Nutcracker Crochet: Amigurumi Clara

For the past few weeks I have been trying to get back into doing amigurumi crochet. This was a hobby I started last year, mostly focused on making Star Wars characters from instructions in the “Star Wars Crochet” kit I got as a gift, but I kind of fell out of the habit, even though I always meant to get back to it. A while back I had also gotten a “Nutcracker Crochet” kit as a gift, but I hadn't worked on any of the projects. I have never seen The Nutcracker, but I know a bit about it from cultural osmosis, and I've always been fond of Christmas. The kit has a book with patterns for a bunch of characters, and materials for the first two in the book. I finally got around to starting the first character, Clara:

I think the patterns in this kit were a bit less beginner-friendly than the Star Wars Crochet kit I had been using in the past, so I found it a bit hard to get started but I also appreciate that I learned a few things in the process. Since my skills were really rusty it took me a while to get rolling, especially since the first things it asks you to do are a magic ring and some really small-stitch-count tubes to make the arms and legs, with color changes almost right away.

I hadn't really done any projects where you create the limbs separately and then join them all together by crocheting the torso, so that was tricky but interesting and probably useful to have in my bag of tricks.

I thought I had gotten past the trickiest bits once I completed the head, but getting started on the skirt was a little aggravating because I didn't have a good feel for how to get a good grip on what I was working on until it was a few rows long.

The belt and hair pieces had more of a “make them, then use the free ends to sew them into the figure” approach that I was more used to, although the “curls” in the back of the hair were my first experience with the corkscrew-type things that I've seen people use for stuff like octopus tentacles.

And here she is posing with a AA battery for scale:

Overall I enjoyed working on this project, although there were times that it was quite frustrating, such as when I had to relearn things I used to know how to do but had forgotten in the months I have been away from the craft. Like I mentioned earlier, I'm also happy to have learned a few new techniques.

(note: this is cross-posted content, original is here posted on 2020-11-16)