{"id":6893,"date":"2012-04-30T11:04:40","date_gmt":"2012-04-30T15:04:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/?p=6893"},"modified":"2022-04-22T14:28:43","modified_gmt":"2022-04-22T18:28:43","slug":"amigurumi-platypus-crochet-pattern","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/amigurumi-platypus-crochet-pattern\/","title":{"rendered":"Amigurumi Platypus crochet pattern"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s my second design commissioned using my new <a href=\"\/commissions\/\">Commissions process<\/a>: a Platypus! Thank you to everyone who commissioned this design from me &#8211; I hope you like the end result&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"\/shop\/index.php?main_page=product_info&#038;cPath=17&#038;products_id=199\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/blog\/images\/platypus1.jpg\" alt=\"Platypus amigurumi crochet pattern by PlanetJune\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>You probably already know that the platypus is a highly unusual-looking animal. When it was first discovered, the specimen was thought to be a hoax (like a jackalope) assembled from a beaver and a duck! <\/p>\n<p><strong>Platypus Fun Facts<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Platypus (<em>Ornithorhynchus anatinus<\/em>) are only found in eastern Australia.<\/li>\n<li>They are monotremes (egg-laying mammals).<\/li>\n<li>Platypus are semi-aquatic. They live in burrows and hunt for their food (insects and shellfish) along river bottoms.<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;s almost impossible to breed platypus in captivity, which is why very few people have seen one in real life &#8211; you won&#8217;t see them in many zoos.<\/li>\n<li>The plural of platypus is sometimes written as platypus, platypuses, platypi, or platypodes!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I thought I had a pretty good idea what a platypus should look like, based on toys, cartoons, and the description of &#8216;beaver + duck&#8217;, but when I started my research I found I was wrong; a google image search shows a huge confusing variety, so I had to learn a lot more about them before I could truly understand what I was looking at. I watched the platypus section of David Attenborough&#8217;s wonderful <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/B000XCK0MS\/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&#038;tag=plane02c-20&#038;linkCode=as2&#038;camp=1789&#038;creative=390957&#038;creativeASIN=B000XCK0MS\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Life of Mammals<\/a><\/em> over and over to see what they look like in motion, and spent a long time researching platypus features so I could make my design accurate. Here&#8217;s what I found:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Although all 4 platypus feet are webbed, the front feet are hugely oversized and used for paddling. The back feet are smaller and used only for steering while swimming.<\/li>\n<li>A platypus uses its tail to store fat reserves, so a healthy platypus does <strong>not<\/strong> have a flat tail like a beaver&#8217;s tail.<\/li>\n<li>Platypus eyes are located just back from the beak. It keeps its eyes closed while swimming and uses electrolocation to detect food with receptors on its sensitive bill.<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;s very easy to understand why people thought the platypus was a hoax: the base of the bill has a really interesting shape which makes the bill look like it&#8217;s been stuck onto the front of the face and doesn&#8217;t belong there.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So I took all these facts and built them into my design to make it more realistic. My design uses a couple of neat tricks for shaping the beak and feet\/legs, but it&#8217;s still easy to crochet &#8211; I always try to find that balance for my patterns.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"\/shop\/index.php?main_page=product_info&#038;cPath=17&#038;products_id=199\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/blog\/images\/platypus2.jpg\" alt=\"Platypus amigurumi crochet pattern by PlanetJune\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"\/shop\/index.php?main_page=product_info&#038;cPath=17&#038;products_id=199\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/blog\/images\/platypus3.jpg\" alt=\"Platypus amigurumi crochet pattern by PlanetJune\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>It turned out to be more of a design challenge than I&#8217;d anticipated, but, several beak and foot prototypes later, I&#8217;m very happy with the result &#8211; the final shaping techniques are simple and elegant, and I think he looks really sweet. As a fun extra touch, his webbed feet are also slightly poseable &#8211; you can move them around to make him &#8216;swim&#8217; \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"\/shop\/index.php?main_page=product_info&#038;cPath=17&#038;products_id=199\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/blog\/images\/platypus4.jpg\" alt=\"Platypus amigurumi crochet pattern by PlanetJune\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I wonder which design will be <a href=\"\/commissions\/\">commissioned<\/a> next&#8230; (By the way, I have many more designs I&#8217;m also working on, so don&#8217;t worry if nothing else from the list is fully pledged for a while &#8211; there <strong>are<\/strong> other PlanetJune designs in the works!)<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"\/shop\/index.php?main_page=product_info&#038;cPath=17&#038;products_id=199\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/blog\/images\/platypus5.jpg\" alt=\"Platypus amigurumi crochet pattern by PlanetJune\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>If you pledged towards the commission, you should have already received your copy of the pattern. Otherwise, if you&#8217;d like to make a platypus of your own, you can now pick up the <a href=\"\/shop\/index.php?main_page=product_info&#038;cPath=17&#038;products_id=199\">Platypus crochet pattern<\/a> from the PlanetJune shop! I hope you like it \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re not quite ready to buy though, how about queuing Platypus on ravelry so you don&#8217;t forget about it?<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.ravelry.com\/badges\/redirect?p=platypus-2\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/api.ravelry.com\/badges\/projects?p=platypus-2&amp;t=.svg\" style=\"border: none;\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here&#8217;s my second design commissioned using my new Commissions process: a Platypus! Thank you to everyone who commissioned this design from me &#8211; I hope you like the end result&#8230; You probably already know that the platypus is a highly unusual-looking animal. When it was first discovered, the specimen was thought to be a hoax [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6893","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crochet","category-patterns"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6893\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}