Mo-Mo the Octopus

I have a Christening coming up, so I've taken a break from human amigurumi to make this cute cephalopod:

I present to you Mo-Mo designed by Tamara Bower-Snow for Roxycraft. 

Mo-Mo is made with 4ply yarn and a 2.5mm crochet hook. For the eyes, I used black felt attached with a felting needle (no tedious stitching!). The highlights were a bit tricky, small bits of felt break apart under a felting needle. Instead I embroidered two French Knots and then used the felting needle to flatten them to the eyes.  

New Amigurumi

I was looking back over my amigurumi collection and I realised two things.

1: It is time I made my own pattern and

2: I really don't make many female amigurumi.

Here is the solution. My first ever designed from scratch amigurumi:

The most kick ass character I could think of: Imperator Furiosa.  For those of you who haven't seen Mad Max, stop reading and go see it now.  (No seriously, go now.  It's got explosions AND a story. You don't get that with your average action movie.)

For now I'm off to crochet another character.  Who to choose next?

Zeke and Alice

A couple of years a go I worked on an animated TV series called Dogstar. It is a futuristic tale of space, plucky kids, ruthless bad-guys and a lost ship full of dogs. I still can't believe how lucky I was to get a job animating a science fiction cartoon. It actually had spaceships in it, and robots! Two of my favorite things. Once I even got to animate one of the characters knitting.

I wish I could show you some of the stuff I did, but alas, the second series has not been shown on TV yet. So all the footage is under wraps until Channel 9 finds a gap in their schedule. You can check out Series 1 (I think it's on DVD), I didn't work on that one though. What I can show you is my crochet versions of the characters. Here are Zeke and Alice the robot pilots of the missing Dogstar.

One of my favorite characters to work with was Zeke. He is convinced he is a human, not a robot, which means he gets to do a heap of fun stuff. I made this doll to take along to the Christmas Party. We were supposed to dress up as our favorite character, but I don't really like dressing up.

Alice is the other pilot of the Dogstar. She is much more sensible and constantly tries to keep Zeke in line. I have to say working with Alice was a lot of fun too.

If you want to find out more about the show visit the official Dogstar site. You should also check out Scott Vanden Bosch's blog. He designed all the characters for Dogstar, as well as directing the series.

Photo shoot with U2

Just before Easter I was lucky enough to attend a photo shoot with U2. Okay so it wasn't the actual rock band, just my crochet version. But there was a camera, lighting and a set.

One of my animator friends, Justin, is also a photographer. He agreed to take some more photos of crochet for me. I think he was influenced by the fact he can now tell all his friends he's photographed U2.



And if that wasn't cool enough here are photos of the individual band members.









And one more of the complete band, this time with guitars as well. I especially like the way Bono is gazing moodily into the distance.



I think the photo's have turned out really well. Never have 3 inch high dolls looked so awesome. To check out more of Justin's photos visit his blog. He can photograph real people too.

Something New.

There has definitely been a Doctor Who theme to this blog. It isn't all I've been working on. In real life I'm a free-lance animator. Recently the first project I ever worked on came on TV. I was so excited to see my work on TV for the first time that I had to crochet the characters from the series.



Here they are the lead characters from Wakkaville. To see what the real characters look like you'll need to be watching channel 9 at 11.30 on Saturday morning.

Thanks again to Justin for the photo.

A Complete Set of Doctor Who Amigurumi

Here they are at last the complete set of Doctor Who re-generations. I know most of you will have seen these already. But now, courtesy of Justin I have shiny new photos, that make these guys look much cooler than they do in real life.

First Doctor - Willam Hartnell



Second Doctor - Patrick Troughton



Third Doctor - Jon Pertwee



Fourth Doctor - Tom Baker



Fifth Doctor - Peter Davison



Sixth Doctor - Colin Baker



Seventh Doctor - Sylvester McCoy



Eighth Doctor - Paul McGann



Ninth Doctor - Christopher Eccleston



Tenth Doctor - David Tennant



Eleventh Doctor - Matt Smith



A huge thank-you to Justin Foo for taking the awesome photographs. For more of his work go to his blog justinfoophotography.com/blog.

Doctor Who

The plan is to crochet miniature versions of all 11 regenerations of Doctor Who. I know it's been done before and there are heaps of patterns on the internet. But they haven't been done by me.

Anyway here are the first five Doctors.


First Doctor - William Hartnell



He's supposed to have checked pants, but the check pattern I made up came out as diagonal lines. I think the stripes are distinguished.

Second Doctor - Patrick Trouton



The first doctor to be in colour. His pants are supposed to be tartan. To do it properly I would need to make a much bigger doll. Instead I just used the different colours in alternating rows. I guess you could call it pixelated tartan.


Third Doctor - Jon Pertwee



He still needs some neck detail. Also, although this regeneration was partial to capes I don't think he ever wore one exactly like this. By the way, curly hair takes ages to sew.

Fourth Doctor - Tom Baker



This is where things got complicated. Making the head, body and jacket was easy enough. The curly hair was tricky, but I only had to do the bits around the hat. What took most of the time was the scarf. I miniaturized the pattern from *the Doctor Who scarf website*. I had to repeat the pattern twice as I messed up and the scarf wasn't long enough. It took three evenings to make, but I think it was worth it.

Fifth Doctor - Peter Davidson



Another tricky one. Mostly because I made the coat the wrong colour to start with. On the up side it meant I could practice putting the red edging on.