In my home it’s very common for me to browse my computer at the living room table with my sons happily drawing next to me. But that also means they get a good look at my screen while browsing around the world of crochet designs. Lately, my youngest son is very into aquatic creatures so it wasn’t surprising at all for him to put on his sweetest pleading voice and say “Mama, can you make me one?” when we came across Alyx.
Alyx has been sitting in a very full folder of patterns on my computer for some time. I bought his pattern as bundle from Neogurumi (Jessica Doering) a long time ago, but who has time to crochet ALL the beautiful stuff, right? I’ll have a link to Alyx’s pattern at the bottom of this post. The pattern is written in US crochet terms.
Now I know what many of you are thinking. “Aren’t axolotls usually pink?” Well, yes they are, but they do come in some more rare colors in nature. Probably not anything close to robin egg blue, but we’re allowed to take creative license when the client is picking out his own color choices from my yarn stash.
And just look at that adorable little smile! The waving arm was a “Christmas Eve, rushing to get done, oops I wasn’t careful” happy little mistake that turned out fortuitously cute. I didn’t HAVE to get Alyx done because my son knew he was getting the axolotl, but I just love being able to let him meet a new friend first thing in the morning.
I’m going to start off my review by saying that I couldn’t be happier how close my results turned out to the designer’s example. When you go check out her pattern you’ll be able to compare our blue cutie to her pink bundle of kawaii. Sorry, I try to avoid using other people’s photos in my posts because they aren’t my photos to share so you’ll have to go check out Neogurumi to see for yourself.
I used #4 medium worsted weight acrylic yarn and a 3.0 mm hook, basically the same as what I use for everything. My Alyx measures approximately 8 inches from the top of his chubby head to the tip of his tail.
The first thing that drew me to this design in particular was the gill frills. We don’t do loopy, fuzzy, or any kind of otherwise not durable stuff with our toys. We cuddle our toys and they need to be able to stand up to two boys loving them. But we also like texture which made this bumpy design much more appealing than some of the smooth flower petal looking designs out there.
The tail is also an adorable design with little scallops perfectly creating a tail fin ruffle.
The only complaint I have about this design is not an issue with the design itself, but a personal thing. I’m not always the best at sewing on flat additions such as spots. But the spots are SO very necessary to give Alyx the perfect character and personality. There’s only 6 of them, so it wasn’t that bad.
From the back it’s a little more obvious to see that the body is worked in two pieces. The top is worked from the head down while the tail is worked from the tip end up to the body. I usually like to work bodies in one piece as much as possible, and I probably will just rewrite that part to just go from the top of the head to the bottom of the tail if I ever make another one. But being done in two pieces does allow you to adjust the placement a bit to make a more defined separation defining where the tail begins.
So there you have it! Alyx the Axolotl by Neogurumi is a really great pattern that even a beginner can handle as long as they know how to do a bobble stitch for the toes.
Thanks for sticking with me to the end. As a reward, the link is the big button right below this. It will take you to Neogurumi’s Alyx page in her Ravelry store. He’s currently only available as part of a bundle on Ravelry but she also has an Etsy shop. Etsy will not allow me in Japan to open a shop (or maybe it’s Japan that doesn’t allow Etsy’s business practices?) so I will never shop on Etsy either even though they will happily take money from Japan, hahaha. Anyway, I will never link to Etsy on my website.
Get the pattern and make an Alyx for yourself!
