Are you unsure about taking the plunge into full-scale Giant Amigurumi? Then Mini Giant Amigurumi might be just what you’re looking for!

Allow me to demonstrate with my cute purple whale:

Front: Standard (worsted weight) whale (silver)
Middle: Mini Giant whale (purple)
Back: Giant Whale (blue)

As you can see, the Mini Giant whale bridges the gap between a standard amigurumi and a giant – it isn’t close to the size of a full giant ami, but is still over twice the size of a standard amigurumi.

Why Mini Giant Amigurumi?

There are lots of reasons why Mini Giant Amigurumi might appeal to you vs Giant Amigurumi:

• You don’t have a 15mm hook
• You want to ease yourself gradually into sizing up
• You don’t have the strength or mobility for the larger hand/arm motions
• You’re short on funds for all that yarn and stuffing
• You don’t have the space for giant ami!

Don’t let that be a reason to stop you trying to size up some amigurumi – you can still join in the supersizing fun and use all the techniques from The Complete Guide to Giant Amigurumi to great effect by making mini giant amis.

How to Make Mini Giant Amigurumi

To make a Mini Giant Amigurumi, instead of worsted weight yarn and an E US/3.5mm hook, you’ll need:

• 1 strand of a super bulky (#6) yarn – I recommend a chenille-type yarn such as Bernat Blanket
• an L US/8mm crochet hook

Then use the techniques from The Complete Guide to Giant Amigurumi (especially my Secure Magic Ring, which works beautifully on this chenille-type yarn) to make and stuff your Mini Giant Amigurumi!

To finish, you can either use one of my crocheted ‘glinting’ eye patterns from the ebook, or you may find that you have plastic animal eyes large enough. For my whale, 15mm plastic eyes were just about large enough; for a larger amigurumi, the Small Eye pattern from the book would work perfectly.

Your Guidebook to Giant Amigurumi

Now, between standard amigurumi, mini giant amigurumi, and full giant amigurumi, you have the choice of sizing up your amigurumi as much as you like!

And if you haven’t bought my new ebook, The Complete Guide to Giant Amigurumi yet, check out the reviews (here) to see what people are saying about it – I think you’ll love it too 🙂

Usually in amigurumi, the goal is to join pieces with an invisible, seamless join, so you can barely tell where one part ends and the next begins. But sometimes, especially with a piece of a different colour, you can get a neater finish by not smoothing the join, and instead making invisible stitches so it looks like the pieces are magically holding themselves together without any stitching at all:

You can use this technique to attach something where you want there to be a clear defined edge between pieces, for example, attaching a beak to a face, or (as I’ll show in this demo) attaching a cactus to the soil of its pot.

Continue to the Amigurumi Clean Edge Join tutorial:

• Right-handed version >>
• Left-handed version >>

Spoiler alert: in doing this jog-minimising back loop only round amigurumi experiment, I have a recommendation for a simple modification to make to your amigurumi that will minimise the jog with those back loop only rounds! If you’re not interested in my experiments, jump straight to the Jogless Back Loop Only Round for Amigurumi video tutorial 🙂

Crocheting a round of back loop only (BLO) stitches is a standard method for creating a sharp corner in amigurumi. The biggest problem is that, when you work in a continuous spiral, you end up with a noticeable jog between the first and last unworked loops of the round.

I’ve had several requests to develop a method for minimising that jog, so you know what that means: it’s time for another PlanetJune crochet investigation!

Method

For this experiment, I tested a few candidates that I thought may improve the look of that jog. Modifying one or other of my Perfect Stripes methods seemed like a promising idea, as well as changing the height of the end stitches to bring them closer together.

I crocheted the same small sample for each method so we can compare the effectiveness of each one. Each sample was crocheted in a spiral with a flat circular base, a round of BLO stitches to turn the corner, and then a few more rounds worked straight.

So, here are the candidates:

A. The control sample, as described above, with no attempt to minimise the jog
B. Sample using the No-Cut Join technique for the round before the BLO round and the BLO round
C. Sample using the Invisible Join technique for the round before the BLO round and the BLO round
D. Sample modifying the height of the stitch before the BLO round with a slip stitch

The photos below show each sample from two angles, and, if you’d like to play along, you can compare the appearance of the line of unworked loops around the edge of each sample and see what you think of my ‘improvements’…

Results

I compared each candidate with the control sample (A) to see how much it improved the appearance of the jog, judging on two criteria:

1. How continuous the line of unworked loops appears between the first and last stitch of the round (left photo)
2. How circular the entire round of unworked loops appears (right photo) – note that this effect is more noticeable because the samples are quite small; it wouldn’t be as obvious for a larger piece such as the base of an ami plant pot

Here are my observations:

B. The No-Cut Join gives the worst result of all the test pieces. Although the jog is reduced, extra mess is introduced to the surrounding stitches, and I think the overall effect is actually worse than doing nothing.

C. The Invisible Join gives a flawless result – the join is completely invisible and the round of unworked loops is almost completely circular. However, it’s slow, and leaves a lot of extra yarn ends, so it’s quite an investment in time and effort.

D. The height modifying method is very quick and simple to execute and gives a pretty good result. As the spiral is almost uninterrupted, the unworked loops don’t quite form a perfect circle, but the jog is almost invisible.

My Recommendations

If you want the best-looking back loop only round possible and don’t care how long it takes, switching to joined rounds (for both the round before the BLO round and the BLO round) and using the Invisible Join method from my Perfect Stripes tutorial will give you the most perfect result.

But, my recommendation is: for the best balance of a good result with a quick and easy method, use my height modifying method – now called my Jogless Back Loop Only Round method – for minimising the jog. (And, to give an even better result, combine it with my Better BLO technique – between the two, you’ll end up with a very neat and practically jogless back loop only round, as you can see below.)

Impressed? Now learn how to do it, with my new video tutorial:

Continue to A Jogless Back Loop Only Round for Amigurumi video tutorial >>

Thanks to a long-lasting thumb injury and a intercontinental move, it’s been a frustratingly long time since I’ve been able to make any new crochet tutorial videos. But all that’s about to change!

To commemorate my return to YouTube, I’ve updated my video template with a fresh new look and animated logo, and, to ease myself back into the video-making saddle, I’ve re-edited my last-published video to add some additional info (as well as the new look). Want to see?

Better Back Loop Only Details for Amigurumi (right-handed)

Better Back Loop Only Details for Amigurumi (left-handed)

Note: The videos may look a little small embedded in the blog: if so, you can fullscreen them or click through to YouTube (links: right-handed; left-handed) to watch them full-sized 🙂

You can also find more detailed information on this topic, including a discussion of when to use it in my accompanying tutorial post.

And here’s a topical bonus: if you’re taking part in our BotaniCAL crochet-along, the technique I demonstrate here is perfect for the edge around the bottom of your crocheted plant pots!

New Tutorials Coming Soon!

Now I’m back up to speed with editing with my new software and I have my new template set up, you can expect regular new crochet videos from me again! All my tutorials are clear, concise and in close-up, and come in right- and left-handed versions, with full closed captions (in case you find it easier to read my words than listen to them).

Subscribe to my YouTube channel here and you’ll never miss a new PlanetJune video. 🙂

Your Video Requests?

I already have a long list of tutorials I’d like to make, but I’d also like to hear your video requests. Are there any crochet techniques I use in my patterns that I haven’t explained on video yet and you’d like to see? Let me know by email, or in the comments below, and I’ll make note of all your requests.

I hope you’ll enjoy my crochet videos – both the library of existing tutorials, and the new videos to come!

Today, I’d like to dispel a common amigurumi myth…

In amigurumi, as with all crochet, you should always be keeping tension on the yarn to keep your stitches compact and regular. But I often hear misinformation that you should be ‘crocheting tightly’ to make amigurumi, and that’s not true at all!

The tightness of amigurumi stitches refers to the tension of the small stiff stitches of the fabric you produce, not to the tension in your hands while you crochet.

Showing is better than telling, so allow me to demonstrate, via a new crochet investigation, how to make perfect amigurumi stitches without hurting your hands!

Experiment 1: Effect of Hook Size

I crocheted the same sample amigurumi cup shape 3 times with different sized hooks and the same worsted weight yarn each time. I crocheted the same way as I would when making a scarf or anything else – I kept my tension even, but didn’t try to pull my stitches tightly or pull back on the yarn after pulling up each loop.

I used my standard amigurumi E hook (3.5mm), and, to show the effects of changing hook sizes, I tried a larger H hook (5mm) and a smaller C hook (2.75mm).

You can see that the stitches are neat and even in all three samples and, as you may expect, using a larger hook results in a larger finished piece that’s both taller and wider than the same piece crocheted with a smaller hook.

See how the smaller hook samples can stack inside the larger ones? There’s quite a size difference!

What you can’t tell from a photo is how stiff the fabric of each sample is. With the H hook, the fabric is too floppy to hold its shape well. With the E hook, the fabric is much firmer and holds its shape much better. With the C hook, the piece is even firmer and feels very solid.

I simulated the effect of adding stuffing by gently stretching out each piece between my fingers, so you can see the gaps between the stitches:

As you can see, the H hook fabric is far too open for an amigurumi; the gaps between the stitches are very noticeable. With the E hook, the stitches have smaller holes between them, so the stuffing would be far less visible. And, with the C hook, the gaps between stitches are almost invisible.

So here’s the result of changing hook size: a smaller hook gives a smaller and firmer crocheted piece, with tighter stitches and smaller gaps between the stitches.

These are the properties we want for amigurumi fabric! A stiff, sturdy fabric that holds its shape and has tiny gaps between the stitches is exactly what we need for crocheting a 3-dimensional sculpture.

Experiment 2: Effect of ‘Crocheting Tightly’

Now, part two of this investigation. I returned to my standard E hook and tried crocheting the same sample piece yet again, but this time I followed the misunderstood advice of ‘crocheting tightly’. I held the yarn tightly and pulled back on it against my hook each time I formed a loop, so each loop was tight around the hook and as small as possible.

Both these samples were crocheted with the same hook. As you can see, the ‘tight’ piece is smaller and firmer than the normally-tensioned piece, but at what cost?

When you crochet with too-tight tension, your stitches are so small that it’s hard to work back into them, and that’s what happened in this case: it was an effort to force my hook into each stitch. My yarn-holding hand began to cramp from pulling the yarn so tightly, and I didn’t enjoy the process of crocheting at all. Even finishing this small piece was very hard work.

Yes, the tight piece is definitely smaller (and therefore ‘better’ for amigurumi) but crocheting it was a horrible experience!

Experiment 3: Comparing Smaller Hook and Tighter Tension

Now, let’s compare the small (C hook) sample from Experiment 1 with the extra tight tension sample (E hook) from Experiment 2:

Can this be right? They look almost identical!

Yes, comparing the two pieces, they look and feel almost exactly the same – the size and shape are the same, the stiffness of the fabric is the same, the gaps between stitches are the same.

The only difference? The sample on the left was crocheted comfortably with a small hook, and the sample on the right was crocheted extra-tightly, at great discomfort, with a larger hook.

Conclusions

As these experiments have shown, there’s absolutely no advantage to changing the way you crochet when you make amigurumi by working extra-tightly (and you may actually hurt your hands, wrists and arms by doing so!)

The goal with amigurumi is to maintain tension (down and backwards) on the yarn that’s balanced by your hook pulling up and forwards. This control allows you to form neat, consistent stitches.

You should never feel you have to force your hook into every stitch and/or pull your stitches as tightly as possible. This not only distorts your fabric but can also lead to hand and wrist fatigue and repetitive stress disorders.

The secret to making good-looking amigurumi without making your hands hurt is simple:

• Select an appropriately small hook and crochet the same way as you usually do.
• The perfect hook for your yarn is the smallest size you can manage without starting to have problems from splitting your yarn because the hook is too small to consistently grab all the plies.

The result: neat tight stitches, with no pain!

If you ever experience discomfort when making amigurumi, I encourage you to relax that death grip on your hook and yarn, and try crocheting with a slightly smaller hook instead. Your hands will love the difference and, I hope, you’ll enjoy the amigurumi-making process more.

Have you fallen for the amigurumi myth of ‘crocheting tightly’? Please leave a message in the comments and share your experiences…

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Thank you so much for your support! Now click below for loads more crochet video and photo tutorials (and do let me know what else you’d like me to cover in future tutorials…)