Inspiration and Motivation

One of my favourite artists right now is Camilla Engman. She’s an illustrator, painter, photographer, and she crochets the cutest little animals characters.

Her wonderful characters, as well as cute little amigurumi, were the reason I picked up a crochet hook and asked my mom to teach me. So it was over the Christmas holidays in 2007 that I learned to crochet. We sat down with Stitch ‘Bitch nation’s The Happy Hooker and went through the instructions and I slowly (very slowly) twigged to this craft technique. For some reason I took to crochet a lot more than I had to knitting, which I am horrible at, and I really liked the fact that if you make a mistake you can simply pull out the stitches and start off wherever you want.
My first crochet project was the bunny bedfellow pattern designed by Camilla in the Happy Hooker book. Looking back, I think this was probably a bit of a difficult project to start with, because you crochet in a spiral and in back loops only for most of the pattern, which I found really confusing. I joke that I probably made the entire bunny 4 times or more if you counted how many times I took it apart!
Today with a bit of searching I found a tutorial on whip up written by Camilla herself, for making these cuddly creatures. I am comforted by her admission that “I’m not a very good crocheter, I’m good at undo, redo, undo and redo” – sounds like me!
So here’s my very first crochet project, under construction and then completed, held up by my friend Sarah.