This is the dolly I made for my sisters baby, the nursery is lemons and whites and dolly is sitting waiting patiently for my niece to be born...17 days to go till the due date....I'm so excited!!!
Anyway, back to the monkey pattern, the seller was dead right, the pattern was not good, the only part that was right on the head was round 2 3 and 4. The body was far too small for the head, the arms were made for pipe cleaners to go in, but I loved the thumbs.
So my mission began, I wanted to make a monkey that was cute like my dolly, soft and snuggly and the same sort of size. I began to crochet, after every round I wrote down what I did, but then later on I realized that it wasn't going right, had to undo it, re-do it and keep making sure I wrote everything down. It took me 4 hours just to get the head right and it's only the size of a satsuma!!! The body was going to be easy because all I did was add a few extra rounds to my dolly pattern so it could be a separate part, then I spent a while getting the eye patches in proportion to the rest of the head. The ears came next and then the arms/legs with those cute little thumbs, a tail and a tummy patch.....my first monkey pattern :)
If you would like to buy the pattern for a dollar, then visit this link to my shop http://www.etsy.com/listing/78748442/my-first-monkey-rattle-crochet-amigurumi?utm_source=OpenGraph&utm_medium=PageTools&utm_campaign=Share&show_panel=true
I also have some other patterns in my dollar sale :)
I'm sure everyone begins with this is my first blog just so you know they're complete novices and haven't really got a clue what they're doing, but secretly they all want to get noticed for whatever reason they blog about!!
So I want to chat about my crocheting, my lovely addictive pleasure that I really can't imagine not having in my life now it's here :)
It all began two years ago, on my 40th birthday and my youngest sister taught me how to make a granny square and I was hooked!! I wanted to make my stitches look as neat as my sisters, but I also wanted to see what else I could make, but this is where my problems began.....I did a google search for some crochet patterns and found some that were for free, cool, I thought, but it was to be short lived because I couldn't understand them, sc, dc and hdc, what were they talking about?
So before I could begin to make hats and scarves, I needed to learn a new language and all these different stitches (sts), but I loved my new hobby so much it gave me the incentive to learn something new and I had the advantage of YouTube and this great crocheter called Teresa, she does things in slow motion and talks you through every step, an excellent teacher as far as I'm concerned.
So I'm ready, learned all my stitches plus how to increase and decrease and downloaded a free pattern, and it didn't work!!! Hmm...why didn't it work? I now know it is because when you're crocheting away, happy in your own little world of creativity, you forget to write down every stitch, but more on that later.
Eventually I began to realise that most of the free patterns had faults, and that people owned the copyright and didn't want you to publish the pattern anywhere else, but they didn't include a way of contacting them to say, "I love your item you made, but I'm going wrong here, can you help me?" So I have a heap of patterns that never worked. I was beginning to feel that all I was ever going to make was blankets, I do like them, but I'm a creative person and what I really wanted to make was a dolly, I now know that was very ambitious of me, but I just wanted a little dolly. But these were very long, complicated patterns and they just wasn't the dolly I had in my head.
I carried on crocheting things like booties and decided to have a go at selling some bits on Etsy...I didn't do very well because the competition is amazing on there and it's mostly an American site, so the postage is monsterous, but I did get spotted by and English woman, who wanted to buy my things and sell them on her site. I was really pleased.....that's when I designed my first granny hat and a cardigan for premature babies.... but that relationship was to be short lived because she wanted to pay slave labour and I'm not being funny, but crocheting although is a hobby, it does require many skills and I didn't like getting peanuts for my work, then discover other people selling things in my design. I'd had my pattern copied!!!
I didn't crochet a thing for a whole week after that, and I normally fit in at least an hour a day, I was very sad.
I looked around again for something different to crochet and found a lovely pattern from gourmet crochet to make some little amigurumi pets, this led me to designing my Dudes 'n' Dudettes pattern, my main photo. But I still wanted to make a dolly, plus my sister announced she was having another baby, a little girl, so I looked on Etsy and found a little fairy pattern, she wasn't exactly what I wanted, but I was confident enough with my skills that I could alter the pattern. I did and made a beautiful 8 inch dolly which my sister adores. then I stumbled across a site selling some baby safe rattles, so I made another dolly for her with a little rattle inside the head. Plus my friends and work mates have fallen in love with my dolly's, they are selling well and I've still got six on order!!!
But as usual there's always a little challenge in life to face, another of my friends told me when she was 6 weeks pregnant that she didn't want to know the sex of the baby before it was born, so that meant I couldn't make her a dolly. I did know though that my friend is monkey mad, so I thought I'd make her a monkey and began searching for the perfect monkey pattern.....and failed :(
No matter how hard I searched, I just didn't like the patterns, they were ugly and not at all cute and cuddly to give to a brand new baby, but fortune was on my side.......in the form of an original monkey pattern for sale on Ebay. The seller stated that the pattern could not be understood, that it didn't state what hook size to use, that they couldn't use it and all they could say was that you needed yarn to make it and under no circumstances would you get a refund. Nothing beats honesty!!!
