Never do it for the clicks, do it for the kicks!

This is Zell from Animal Crossing. I regularly take part in art challenges on Twitter (Under my ReadItDaddy account) and Zell was this week's #AnimalAlphabets prompt - and rather daftly I decided to try and do this week's challenge as a piece of crochet. 

Snag 1. No patterns exist for Zell. I had a couple of reference pics to work from and a vague idea that he was sort of "Deer-like" so went hunting for cute deer patterns on the internet. 

Snag 2. Most of the patterns had antlers, not Zell's rather cool twisted horns. 

Regardless I decided to make a stab at this, using some nice thick plush brown yarn and fluffy babysoft white yarn to crochet the body, arms and legs (don't you just love those all-in-one patterns where everything starts with a 6SC Magic Ring and you've somehow got to remember to stuff, turn inside out and crochet closed at the last minute). The head was a normal sphere that I added a few extra rows to in order to make a nose (topped off by a safety nose I had in the right shape). Zell's antlers were found on a really great website that teaches you 

how to do sculptural crochet. 

Lastly Zell's lazy eyes were made out of felt, and a pendant was made out of an old card decoration and a piece of silver thread. 

The bulk of this project took about four days, a few hours each evening and the trickiest bits were definitely the horns and the vest. 

Unsurprisingly, this was submitted for the AnimalAlphabets weekly submissions and got about 13 likes. I bet if I'd just lashed up a 10 minute drawing of Zell it would probably have got more so the lesson here is "Do it for the kicks, not the clicks" kids!