Crochet Baby Pumpkins

Today I want to share with you these three adorable little crochet pumpkins I made for my niece and two nephews! I was feeling the Fall Spirit a little early, and these were actually complete weeks ago -- but I wanted to be sure the packages had safely arrived before I showed them off on the blog.

For those of you playing along at home, this is my first attempt at a crochet "stuffed animal". I learned how to crochet 3D shapes when I made the basket earlier this year, and off-camera I've been working on a few failed unfinished projects that require 3D elements that never made it on the blog.

These were made based loosely on a pattern I found on Loulou Downtown's blog. The basic idea is you crochet a flattened sphere, stuff it, then wrap some yarn around it so that it creates wedged segments for the pumpkin shape.

I got to practice my crochet increase and decrease as well as joining in the round, which is really, really weird. For some reason, you get a seam going diagonally up the side of the shape instead of straight up. I suppose it makes sense when you consider that all crochet stitches kind of lean forward, but still.

The stem is basically a hollow tube. I tried a tester-pumpkin with the stem stuffed and it looked... inappropriate for children. Definitely do not stuff the tube.

The leaf was a little tricky. I used a pattern I found by Ambassador Crochet. As with pirate diplomacy, leaf patterns are really more like guidelines, really.  The basic idea is that you mix up double, half double, and single crochet stitches and also put multiple stitches into one stitch in order to make the leaf fan out. I got to experiment with using some freehand stitchery to make the leaf wider or narrower. As a result of my inexperience, the leaf naturally curled a bit, which actually ended up looking intentional!

For yarn, I used Vanna's Choice worsted weight yarn in Terracotta (pumpkin), Chocolate (stem), and Fern (leaf). The hook is a size G. A regular skein of this yarn will make two of the larger mini-pumpkins (which are I believe 56 half-double crochet around, if that helps you at all).

Now that I can make a few different shapes, I hope to learn how to do amigurumi next! I got this book for my birthday and I'm still trying to decipher it. I tried a few times to start a pattern, but you have to use a tiny, tiny hook on tiny, tiny yarn and it's a bit of a mess, really.