If you are familiar with the author and podcaster Gretchen Rubin, you may have heard her talk about the idea of design your summer. Essentially it is to give your summer a goal. Meaning. Something to make it special. For some, it could be the summer of gardening. For others, the summer of Mortal Kombat or Pokémon. For me, this year is the Summer of Amigurumi. Amigurumi is the art of crocheting or knitting small stuffed toys. I love making amigurumi, but never set aside much time for it. I have a Pinterest board overflowing with ideas and have even more in my imagination. Therefore, this summer I have a goal to make at least one amigurumi every week. I started with a request by my husband for his favorite Animal Crossing character, Gaston.
Why Gaston?
Gaston is a cranky bunny. He is hilarious. My poor husband loves him and spent about four months of real time trying to find Gaston to invite to his island. Every time a villager moved out my husband would spend all day and night visiting islands in the hopes of finding this grouchy rabbit. He finally gave up and just bought the amiibo card from someone online. Gaston was worth every penny to this man.
The Amigurumi Pattern I Based Him On
I couldn't find a pattern I liked online for Gaston. However, there are a lot of patterns for other Animal Crossing characters! I would like to make some others and I wanted them all to be the same size and basic shape, so I actually purchased one I liked to use as a template. For this reason, I don't have a pattern here to share with you, but I will tell you what I did!
I started with this pattern for Punchy the cat from Shea Crochet on Etsy.
Shea Crochet's patterns are ones I have used before and are very straightforward and easy to understand for an intermediate crocheter.
How I Tweaked It
Now besides the obvious changes of colors and face, I made a few tweaks to the base body as well. First of all, Gaston's head isn't as round. So I tried to make the head more of an oval shape. I created bunny ears to use instead of the cat ears, and made a fluffy bunny tail rather than the long cat tail. A few cosmetic changes for creating a nose, unibrow, and mustache really made a big difference. For Gaston's body I did use one color change to allow for his legs to be orange while the top is yellow (which also gives a nice illusion of him wearing pants).
The Hardest Part?
The most difficult part was his shirt. Especially as my husband wanted to make sure it is removable. Gaston's shirt in the game is a diamond pattern of various colors. By the time I started making the shirt, it was well past midnight and I was tired. And probably even more grouchy than Gaston is. I confess, I went the lazy route and didn't make a full diamond shirt. I made a few diamonds in the correct colors for the front, and simply used black for the rest. Perhaps one day I will go back and make a more accurate shirt. For now, this works fine. My husband and I are happy with him.
