Since I’ve been such a big fan of Ana Paula Rimoli’s work, I decided to pick up her third book entitled “Amigurumi Toy Box: Cute Crocheted Friends” when I happened to come across it in San Francisco. I’m excited to try out some of her new patterns as her work is always adorable!
The first pattern I’ve tried from her new book is the “Mom Koala”. For those of you who’ve been with me since I started my blog in January, you may remember that the very first amigurumi animal I ever made (excluding Jigglypuff) was the Koala Bear from Ana Paula’s second book (see blog post here). I wanted to try this new koala since there were some stylistic differences between the two.
First off, this koala bear has white circles around the eyes which Ana Paula calls “eye roundies”. The safety eye is placed through the eye roundie. In this case, I did not use the magic circle technique to make the eye roundie since I wanted to leave an open circle for the safety eye to go through.
Here we have the head with the eye roundies and safety eyes in place. He looks a little bit alien-esque without his other features yet!
Now he’s looking a lot more like a koala bear with his big ears placed on the sides of the head (vs. towards the top for most other bears), felt nose and tiny sweet smile.
He’s ready for assembly with his body, arms and legs completed!
After attaching the body and the arms…
And now his legs! All complete 🙂
Here he is from different angles. I used grey and white mercerized cotton (lighter weight and thinner) to give this koala a relatively lustrous finish.
I really like this koala bear because he’s so plump and round (particularly his limbs)!
Here is the new koala bear with my old koala bear! As you can see, the old one has no eye roundies and has a different-shaped nose. Old koala bear’s limbs are not stuffed AND he is technically “inside-out”. I made him before I knew about “the right side of amigurumi” (see my blog post about this here). Can you tell the difference between the stitches and the overall look?
Ana Paula Rimoli has a really cute picture of her koala bear plus the baby bear (yes, she has a pattern for a baby koala in her book too!) climbing up a tree, so I thought I’d attempt the same, ha ha 😉
A closer-up view…
This koala certainly fits in with the the overall grey colour scheme of our house! I actually gave this koala bear as a gift to our little niece who is less than two years old. She kind of looked at it curiously when we first gave it to her and then set him aside. I think she’s a little too young to appreciate and play with Koala. Interestingly enough, however, her older 4 year old brother really took a liking to this koala and began bringing him around wherever he went and playing with him! I’m glad koala bear is being loved 🙂
I can’t wait to try out some other patterns from “Amigurumi Toy Box”! Let me know if you also purchased this book and what patterns you’ve already tried!
