Superhero Crochet: Amigurumi Thing

Over the past few weeks I've been learning to crochet by following the instructions that came with the Star Wars Crochet craft kit to make several amigurumi Star Wars characters. It has been fun, but I've also been very tempted to go “off book” and experiment with some of my own ideas. As I was working on my most recent one I had the idea that I could do some “side projects” where I experiment while also continuing to develop my skills by doing the ones from the book. And as I was pondering that idea, seeing a mini-skein of orange yarn reminded me of one of my favorite superhero characters, The Thing from the Fantastic 4, so I decided that would be my first non-Star Wars crochet project.

My initial plan was to use the head and upper body similar to the Star Wars characters I've been making, but I wanted to see how hard it would be to try a different design with the legs. One of Thing's most distinctive facial features is his rocky brow ridge. I thought that a line of bobble-stitches would do a good job of implementing that in crochet form.

My previous figures have all used small black plastic eyes, but the set of plastic eyes that I bought a few weeks ago included a few sets with colored irises. They're much bigger, but I couldn't resist using the blue ones for the ever-lovin' blue-eyed Thing.

The big eyes do make his face rather cute, I think.

My recollection was that the Thing's shorts were just straight blue, but when I did an image search for references a lot of them had a black waistband, so I went with that.

And this is where I started the biggest departure from the previous projects. In the ones I've done the legs have all been done as a single body-code that is then joined together front-to-back at the bottom to form legs. Here I wanted to try chaining across from the front to the back and then crocheting legs as independent tubes.

t sort of worked. Because I didn't really carefully calculate how to do the foot, figuring I could just wing it, the heel ended up a little rounded, which isn't ideal for stability. I also somehow ended up with an extra increase in there somewhere, making the leg a little thicker than I intended.

I also had a bit of a scare when I thought I was running out of orange yarn and wasn't sure if I would have enough for the other leg and the arms, but then I realized the assortment of colors I bought included two orange mini-skeins.

The second leg was a lot trickier, since adding a new crochet element was something I hadn't done before. Unfortunately I forgot to take pictures during this part., but here are the completed legs with the still-to-be-attached arms.

Since this was the most experimental part of the project let me say that I think the theory was sound but there were some issues with the implementation. For one thing, when I chained across I think I ended up allocating more stitches to one leg than the other, so one's a bit thicker. For another thing, when I started adding on the second leg with the blue yarn I went based on my notes for how many rounds I did for the shorts on the first leg. But those notes had treated the “crochet halfway around and then chain across” step as one of the torso rounds rather than the leg, so the leg on the right has one more round of blue in it than the one on the left, making the shorts a bit asymmetrical (I realized the issue while I was doing the orange so I compensated by adding an extra orange round so the legs would end up the same length overall). Also, I might have overstuffed the arms a bit, and the foot issues make him a bit tricky to stand up. But overall I'm happy with the result.

Obviously I think I made some mistakes, but most of them were in the “experimental” part of the design, and since I learned something from them I consider them at least partial successes (and, unlike Reed Richards, I didn't end up exposing anyone to dangerous cosmic rays in my experiment). There are other things I could critique about my design as well, like maybe making him a bit too tall, but on balance I think it went pretty well. For the next experimental project I do I think I'll have to do a little bit more work up front getting measurements for the size of the various stitches and doing some math. Winging it works fine for some things, but I think getting a stable foot design will take a little more planning.