"A Monkey Butler on Roller Skates delivering something very important"

 

Sometimes, crochet takes you in weird and wonderful directions, and sometimes you bite off more than you can chew. I regularly take part in art challenges on Twitter (under my @ReaditDaddy guise) but I've been letting them slide really badly lately, mostly because I've been hooking bits of yarn together. 

So when #Drawmoor (one of my favourite art prompts, run by awesome children's author and illustrator Becka Moor) had the title of this blog post as a prompt, I figured it was time to see how quickly I could put something together. 

There are a million and one monkey patterns out there so I started with a base (which looked weirdly like a champagne cork when it was done), added ears, eyes and a mouth, sewed on legs and arms and a long tail and the monkey began to take shape. 

As it was a Monkey butler, I reined in my ambition from doing a tailcoat and just stuck a simple tie on him, and a fez (because Fezzes are cool, right?)

From there I knocked together a silver platter using cotton yarn (which is great because it's stiff and holds a nice dish shape quite easily), a banana (about the easiest thing to make in the world, literally just two rows of chain stitch with a bit of black thread embroidered onto the end) and then I hit the wall. 

Roller skates. How the HECK do you make roller skates? These are a mechanical thing, how on earth do you create something like that out of yarn. 

There were patterns out there for roller-skate-shaped baby bootees but they were way too big. In the end I had to do some thinking on my feet about the shape of a sole of a boot, how the upper would come together, and of course most importantly what to make the wheels from. 

In the end I found a stack of 'toy eyes' from my cute animal eye kit that are horrible to use for actual Amigurumi, and used 8 of them in different colours for wheels (and they're surprisingly effective!)

This took around 4 hours to complete over two nights and was a great challenge. Because it had a public audience I wanted to make it as neat as possible. 

I usually hate everything I make or draw but this is one of my most favourite 'makes' ever, I actually really like this little fellah, so much so that when someone at work offered me £5 I turned them down (in terms of materials / time I think it's worth way more than that anyway, but I couldn't bear the thought of someone giving it to their kid or their dog and them pulling it slowly to bits). 

I wonder what next week's #Drawmoor will be. I joked that knowing my luck it would probably be a crocodile in period dress driving a mini go kart, I think I definitely would have to baulk at that challenge!

If you'd like to try making your own version of the monkey, the pattern I based it on can be found here (I scaled mine up a tad and changed some aspects of it but it's fairly easy to follow). one of these days I will properly dig in and do some patterns for this stuff but in the meantime this will get you started! Amigurumi Crochet Monkey Pattern | Supergurumi