In my post from January about amigurumi based on patterns from the Nutcracker Crochet kit, I mentioned I would put it aside for a while since it felt strange to work on them outside of the Christmas season. At the time I thought I had another idea for crochet stuff, but that got a bit derailed (I’m hoping to get back to it eventually). Without any ideas for projects I ended up not crocheting for a while, and during the summer I decided I should try to get back into what had been working for me even if it wasn’t seasonally appropriate. I picked another project from the Nutracker Crochet book, the Mouse King, and started working on it.
However, the part that always gives me trouble with these patterns, joining the legs to form the torso, ended up giving me trouble again and I got pretty frustrated. I was using the technique of using scraps of different colored yarn to mark stitches, but with all those free yarn ends around the critical area I was having a hard time finding the right stitches to be sure I was doing it correctly. So I put it aside for a while again, until November when I finally decided to get some plastic stitch markers and get started again.
Unfortunately I ran out of the gray yarn I was using before I could complete the tail. I tried to pick apart some of the gray from a set of legs I had abandoned from back when I was messing up the join, but in the process of crocheting with and then hurriedly unstitching the yarn I damaged it enough that it kept fraying at the worst possible time so I literally couldn’t even see some of the stitches I was trying to do. I decided to put the project aside again, because I also needed to work on a crochet project for a handmade Christmas gift exchange I do with my brothers and sisters. After I finished that earlier this week I got back to the Mouse King. I used some different gray yarn for the tail, which isn’t a perfect color match, but pretty close.
And then I completed and attached the clothing accessories.
And here he is, completed!
Over the past few months I’ve started an activity where my teenage niece and I each write a poem during the week to give us a topic of conversation when we have zoom calls with each other. One week I wrote a poem inspired by the experience of working on this project, which I posted here.
