Pokemon Amigurumi: Sylveon

Boy, was October ever busy! A lot more family members and friends from out of town came to visit last month, so I didn’t get a lot of time for crocheting. This month is also fairly busy with upcoming events, but since it is my birthday month, I am focusing on what I call my “guilty favourites”.

By “guilty favourites”, I mean the pokemon that I think are way super popular, but I still like them anyways; they are probably within the top 1 – 200 favourites according to this reddit list. I usually try to focus on the not-so-popular ones (or the super-intricate ones), because there are often a lot less crocheted content for them. The next ones I’m going to make will likely have been already done by someone else.

Take sylveon for example: a very popular pokemon, because it is an eeveelution and it’s super cute. I can’t help but love this pokemon – I am not immune to the eeveelution hype! This guy probably has a ton of crocheted renderings, and I am still adding my own in.

First off, I made the head and added the facial features as soon as I could. The outcome of this part would determine if I wanted to continue with the entire project. Previously, I had mentioned that I found it hard to make the mini-snout shape; I didn’t think I could do it for the pikachu, and even more so with eevee and its evolutions. It would be easy to ignore the snout and make it spherical, but that small detail is too important to me.

With pikachu, I could construct it from top-down in head shape, but with sylveon, it was going from the back of the head to the tip of the snout. I wanted to make the colour changes within the head piece, and luckily it didn’t look too bad after the attempt. I think the key in this version was that I stitched the piece into the shape that I wanted it defined as. Stitching always saves a weirdly crocheted piece.

Amigurumi Sylveon, front view of head base being stitched together — Before stitching: nose is twisted and looks a bit too long.

Amigurumi Sylveon, with head base stitched together — After stitching: “I guess it could work” stage; the nose is the right shape, but not so sure about that colourway.

Amigurumi Sylveon, with head base stitched together with facial features — After details stitched on: it is OK enough to continue making the rest of Sylveon.

With the ears and the tail, the extra protrusion as made by chaining on one round, increasing along the chained part in the second round, and then skipping all the new crochets back to the original amount within the round. I decided to do this on a whim, because I was too lazy to make a separate piece to attach later on.

The body was built like a lopsided eggplant, and the limbs were surprisingly no trouble to make. I used the same sort of techniques that I’ve been using all year – they are basically my tools of choice in crochet.

Amigurumi Sylveon, body piece — Technique used: combination of double crochets and single crochets within a single round.

Amigurumi Sylveon, front and back leg pieces — Techniques used: inc and dec the same amounts within a round; for colour to be slightly angled, the last round of the first colour had a combination of scs and dcs and the new colour was inverted in dcs and scs.

At this point, I was almost home free with the design; the bows were stitched at the centre to make the shape and the hair tufts were made by combining a chain of triangles together. I folded two at a time, stitched them together, and then repeated the process.