The pink elephant and the devil duck

Interested in testing my metal as a free form crocheter, I offered to make some animals for my kids last weekend.

They picked the kind of animal that I made and then I gave them free access to my yarn stash to pick the colors. Let's see if you can tell by what I created:

The duck on the left is for the boy and the elephant on the right is for the girl.

That's right, folks. Flaming red with baby blue accents was the idea of my almost 2 year old son, not me.

Anyhow, the elephant was pretty easy to figure out. The hardest part which wasn't really hard at all, was figuring out how to get the trunk to curve. It's all single crochet with increases and decreases worked in the round.

This project went really fast and I had it completed in a couple of hours.


Then there's the duck...well, let's just say that it has a nickname now: The Devil Duck.

The nickname was created not just because of the color, although it does make the duck look a little bit devilish. No, the nickname came because it took me MANY hours and MANY stitches to figure out this pattern. I'm talking: Crochet a shape, look at shape, decide it's not right, rip the stitches, crochet, look, decide, rip, crochet, and on and on until the duck started to take a duck-like shape. The head was really easy, but the body was certainly not. <--UNDERSTATEMENT OF THE YEAR

Right before I figured it out, I looked from the pile of ripped out yarn to my husband and proclaimed, "This is the last time I'm going to try this. If it doesn't work, the boy is getting a duck head and that's it!"

So I tried one last idea. An idea that if it hadn't worked would have been hell to rip out (see the theme here?). And then, to my utter amazement, the duck's body started to take shape.

In the 2 days that it took me to make the duck, I spent about 8 hours on the dang thing. Sad considering that once the pattern was figured out it took me about an hour and a half to complete.

I can tell you this: I won't be making another duck anytime soon. And when I do, I'm using a pattern.

All that trouble and turmoil and I still managed to pump out 2 crocheted critters in a weekend.

And the best part is that my kids love the animals. To date, they have slept with them every single night. That right there makes all the duck frustration worth it.

As I always say: If I made this in my free time, then imagine what you could do in yours!