Claude the Octopus - Finished!

 

I finally finished up Claude the Octopus.  All I had left to do were the eyes, and they were incredibly simple to work up, although stuffing them and sewing them to the head were a little bit challenging.  Getting the backs on to the safety eyes wasn’t easy either.  Getting the tension right on the tentacles was the most challenging part, and I was not entirely successful.  There are gaps in the crochet that you can see the stuffing through.  But not bad for my first attempt at Amigurumi.  He now hangs out on top of a lamp in our living room, keeping a sharp eye on things.

Pattern:  Claude the Octopus by Kate E. Hancock

Yarn:  Adrienne Vittadini Dianna

Hook:  4 mm (G)

Claude - Body Done!

I actually got the body, and even a couple of the tentacles, done over my Thanksgiving holiday.  In fact I worked on it so much and so intently that I ended up with really bad muscle cramps in my right arm and right hand and both of my shoulders.  It didn’t really hit me until I stopped working on it one evening, and then it was pretty bloody awful.  Needless to say I set this aside for a little while to let things recover and when I picked it back up I limited how much I worked on it at any one sitting.  At that point I was doing the tentacles, so I would limit myself to a single tentacle at a time.  Then this past Monday I was in some meetings and felt like crocheting, so I finished up the last three tentacles.  All I have left now are the eyes.

Here is the underside. My tension is not quite as tight as it should be on the tentacles and there are places, mostly on the underside, where you can see the filling, and some of the gaps are kind of big.  Big enough that I don’t think I want to give this to a toddler with little pokey fingers.  Oh well.  Maybe I will just keep it and let it sit on my piano.  It has been a lot of fun to make, and I will definitely make more crochet critters.

Pattern:  Claude the Octopus by Kate E. Hancock

Yarn:  Adrienne Vittadini Dianna

Hook:  G (4 mm)

 

Claude the Octopus

 

When I first started knitting, way back at the turn of this millennium I became obsessed with Adrienne Vittadini patterns.  I loved the sophistication of their style and I bought pattern books and yarn.  Back then I always bought yarn for patterns that I wanted to knit right away, on the theory that the yarn could be discontinued later when I finally got around to knitting the pattern.  It is a habit that has contributed to my rather large stash, but it has paid off.  One of the Adrienne Vittadini yarns that I have in my stash is Dianna.  This yarn is 51% cotton, 49% acrylic, and comes in 50 gram/87 yard balls, and I have 27 balls in my stash in 5 colors.  I did knit a top out of it, and didn’t really like how it knit up, so I left it in deep stash and moved on.

Lately I’ve been going through my deep stash and deciding what to do with it.  I’ve given some away to friends and I almost gave this away to a friend of mine that crochets and can’t work with wool, but then I saw Claude the Octopus on Ravelry and I fell in love.  I looked at the colors in my stash of Dianna and realized that I had colors that would work in the quantities that I need.  This baby is taking 13 skeins, almost half of what I have in my stash.  So last weekend I grabbed a hook and started crocheting, and I am loving it.  I’ve been eyeing Amigurumi for awhile now, but this is the first one I’ve attempted, and I am hooked - pun intended.  The picture above is the head/body (upside down).  I’ve almost finished the top side of the tentacles.

This is the very start.

And this is the head/body before I started really decreasing and had to start stuffing it.

And these are the colors I’m using.  The off white will be the underside, and the rose will be the suckers.  The dark blue is the edging color that you use to join the top and the bottom together.

Pattern:  Claude the Octopus by Kate E. Hancock

Yarn:  Adrienne Vittadini Dianna

Hook:  4 mm (G)