meet lloyd

Last week a friend introduced me to amigurumi—a japanese style of crocheted stuffed animals. You can see incredibly cute ones at Avocadolite and GourmetAmigurumi. Though the ones on those sites are pretty complicated, the basics of the skill didn't seem too intimidating, so I thought I'd give it a try. I found this pattern for a penguin from kreinik which I thought appropriate for my Penguin friends.

Jennie, being a bear of little vision, named him Blobbie the Penguin as I worked to shape his (admittedly somewhat blob-shaped) body. I didn't have any black yarn, so I just used some endy-bits that I had lying around--red and cream. Mom said a red penguin was either a Republican or a Communist, and since he certainly didn't want to be a Republican, he became Blobbie the Commy Penguin.

In the end, I showed up Jennie's skepticism by producing a moderately cute little bird. We realized that penguins that are not black really just look like any other bird. (Little abstractly crocheted ones do, anyway.) And when he was all done and had received his little embroidered face, he whispered to me that his name was Lloyd and that communism was just a phase he went through—he has now wholeheartedly espoused the democratic system as well as the free-market economy, despite being red.