A colleague taught me to crochet way back in about 2016. She showed me the basics in a quick half-hour lesson after work one day, recommended Bella Coco on YouTube for good beginner’s tutorials, and I haven’t really looked back since.

I’d tried to teach myself, before, using magazines and books, but it hadn’t really stuck. Nor had any of the YouTube tutorials I’d tried. But once I’d got the basics from my colleague, suddenly it all started making sense. Even reading and following patterns.

Obviously, having got started, I then collected yarns and books of patterns. Now, about half of my crochet books are Toft toy books.

Amazingly, though, I haven’t yet made all the toys. Actually, I’ve only made maybe ten of them, and I’ve repeated Emma the Bunny once.

But the Toft patterns, for the most part, are reasonably simple and straightforward. They’re based on amigurimi principles, and they all have the same bodies and mostly the same arms/legs, which saves some thought. Admittedly, none of the patterns I’ve made have been in the more complicated sections of any of the books. Too much concentrating.

Unless you count the constant colour changes of the stripy tiger. Who is still waiting for his face. I hate doing the faces: can never get the eyes to match. The rat’s colour-change required much less concentration.

When I was pregnant I bought a whole load of Hobbycraft’s WI yarns, specifically for a set of various of the animals. Naturally, I didn’t manage to make all of them, so now I have most of those balls of yarn in my stash. Waiting for when they get turned into probably not their intended project. Certainly the rat and another bunny weren’t on the list for Tiny (they’ve been made for cousins).
Of course, having made things that weren’t on the original list, I now have to adjust that list, to fit with the yarn (quantities and colours) left.

Except that, having had a more recent flick through the patterns, I’ve found others I now want to make. Oops.