Amigurumi Expert???

Hello again Cinnalooneys!

Coraline is complete! It's not without imperfections, obviously, but for my first time making amigurumi and having to come up with my own pattern, its not too bad! I started with the head which ended up being the most time consuming (who knew!). I forgot that I had to attach all of the features before I could put the stuffing in and continue. I also knew that the doll wouldn't look exactly like Coraline so I tried to put as much detail as possible so there was no mistaking what it was supposed to be.

I looked at a lot of different pictures and even watched the movie to make sure that everything was perfect. First were the eyes. I had never noticed that the threads that held the eyes to the doll in the movie were positioned into an X (genius). I made sure to put the thread in the same position and laid one string over the other just like the film version. This took me longer than I'd like to admit (about an hour and a half *ahem*).

Once the eyes were done I had to somehow fashion a nose onto the doll. Coraline's nose is so skinny that I just took the easy way out and threaded some yarn into a triangle shape to get the outline of the nose without having to actually put one on. I did this same technique for the mouth since I didn't know how to do actual lips and I just threaded a bit of pink yarn into a smirk, which is my "go to" mouth for anything that has a face on it.

I realized after I finished the freckles that the actual doll doesn't have symmetrical freckles on her face. On her right she has five, which is what I did for both sides, but on her left she has six which are not positioned in any sort of pattern. Let me tell you that this has been bugging me since I finished the doll, but I certainly wasn't going to undo it and fix this little detail, so I'm just going to have to live with the mistake.

All of that and only the first part of the doll was complete! Can you believe it?!

I won't bore you with too many more details because the arms, legs, torso and skirt were pretty straightforward with, pretty much, the same general shape in different sizes and colors.

Then came the rain jacket.

I want to give credit where credit is due so I actually based the raincoat off of a free pattern I found by Amidorable Crochet. I say based because I couldn't follow the pattern exactly as written since I had a different size crochet hook, but without the pattern I'm not sure I could've pulled it off, so I am grateful to have found it. This raincoat took almost TEN, yes TEN, total hours to finish. I never expected a little raincoat for a doll to take that long. I thought the hood would be the death of me, and it still didn't turn out as great as I would've liked. It was very difficult to get it into the shape of an actual hood, but the doll can still wear the hood, and it looks decent when not on the doll's head, so I'm going to call that a win.

Also, I quickly want to give a thank you to Hooks_On_The_Go for their video on the hair technique. It was super straightforward and a very easy tutorial to follow. I made the hair longer than it needed to be, cut it to the length of Coraline's hair and then glued it to the head. Coraline's hair is really flat so I wanted to use as thin a layer of hair as I possibly could and I think I achieved a pretty good version of it. The dragonfly pin in her hair was made by Andrea about three years ago, which is how long I've been putting off this project...

I hope you enjoyed this venture into what it was like for me to make my first amigurumi. I might try my hand at it again, but hopefully next time I can find some patterns to make it a lot easier.

Long story (kind of) short: am I an expert? Not even close, but my niece fell in love with the doll the moment she laid her eyes on it, so I feel like it was worth every painstaking moment and hand cramp (carpel tunnel anyone?).

I would absolutely love to hear all of your comments on the final product, so please send them in via Instagram, Facebook or email!

Until next time, stay crafty!