Crochet key rings

Happy Christmas Everyone!

Now it is actually Christmas and people have had their presents I can show you my crochet key rings.

Okay! not actually crocheted key RINGS but little amigarumi figures attached to key rings.

These days I give my children money plus a little something I think they would enjoy. This year for my daughters and their husbands it was key rings.

I started my making a little red bear for my older daughter.

I had found a free pattern  by Lisa van Klaveren of www.holland-designs.com

The pattern was for DK yarn but I wanted to use #10 crochet cotton so I decided that I wouldn’t be able to use safety eyes to articulate his arms and legs but I found a way to do it with a couple of strands of yarn that I tied together.

I wanted to make a green fish for her husband but I couldn’t see a fish pattern so I made my own, though you won’t see it written down as I just created it as I went, with a certain amount of undoing as I went along.

The inspiration for the design came from a Siamese silver bracelet that my father bought me after a trip to the far east when I was a child.

The silver was very soft and the fish unfortunately was one of the first casualties.

Here is a close up so you can see the way the body is formed with overlapping sections.

So here are fish and bear together.

I stiffened the fish’s tail to make it look right.

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For my younger daughter I wanted to make a blue cat.

Again, a Google search didn’t reveal any crochet cats that looked just the way I wanted it to turn out.

I did find THIS ONE that was the nearest but in the end although I got Google to translate it into English, I decided that again I would design my own.

The hardest part was the tail and I had frequent recourse to a magnifying glass to check the number of stitches as I found it very easy to inadvertently increase them.

Having decided that it would be rather fun to give the cat stiff little whiskers, I used some of my PVA glue to stiffen the central part of some strands of white crochet thread and pulled them through like this:-

And so here is the finished cat – front

and back.

Lastly for my second daughter’s husband I decided to make one of the owls from the ‘Bunny Mummy’ blog.

And here it is.

Again front

and back

Everyone loved their keyrings! They were a very popular present.