February 22, 2016

Socktopus 2.0

Happy Birthday to me! This year marks about 6 consecutive years that I have been posting odd stuff on this blog. So for my own pleasure, and since I said I wanted one, I decided to revisit the very first crochet project I ever made up in my head: The Socktopus!

Looking back on that post in 2010, I have to hope that my writing has improved, as well as my crochet and photography skills. Says there that the original took me a month? Wow. That seems like a long time for something seemingly so simple. I never wrote out the pattern for original Socktopus, so this time around I gave it a little more thought and planning. Socktopus will also get a nice pdf workup and be available for purchase on my patterns page.

Firstly, I changed up the colors based on my own favorites and what I had lying around. Of course I knew the main body needed to be blue, as it's my favorite color, duh. I've got this lovely Bernat Handicrafter Cotton in Sky Blue, which I used a little bit of in The Creature. I also happen to have a lot of small amounts of other cotton yarns, mostly Sugar n' Cream brand, so I pulled them all out. An all cotton yarn toy, although perhaps a little less soft, is really easy to care for, and should look great.

Each leg is the same pattern, worked from the foot up. The foot is made in your desired sock yarn and works up to the ankle area. After that it is simply 30 rows up to the body, so you can just kind of decide how high you want your sock to go, then stop and switch to the main body color. Just as an fyi, each leg takes about 2 hours to work up and finish.

Once you have all the legs done, we join them together along the outside, so that the feet/socks face out, and then add a row to widen up to attach to the bulb head. To make this easier I took some scrap yarn and tacked the insides together and then tied up the legs to make it easier to work around.

The Head is made from the crown down to the base to meet the legs, which I then sewed to the leg join rows. Last you close off the body on the underside by joining all the open loops of the legs together. I then made a little disk and sewed it into place to keep all the stuffing in.

Once the body and legs are all stuffed and closed, it was time to add the eyes. I was a bit unsure of what to do for them, but decided to stay true to the original look. I kept the eyes closed and the happy mouth but made them much more anime/amigurumi like. I also painted on some blushies with a little pink paint, just to make it super cute.
Done and so much cuter!!
It really is amazing to see your skills grow. I hope you are inspired in the same way when you look back on your first creations, whatever they may be.

Difficulty: Easy
Time to complete: 25 hours
Finished Size: 19" tall, about 6 inches wide in the head
Socktopus, like my latest patterns, has a full pdf download. Email me if you would like to purchase a copy. Unlike the other patterns I have for free, this is the first that is not based off a copyrighted character.