There’s something about giant amigurumi that’s just so appealing. I love how quickly you can make a huge soft toy or decoration! So on December 1st I tweeted:

I may have just decided to crochet a giant purple mushroom and a giant blue gecko… These seem like entirely reasonable and useful items that need to exist in the world, right?

The reason for those colours? I had lots of random blanket yarn that I bought last year from the yarn factory outlet store without considering that the colours I like for clothing etc (purples, blues, etc) don’t really translate into useful colours for a lot of amigurumi (lots of browns and neutrals)…

Blanket yarn is so bulky, it takes up a lot of storage space, so keeping a stash of giant yarn isn’t the best idea. This plan would use up a good chunk of my blanket yarn stash, and all I’d need to buy is one ball of white for the mushroom stalk!

And here are the results:

Giant Mushroom

My Giant Mushroom uses mushroom design ‘C’ from my Mushroom Collection crochet pattern, and less than one ball each of the cap and stalk yarn colours.

I love how the giant gills turned out. The head was initially flopping about far too much for my liking, so I unstitched the cap from the base and used the technique for stiffening stuffed pieces (from my Giant Amigurumi ebook) to fix it.

Giant Gecko

My Giant Gecko gave me some problems at first – after using the yardage calculator from my giant amigurumi ebook, I realised I didn’t have enough of any single yarn colour to make the whole gecko. I didn’t want to buy more yarn for my stashbusting project, so I decided to base my gecko (very loosely) on a neon day gecko – lime head, aqua body, teal legs.

I was very uncertain about this project when I’d crocheted all the pieces but not yet assembled anything – I was pretty sure it was going to look terrible! But I’d forgotten the PlanetJune maxim:

Trust The Pattern

…I give this advice all the time, but forgot to take it myself!

Lots of my designs can look weird and wrong when you’re partway through making them, but if you just trust the pattern and follow along with all the steps, it magically comes together in the end. (That’s why I often need to tweak my prototypes multiple times before everything comes together in a way that looks deceptively simple in the final pattern. )

And yes, my gecko turned out just like I’d originally imagined he would:

I kept my fingers crossed that I’d be able to make the legs work without the original pipe cleaners inside them – imagine how large the pipe cleaners would have to be to work for a 3-ft long gecko! With normal amigurumi, you can skip the wires in the legs and just stitch the legs into a fixed bent position, but I wasn’t sure that technique would hold up with this size and weight.

Although my giant gecko’s legs won’t support his weight, they don’t have to – his belly touches the floor and the legs just stick out to the sides, so there was no problem in the end. He looks pretty realistic considering he’s 9 times larger than a real neon day gecko!

Giant Tortoise

And then there’s my Giant Tortoise! I actually made him at the same time I made all the normal-sized tortoises for my Tortoise pattern, but I never got around to showing him to you.

He looks very similar to a real-life giant tortoise in shape and size – I love him so much! And isn’t he cute with all the ‘baby’ (aka regular-sized) tortoises?!

I didn’t make any changes at all to the pattern except for scaling up the hook and yarn to Giant size and using my standard Giant Amigurumi techniques.

Thanks to the double construction of the shell with the crocheted body inside, there’s nowhere with gaps for the stuffing to be exposed, and the finished tortoise is satisfyingly sturdy – as you can see, I sometimes use him as a footrest!

Crochet your Own Giant Amigurumi

Have I tempted you to try giant amigurumi for the first time? My ebook,The Complete Guide to Giant Amigurumi, will give you all my tips and tricks for upscaling a regular amigurumi pattern to giant size.

And here are the links to my crochet patterns for all the patterns I used here:

• Mushroom Collection
• Gecko
• Tortoise

Please send me a photo if you upscale any of my patterns – I always love to see the results! You can find me everywhere as @planetjune 🙂