I Wish You Amigurumi Christmas

For the past several years my brothers, sisters, and I have been doing a hand-made gift-exchange for Christmas (often hand-made Christmas ornaments of some kind). For this year's gift for my sister I wanted to use a version of the free-standing amigurumi figure design that I've been developing through the projects I've been posting about for the past few months. I tried to think of some other ideas first, but for a Christmas-themed human figure it's tough to beat Santa. I decided I didn't want to do a completely traditional Santa figure with the hat and red suit, so I started by trying to figure out a pattern to map a bald-head-and-full-beard hairstyle onto the geometry of my pattern (since getting better at color-change patterns on my design was also something I wanted to work on). I spent some time thinking through how the "twist" of the amigurumi continuous-rounds style maps to the final result and created a "grid" to help me map out my color changes.

Even though I didn't want to go completely traditional with the outfit, a red-and-white color scheme seemed important so I gave him a red shirt and white pants. I was originally planning to put some extra cosmetic details on the shirt, but I got frustrated with that aspect when doing the mouth and I wasn't super-confident about the idea anyway, so I decided to pivot to just giving him a prop to put him in a non-traditional context. The thing I thought of that had the right combination of being easy for me to create without a lot of experimentation and being recognizable at the scale I'm working with was a banjo. So I made two off-white circles, then I created a chain in brown for the neck of the banjo, slip-stitched down one side of the chain and then continued that series of slip-stitches to join the two circles together, and then back up the other side of the chain. The slip stitches on either side of the chain created a semi-stiff flat section that works as the neck of the banjo. Then I made a chain from black yarn to work as a strap and hung it around his neck. So I guess Santa when Santa's not busy with his toy-making and gift-delivering job he's learning to play bluegrass music?

And here's an animated gif I made from a video where I spun him around 360 degrees to show off multiple angles:

I packed him up and mailed him off several days before Christmas and the post office surprisingly delivered the package a day earlier than scheduled, so I didn't even have to stress about whether the gift would get there in time.

In the time between when I mailed him off and before the holiday I did start experimenting with doing one of the Christmas-themed ideas I rejected before settling on Santa to just make something for myself, but that is turning out to be trickier than I anticipated so it's not done yet. I'll likely keep going with that since I tend to have a hard time letting go of ideas, but I also have some other things I want to explore, so I may go with one of them for my next project.