diy plushy

This time I felt like making something completely different. Meet Frissle, a crochet boarlet amigurumi!

When we go hiking, we often go to a place a little over an hour from where we live, where there is a lot of wildlife. If you are lucky, you can spot different kinds of animals there, like foxes, deer, and wild boar. I especially like going in Spring, when the days are longer and the boar have young (they can also have young in the winter, but you hardly ever see them then). In Spring they are much easier to spot, and I’m always so delighted when I see the boarlets in their stripy pyjamas.

Although I’ve always wanted to create a boarlet pattern, I was never sure about how to design it. But now that I’ve made a few animals on all fours, I had a good idea of how to shape this baby boar. The first test version looked more like a fawn than a piglet, but I have to start somewhere. Now I knew the paws needed to be much shorter and the head had to be placed lower and more to the front. So I made a second and a third version, and I then had the shape I liked. All I had to now was to design the stripy pyjama, which took some trial and error but in the end turned out ever so cute.

I’m very pleased with this new addition to my woodland creatures and absolutely love this crochet wild boar piglet. I hope you like it as much as I do. Maybe I should make a big, sturdy parent for it someday soon!

Here are some more pictures of the boarlet amigurumi, and below them you can find info about and links to buy the pattern.

This is an intermediate pattern. It’s made with basic stitches. The difficulty of this pattern lies in crochet-attaching all four paws. I try to explain it as thoroughly as possible, and it isn’t that difficult when you understand the principle. The benefit of this kind of shape is that there’s hardly any assembling to do once you’ve finished crocheting. You only need to attach the ears and the head.

This crochet baby piglet is made with Istex Lett Lopi, a 100% wool with a lot of fuzziness. It’s 5.5 inch / 14 cm tall. The pattern contains a clear and colour-coded description of how to crochet and assemble the doll, with instruction images with notes next to the text and pictures of the finished doll at the bottom. In the pattern you can also find out what materials you need, the yarn colour numbers — in short, everything you need to know to make your own realistic boarlet amigurumi. All the additional information you need to know about this pattern you can find in the shop listings. You can purchase it in my shop at Ravelry or Etsy.

And heads up! This pattern has a one dollar release discount till the 10th of July.

This is the first animal I have made in a realistic position, well actually the second. Last year I made a guinea pig on all fours but lets be honest, guinea pigs are little potatoes and therefor not the hardest animals to make. This one was much more complicated. In the series of realistic animals I started with a badger because it is my favourite animal, but also because I thought the shape of a badger is easier to design than that of a fox or squirrel for example.

Despite thinking that, I had a hard time designing the body. When I had finished my first prototype, it looked like a potato with a badger head. How on earth would I get a proper badger shape? I got completely stuck there and had to stop and think about how I was going to design the body. After some thinking I had a few ideas and set behind my desk again. The first idea did not work, made the badger look like an armadillo. However, the second solution I had in mind did work. The thing was, I needed to get a shape where the paws seemed to come out of the fur instead of looking attached to it. The simple solution of shoulder and hip pathes did the trick. Even without the fur brushed, the badger looked like a sturdy burrower.

If you would ask me what I like most about this badger, it is the face. I am so happy with it. On my desk I have this framed postcard with a portrait of a realistic badger wearing a jumper. That serious badger is looking at me all the time and I used that face as my example. And the result is so similar I even surprised myself!

The good thing about this pattern is, I did all the hard work. All you crocheters need to do is follow the instructions, easy peasy. This is not a very complicated pattern to make.

In this image you can see how the badger looks before brushing, to get a better idea of the basics before you buy the pattern. My editor complimented me on how extensively I have written the assembling instructions.

I did that to be sure everyone gets all the pieces in the right place, with the correct distances between them etcetera.

Here are some more pictures of the finished badger amigurumi to get you all enthusiastic and below them you can find more info about & and links to buy the pattern.

Info about & links to buy the pattern

This crochet badger is made with Istex Lett Lopi, a 100% wool with a lot of fuzziness that works very well with brushing. He is 7.8 inch/ 20 long from tail to nose when made with this yarn.

The pattern contains a clear and colour coded description of how to crochet and assemble this animal, with extra illustrations and example pictures at the bottom to help you get everything right. In the pattern you can also find what materials you need, the yarn colour numbers, in short, everything you need to know to make your own realistic badger amigurumi. All the additional information you need to know about this pattern you can find in the shop listings. You can buy this pattern in my shop at Ravelry, Etsy or order it here.

This pattern has a one dollar release discount till Friday the 1st of December!