Swedish Chef Amigurumi

At the beginning of January, I agreed to make a Swedish Chef pattern for someone who was looking for one on Ravelry. At the time, I hadn't yet done the copyright research, and I thought I might as well go for it! Yesterday, I finally finished (a week late, and I feel terrible about it). I heard back in the late afternoon that she was satisfied with the FO, then I put the pattern together and send it out, so now it's finished, and I'm glad of it. :) It was late enough that I offered to send it for free, but we agreed on half payment, instead. It didn't cost me much to make (mostly scrap or old stash yarn) so I don't mind. Once I found out about the copyright stuff, it suddenly became like pulling teeth to get myself to finish this project. On the plus side, I am getting a lot of positive feedback from it. Doing something like this, it's easy to see the allure of working with well known properties - people notice, and appreciate more because the work is more accessible. The temptation is certainly strong - but oh well.

Anyway, on to the pics!








All in all, I'm pretty happy with how this project turned out. I got to experiment with some new techniques, practice making a doll based directly off of a picture (though actually, now that I think about it, I've referenced pictures with most of my creations), and it was interesting to make a doll with so many different pieces (body, arms, head, two ears, nose, hair, two eyebrows, mustache, apron, bow tie - made of two bits - and the cleaver). Making the hat was entirely experimental and turned out almost exactly how I wanted it (but shockingly time consuming). Then, I had to figure out how to make the hair (which worked much better than I thought it would). Lastly, to make the eyebrows and mustache, I had to learn how to do a loop stitch (I used Planet June's tutorial), and then I crossed my fingers, muttered a prayer to no one in particular, and clipped each loop - and discovered to my joy that this didn't, in fact, cause the whole thing to fall apart. Phew! Several moments of fear involved in that one. :) So this whole project was an excellent learning opportunity.

My inspiration photo, by the way, was this one:


I'm not happy to have done something that violates copyright, now that I understand how that works, and I'll say plainly as I said when I wrote this post about what I learned relating to that: never again. Now that I know how the law works, I will not make anything else based directly on a copyrighted source. Inspired by - like, say, the cowel I made on Monday which was inspired by the Jump Gates in B5 - that's fine, it's a distant enough interpretation that I don't see any cause of thinking it's a derivative work - but, say, a doll based on a puppet? Totally off limits. So don't ask. :)