Bad taste amigurumi

Hey. So its been a while.

All my knitting time has been taken up recently with an epic knitted sea side blacket for my father in law, Brian. I'm not that great at knitting in summer anyway - need the long winter nights to drive me to the needles.

In the meantime I thought I'd share the fruits of other people's efforts. These are the best bad taste amigurumi ever:

Crocheted neuron with Multiple Sclerosis damage (plus other anatomical treats here)

Cute toilet paper, with or without poo friend

Octopussy with insertable tampon

Anthias turner

Just came back from an amazing week in the red sea, finishing my PADI open water scuba course with my husband. It's like going to another world underwater, bobbing around with clouds of neon fish, flying over lush corals and spotting rays and turtles and even a reef shark in and around the bays of sharm el sheikh. We flew home from 38 degree heat to minus 3 in London last night and I set about making a thank you present for our instructors and guides at camel dive club. This fine orange lady is an anthias - I've called her anthias turner. Anthias are hermaphrodites - the most dominant female in a harem group changes sex to become male and if she dies another female steps up to the mantle. Fish feminism in action. They also swim directly into the current and seemed to be doing a much better job than me at mastering the forces of the sea.

Slow loris

Inspired by this classic Youtube vid , I created this little amigurumi loris for my boss as a secret santa present.

Slow loris are threatened because poachers kill them for their eyes, which they use as a traditional medicine. But the cute loris isn't without defence...

They have a poisonous bite and if that fails they can cunningly drop from their branch and roll away in a tight little ball. Too cute.

Back from the dead

Spooky happenings over the weekend. A creature, given up for dead, emerged from the depths, drawn by the presence of its true master...

The story begins in the inhospitably cold days before Christmas. Hiding away from the un-godly weather, I turned the power of my opposable thumbs to crafting a creature of the night for my cousin Michael. He likes that sort of thing – monsters, zombies, skeleton armies etc etc. Rummaging through the endless scraps of DK I found just the right kind of knobbly ‘rotten flesh’ shade of tweedy wool and set about a pattern from Creepy Cute Crochet.

He turned out a treat. All drooling blood and brains, wobbly cadaverous head and dragging knuckles.

I took a couple of snaps for posterity but when I went to wrap him a few days later he was nowhere to be found... We searched the house, terrified of the horrific, evil acts he could be inflicting on other knitted creations, but to no avail. It was a mystery, only explainable by a possible accidental ejection amongst the recycling.

Months later, as Spring tried desperately to break through the bleak, black Winter... Michael came round for a game of Settlers of Catan (fun board game involving trading wheat, bricks etc to claim dominion over the island of Catan – try it sometime) and to watch Big Man Japan (weird Japanese monster movie involving a giant Gary Glitter look-a-like pummeling various monsters including a giant potato with an telescopic eye in place of his manhood and a family of cosmic looking giants that give a mean wedgie)

Within 5 mins of his arrival, I moved a cushion to make more seating room and out crawled the zombie from the nether regions of the couch, slightly squished and looking even more decomposed but otherwise still in good fettle. Or at least as much as the living dead can ever be.

It was like Thriller all over again.