The Making of an Elephant

My sister-in law recently became a Grandmother (although she prefers the term Meema), which means I became a Great-Aunt {gulp}! That sounds so old.

She asked if I would make an elephant for her new grandson and of course I promptly said YES!

I chose to do the elephant from the book Crocheted Wild Animals (3/26/17 this pattern is currently not available from deramores.com and it was a LOT of fun. You can find a free pattern just for the elephant on the Deramores website – you will need to provide them with your email address in order to get the free pattern.

I used some grey acrylic yarn that I had lying around and an D (3.25 mm) hook.

Here is a photo of all the piece of the elephant.

Next we have a rough layout of how the elephant will be assembled. Will you look at all those yarn ends! What a mess.

With his head and legs attached, it was now time to find just the right placement for his ears. To make this easier, I sat him on top of a plastic storage box that I have on my work table so that he was at just a little above my eye level.

Once I had the ears pinned in place and I was happy with where the sat on his head, I stitched them on good and tight, crocheted and placed his eyes and firmly attached his tusks. Here’s a picture of him sitting in the corner on my worktable.

While I thought he was really cute, I felt he was missing something and I wasn’t totally happy with the way he looked – he needed some color because there was just too much grey!

Trying to figure out what I could do to the crochet amigurumi elephant to add just a little color to him was quite the challenge. So I went searching on Google for inspiration – and I found pictures of elephants from India all dressed up in ceremonial garb and it clicked! He needed something colorful for the top of his head and some little pink nostrils on the end of his trunk!

So, I broke out my crochet hook and some colorful variegated sock weight yarn and set about making a colorful granny square following the pattern for what was intended to be a dishcloth!

So, here is the finished elephant. Isn’t he just so much cuter? It’s those little finishing touches that just make a handcrafted crochet gift unique!