Crocheted Toys

my recently finished crochet projects 

Lately I have been doing a lot of crocheting. It is not my favorite craft as far as the look of it, but there are a lot of things that I like about crocheting. I like the fact that I can do it anywhere, I am not tied to one place like I am with sewing. I can do it while watching a movie with my husband or while nursing my baby, though the baby is getting to the reaching and grabbing stage so that's not working quite as well lately, or I can take it with me if I am going somewhere away from home. The other thing I like about crochet is that most projects work up pretty quick. I like projects that I can finish quickly, if they take to long I start to get bored with them. For instance, I like the look of knitted baby sweaters better than crocheted but it takes me forever to knit anything so I prefer crocheting.
When I first decided to crochet a little I saw a crochet dinosaur amigirumi pattern. I had never made amigirumi before but I found that I really enjoyed it. My first three projects were the baby triceratops, the octopus, and the little duckie. I really liked the little triceratops, the only thing that I didn't do was the eyebrows because I couldn't figure out how to put them on and I thought he was cute without them. The octopus legs were supposed to be knitted but I just crocheted long tubes instead. I embroidered the eyes on both instead of using safety eyes since I didn't want to buy the eyes and since they are kids toys I figured that the embroidery was safe, it couldn't be pulled off like buttons or something.

I enjoyed making the toys so I decided to make a few more. I found a couple of websites that have lots of cute free patterns. I like lionbrand.com though you do have to register in order to get the patterns. I thought they had a lot of cute patterns. Another website that has a ton of patterns is crochetpatterncentral.com. They have a lot but they don't have pictures so you may have to look at a lot that you don't like before finding what you do. The caterpillar, the frog prince and the dog in the picture are all lion brand patterns. The yellow bear was from a free pattern that I picked up from Michaels, the little tiny bear pattern and the turtle pattern I found through crochet pattern central. Though all of the patterns called for worsted weight yarn all of the toys in the second picture except the turtle are made with sport weight since that is what I had the most of. I just followed the pattern using a smaller hook so that the stitches would still be tight.