This beautiful Japanese-style has long been on my list of things to make since I first saw some pictures on Pinterest.
I had always put it off as something I would make “some day”, because in truth I thought it would be a fiddly and therefore unenjoyable work.
Turned out it wasn’t so bad after all and mostly due to the beautiful yarn I worked with, I actually loved making them.
At a party we hosted recently, one of my friends had a look at my newest creations, among which those two sweet Amenikos were sitting. My friend mentioned that the blue-ish one looked a bit grumpy.
Within the group of other women who had joined us, some knew of “Grumpy Cat” who had become famous with hundreds of memes and some didn’t. The topic quickly turned into a hilarious discussion with lots of laughter about the influence of social media, memes in general, what it means to live in a society where one grumpy looking cat can make their owners millions of dollars (seriously, a TV show with “Grumpy Cat”?) and the value of a newspaper that has the death of Grumpy Cat as one of their main stories.
Anyhoo, my intention was to give him a little smirk, as he seemed to me to be a little dandy. What do you think? Does he look grumpy or content?
And what do you think of the yarn? I wrote a review about it here.
Then there is this guy. I had started him a loooong time ago, but only made the head and body. He is made from a variegated green and a white cotton yarn. He is supposed to be the small version of the blue Ameniko, but the yarn is thicker than
the Mondial Cotton Soft, so he is almost as tall as his brother. It seems to me that the shape of the head and the body are slightly differently proportioned than they are in the larger cat, but it works nevertheless.
I am a bit unsure where the pattern originates. At the time when I found it, it was one of those pins where you click from page to page through all these click baits and advertising graveyard website. Honestly, WTF! Why do people do that? I know why, but really?!
However, after some search engine frenzy and a bit of research, I do believe that this is the original pattern in Japanese.
There is an English version of the same diagram on this website.
Another translation in English can be found on an amigurumi specialised website here. It was in fact their colour choices that made me want to have one Ameniko myself.
And I might have just found the yarn for it, too.