My amigurumi elephant

Yay! I have finished my elephant, which is actually my second!

I found this amigurumi business a little hard to get my head around, firstly I really struggled with counting the stitches, especailly when I was increasing a row. Having to think of how many stitches in the row, how many times I had to do two stitches in one loop, how many single stitches between each double, phew! Luckily I have a wonderful husband who says that his job is to make the complex simple, so he sat down with me and got me to come up with a way I could keep track of it all. So this was the pattern I ended up working from, crossing each section off as I completed it:

Row 3: D 1S, D 1S, D 1S, D 1S, D 1S, D 1S

Row 4: D 2S, D 2S, D 2S, D 2S, D 2S, D2S

Row 5: D 3S, D 3S, D 3S, D 3S, D 3S, D 3S

And so on.

This really helped me keep track of what I was doing, and stopped me getting into a complete muddle.

The next issue I had was that my decrease stitches left huge gaping holes, I was using the sc2tog stitch and was really unhappy with the result. However, as my previous post mentioned I found a different technique which I used on my second elephant and got a much better result. Thanks June!

First elephant Second elephant

Finally, and perhaps the biggest (and stupidest) problem of all was that I was using totally the wrong stitch in my first elephant!!!! I had managed to make up one of my own, which I think makes it all the more impressive that I completed an elephant (no matter how demented) in the first place. I keep learning lessons about doing your research properly before starting.

Here are the two side by side so you can see how wrong my first elephant went.

Overall, I enjoyed this project, even though I had to do it twice, and I am looking forward to trying a different project (which is going to be a giraffe).

Here is the original pattern from Lion Brand although please note you need to register with them before you can view patterns:

http://www.lionbrand.com/patterns/70582AD.html?noImages=&newreg=1&r=1

On a side note: I realise my choice of grey is highly original for an elephant, but this is a recycled wool of which they only had grey, so I felt like doing my bit.