This time it is my husband's cousin. She is having her first girl (she already has three sons!) and her theme is basically anything NOT princess-y or pink. She also mentioned that she loves ladybugs, so with that in mind I set out to find a cute and quick pattern. I saw a few that I really really liked, but they were not children friendly. Thanks to a bit more searching I found this free pattern from Michaels and Lion Brand yarn.
This pattern is very beginner friendly and great for anyone looking to jump into amigurumi. Total time for this project I estimate to be just about 3 hours. The most difficult part is sewing all the little pieces together. I started following the pattern exactly and made the upper body, head, base, feet and spots all according to the pattern. Since I wanted this to be sturdy I sewed everything to each other with the yarn tails from the pieces. I added the eyes and stitched on a mouth with red yarn. The pattern was not very specific on the antenna for the head, so I used the antenna pattern from doing brain slugs (Chain 7, three dc in second chain from needle, slip stitch into the remaining 5 chain, bind off). I tied them into the stitching before stuffing. I also sewed the spots to the upper body before stuffing and the feet onto the base before sewing them together.
Two things to note, I used the black safety eyes I had lying around, since they are so large, I thought it made the lady bug look SUPER cute. (more so than the image on the pattern anyway) Also, since I wanted it to be a girl ladybug, I decided to add a flower. I wanted to make a really small one for on her head. A quick image search led me to Mimi's Crochet Stuff blog and this pattern which I really liked since it used two colors and had a little leaf! Since it came out larger than I expected I decided to add it to the back of the ladybug and I think it came out darling. Hope they like it. Such a fun little project for a baby shower.
