Amigurumi Lessons

Understanding Round and Oval Shapes

(in order to create head)

There is no animal or doll toy without head. Understanding and learning how to make one is essential when creating your toy.

This simple round shape used to create head, as all of amigurumi elements, also has endless possibilities.

You can make simple sphere. With simple one you can never go wrong. You can make wider top and slimmer bottom or vice verse. You can make it squarish looking or go some three edges weird shape if creating one alien.

Many possibilities and you are not sure how?

Let me know if you’ll find out how, after this lesson!

This lesson will talk about basic round and oval shapes made with even increasing stitches to form the shape’s width and even decreasing stitches to close it.

Most commonly used are spheres. Specially common are spheres starting in magic ring with 6 single crochet stitches.

Why is that so? Let me show you on examples:

As you can see from above photo, I have crocheted several different rounds. Each one I started with different stitch count in the magic ring, increased evenly for 5 rounds, then repeated last round stitch count for the following 5 rounds and evenly decreased in order to close.

Increases are made in orange colored yarn for you to see what is happening in each work.

If you ask me, I like all of them, even the rounds starting with 7 or 9 stitches that are not in this photo but I included them in this lesson as well.

All of the rounds increase nicely and all are creating nice rounds to start with.

I am sure you will agree with me.

Now let us see how they look from the side view.

Aha! So that is the difference!

Can you tell?

Depending on how many stitches you use to start with, it will apply to your work. The less the stitches, the narrower the work. More stitches you start with, the faster you will reach desired width.

The more stitches you start with, the more repeating s in the middle rounds you’ll need to do in order to reach nice and round shape.

By now you can guess why is the 6 stitches in magic ring very popular (5 sts as well). They find themselves in the golden middle.

So why to bother talking about all other possibilities?

They all matter and are all important. Furthermore, you need to understand all of them in order to make your head desired shape.

Each one of them talks different story and will make your work look just the way you imagined. Many times, you won’t find yourself satisfied with simple 6 increasing rounds on top and decreasing to close. Many times you will need narrower head on the bottom or in the middle or longer neck to create…

That is why all these stitch counts matter and are important for you to understand. So let us talk a little about each one of them.

3 Sts start/inc/dec

Very rarely used, but is nice for small works and cone shaped heads for example. It will always have this pointy, sharp end because of only three stitches used in the magic ring. Increasing/decreasing will go slow. 3 stitches each round is not much, but remember and use it if you are looking for something pointy on top. Middle part, if done will make this cone looking beginning start to look as spindle-shaped. Not the round shape but nice one to use for small heads, flower buds…

3 sts inc/dec are great to form edges on your head. Adding them inside you work will shape your head little bit better and give nice edges touch. For example, try adding them right after you finish creating your top of the head, and use 3sts increase to form the forehead and back of the head. Or use it around nose area two even increases on sides and make one just above where nose will be. This will make your nose pointing more. These are just few samples crossing my mind as I write.