figures. The minions were fun, not only to make but also to photograph.

I did have a bit of trouble with the light, it was about 4.30 when I was photographing them, and the shades of night were already falling. This lead the boyfriend to spring into action and construct a light-box, which he has been talking about doing for a couple of weeks.

And L's little minion was the first model to test out the new photographic suite.