Commission Blog – Nudi Fun

This week, we’ll be talking about free from crochet…or wild crochet, I’m not entirely sure what it’s called but I certainly enjoy doing it.

Crochet is very relaxing once you’re off on your way and you have a few rows to do and the feel of the yarn and the needle in the hand is meditative. What I don’t find meditative is trying to follow a pattern. I can do it but I get bored easily and I often find that something I’ve decided to do instead is more fun, even if it doesn’t look quite as polished as the picture that im trying to follow.

So I found that once I’d learned the idea and a few basics I just started making shapes and making my own patterns up. My work of the cuddly nuke is an example of this. A simple tube went into making this but there was no pattern, I just looked up how to start a cone and then knew that to make it into a tube I just keep going around until it is as long as I’d like.

So, that’s when a commission from a friend arrived. Something I’ve never heard of before. A nudibranch. It turns out that it’s a sea slug and they come in all different shapes and sizes. The one I’ve specifically been asked to recreate is this colourful guy here

So, like all my pieces, often, as soon as I get the idea, I usually know straight away what materials I am going to use to make it. It doesn’t always happen but more often than not I know how Im going to start it and go from there. No pattern, just get started. It’s certainly how it works with the felt and then as with clay and with sewing and crochet, observe and learn a few bits and improvise from there.

I’ve often reflected on this and why I cannot just follow a pattern but I’ve decided that I should probably lean into it. It turns out that a lot of people like patterns, I always thought that everyone found them as boring as I do, but it seems that it’s as always, ‘different strokes for different folks’

This type of creature doesn’t really lend itself to a pattern either really, its all wrinkly and flowy and a bit random, so I just set off a stich line and got going. I knew that I needed two circle shapes at either end, one bigger than the other so I started with a magic circle, which is where you end up with a little ball of stiches and then make it progressively bigger. Once I’d got myself a crocheted circle big enough for my liking I set off a single line of stiches to get the thing to the length I liked and then randomly stitched a few into a stich a few back and started another circle.

The tricky part then was making the spine. So I ended up with a big circle on one end, then a smaller circle at the other end and started to stich up and down the line between them until I had a spine of sorts. As I did that, I added more side to both of the circles until I had the main ‘middle’.

From there I needed to add some wavy bits, as well as a bit of depth as you’ll see that this creature has slightly raised sides on the circular bits so I did a few lines of stiches that were just ‘going around’ since if youre tracing a shape if you don’t expand or make shapes, the crochet tends to add some depth to it. After a few of those, I started to expand out again. Using stiches I thought were double crochet but I could have been making my own thing up really.

To add the wavey bits to the sides, I made big stiches like a double crochet and then graduated them in size so I ended up with waves, expanding the sides as I felt right.

After that I knew that I had to make some ‘walls’ down the sides really to properly make it more than a slug carpet. So I finished the crochet of that bit and started to do it a new underneath. Knowing that the best way to create the walls was just to simply single crochet around the shape, leaving enough room at the sides to have the overhanging wavy bits.

Once this was done, I put some stuffing in to make sure that it kept the shape and started to cinch up with bottom. From there, it was a matter of the starting a new set of ‘waves’ using various combinations of crochet stich sizes to go around the bottom part of the guy.

I send some pictures to my friend the commissioner and they were a fan so in order to break up the task I started to add colour. As is the way with the majority of my crochet pieces, rather than crochet the colours in, I like to add the details with felt. I don’t understand why you don’t see this more. Mixing disciplines is interesting and felting into a stuffed thing is fun and more importantly, quite easy!

So I added the blue and yellow colours around, this part did become quite monotonous since it takes a lot of stabbing to get the correct texture, and I also noticed I still needed to add quite a few little black embellishments to make sure it got a true to photo look. I started the colour before I’d added the second flat layer to the bottom ‘walls’ I’d added but it was nice to break up the tasks. At first, due to just being blocks of colour I wondered if I had made a mistake felting the colour rather than doing all of this in full crochet, as is the conventional way.

However, I resolved that once I’d felted enough and added the details it would come good. I don’t really like the fully crocheted look. I couldn’t tell you why, I just don’t. I think it becomes ‘too fluffy’, silly I know since felt is also fluffy but that’s just me.

After a while of this and some more bits underneath (including a tail!) we’re almost there – lots of felting, takes lots of time.

Finally, we needed some antennae…I was thinking about crocheting some and then felting them, since I didn’t have the right coloured yarn to crochet these antennae with. I decided to just go for it and felt them, despite the hgh liklihood in felting such think things that I stab my fingers…but it was worth it!

So, there we are. Nudibranch commission! I hope my friend likes it. I like it so hopefully that’s a good sign!

Looking forward to my next commission and the lines are open. Head to my CONTACT page if you’d like to discuss an idea, drop me an email or use the online form.

See the rest of my conceptual and felt work at the PORTFOLIO

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