Amigurumi Amish Animal Puzzle Balls!!

Amigurumi Amish Animal Puzzle Balls! Amigurumi Amish Animal Puzzle Balls!
Amigurumi Amish Animal Puzzle Balls! Amigurumi Amish Animal Puzzle Balls!
Amigurumi Amish Animal Puzzle Balls! Amigurumi Amish Animal Puzzle Balls!
Amigurumi Amish Animal Puzzle Balls! Amigurumi Amish Animal Puzzle Balls!

Ahem.... Good to finally get that out of my system...

The amigurumi Amish animal puzzle balls (or amamani for short) are exclusively designed by Dedri Uys of Look At What I Made. I have blogged about her patterns many times before - I can't help it. They're great! The animal puzzle ball patterns themselves are available from a variety of sources. The free ones such as the plain ball, or Olive the Octopus, can be found on her website, while the paid ones can be found in downloadable PDF form from Annies, or paperback form from Amazon. Apparently I'm crazy, as I bought the digital download but then decided that I wanted the paper copy of the patterns anyway. (Or maybe they're just that good!)



Currently, I have completed the turtle ball - who we are calling Atuin - for my daughter, and am partway through the dinosaur for a friends' nephew. These patterns are actually much simpler than I originally thought - so much so that I can already complete the basic puzzle ball pattern from memory, without the book to hand. They don't take long, either. Or at least they wouldn't, if I wasn't juggling my nursing daughter as well as my crochet!



The yarn for this project came from my new local yarn store - Westcliff Wools. I had originally planned on using left over yarn from my crochet Christmas jumper four years ago, but I couldn't find it. I assumed that I had used it in my Fugly blanket, and after I had been to the yarn store and bought new yarn I found the original yarn in my wardrobe. Ooops! Still, it spurred me to sort my yarn out into colour coded bags so that I would always know where everything was in the future!
The yarn used for the turtle was a chunky weight yarn - the pattern called for an Aran, but there weren't enough suitable colours at the store in that weight. I did um and ah for a while, weighing up the choice of a funky coloured or a larger turtle, and as much as my friends were pushing me for bright colours, I had my heart set on more realistic colours - well, I have to use my degree somewhere, right? To that end, I left the store with three 100g balls of King Cole Big Value chunky, one eack of Bayleaf, Caramel, and Koala for the turtle, as well as two balls of King Cole Fashion Aran for the dinosaur - one each in Stonewash and Hint of Denim.

The pattern is pretty easy to work up - sometimes in the round and sometimes with rows for shaping - and in total it took me about six days, on and off (though mostly off!) That said, I did get a little confused when trying to navigate the book - Rather than step by step, the turtle pattern starts off with "Make x number of wedges from this page", and "crochet this number of lids from this page", before continuing to give the instructions for the head, legs, tail, etc. In addition, the back leg follows on directly from the front flipper - something that took me quite a while to figure out. The flipper ends with "do not finish off", but you flip over the page and there's a new heading and you're back to "row 1". However, I eventually worked it out, and once I did I had no further issues, and overall I enjoyed the pattern enough that I do plan on making several more. I definitely would like to make the Octopus, and I think the basic ball pattern would make a great gift for future babies.

Except my baby, apparently. The turtle didn't impress her... Maybe my friends were right and I should have made it more colourful?



Ah well, maybe she'll grow into it?