Emma the Bunny

When it comes to crochet, I am a huge fan of simple patterns and projects. Anything that requires thinking beyond counting rounds or stitches tends to be filed away under the “One Day” section of my crochet projects.

Especially as I have a tendency to leave large periods of time between crochet projects.

However, Toft’s Edward’s Menagerie has patterns which fill the brief of cute and straight-forward. I like the whole series of books, having collected the original Menagerie, Birds and the Imaginarium. I see there’s a new Menagerie collection…

I thought, as I picked up my hooks, to start at the beginning, with the first from the Menagerie: Emma the Bunny. And I found a suitable honey shade in Hobbycraft’s WI range (which seems a good substitute for the expensive alpaca yarn recommended by the pattern).

And off I went.

The joy of crochet, as opposed to knitting, is that I can always remember what I’m doing, even if it’s been months and months since I last picked up a hook. When I knitted (very rarely), I always had to stop and think before I started, to work out what needed to happen. With crochet, I can just get going. Which is always helpful in a hobby, especially when you’re a crafter and you cycle between different projects and crafts.

Emma took me about a week of evenings to create, though I was stitching slowly and I could probably have done all the legs in one evening, rather than spread across two. One of the things I like about these patterns is, generally, they only use the double-crochet (single-crochet for the US) stitches. It’s really just a matter of counting. I haven’t tried any of the more complicated patterns yet…