Back to Crochet for a bespoke 'make' for this week's #DrawMoor

 

Back to my first 'yarny' love this week and good ol' Crochet. I am so in my comfort zone when crocheting stuff now, that I didn't even bother with a pattern for this make. 

There is a weekly art challenge on Twitter under the hashtag #DrawMoor - run by the awesome children's author and artist Becka Moor. 

Every week she posts a challenge, and every week various arty folk draw it. And most weeks I attempt to crochet it!

This week's prompt was "A Dinosaur enjoying a bubble bath" and I couldn't resist making one. 

I did a lot of research online to try and find the perfect pattern for a crochet Dinosaur but most were either premium (paid for) patterns, or were a bit rough looking. So it was time to dig into my Amigurumi 'catalogue' of shape making to see what I could do from scratch. 

"Moshchops the Dinosaur" (as I decided to call this one) was made out of basic shapes, in most cases starting off with a magic ring of 6 stitches, then crocheting in the round. 

For the nose I used a bit of nifty back-loop stitching to get a basic schnozz shape (topped with a nice shiny nose). For the tail I worked a nice pointed tube in the round, and for the fins those are just varying sizes of magic circles, with a chain foundation and oval for the top fin on top of his head). 

The duck was even more basic, just two spheres crocheted in the round, slightly squished with a half magic circle of 6 stitches for the beak. I think it just goes to show what you can achieve with the most basic of techniques and stitches (and believe me, even though I can do stuff like this from scratch, I still consider myself a beginner). 

I was then stuck for a bubble bath. How on earth do you crochet a bath? It was then that I saw my yarn bowl sitting there, and a huge wad of stuffing - which works brilliantly as a nice wooden tub with bubbles in it!

One of the things I've started to try and do with my Amigurumi is make them more expressive. Moshchop's face was kinda bland, and so I put some shaping around the nose and the head - and built up the brows with some simple chain stitches sewn on to the head. I think these really make a huge difference to the 'character' of this piece, and in some of the photos I took, it really looks like a nice smile as he bathes with his yellow duckie!

I'm really happy with this one. I've now made about 5 different "Drawmoor" characters (if you check out my twitter profile @readitdaddy or the hashtags #Drawmoor and #Crochetmoor you will find them) and each one has been a challenge to complete. 

I sometimes think it would probably be easier to draw the challenges but it's way more fun to set myself the task of making something in fairly quick succession (the challenges are posted on Tuesday and I managed to finish this off in about 3 hours, which isn't bad going for me). 

If folk are interested I might post this one as a pattern to Ravelry as it's a really easy beginner project, and doesn't require any fancy crochet methods or stitches, just some safety eyes and the ability to stitch together the various components (I swear I WILL get better at stitching my work together, even though I pin stuff out I'm still really awful at it). 

Hope you enjoyed this piece and drop a comment below if you'd like me to work this into a tutorial or pattern.