The bench

About the bench

One person, one hook, and a habit of writing the number down. This page explains who is behind the builds and what has to happen before one of them gets issued.

How I got here

I came to this from model-making. For eleven years I built prototypes for product designers: foam blocks, resin casts, a great deal of sanding and a calliper always somewhere on the bench. The job taught me one habit that has nothing to do with craft and everything to do with finishing things — measure it, write the number down, and if the next one comes out different, find out why before you make a third.

Amigurumi arrived by accident. A friend asked for a small whale, I worked it from a pattern that skipped the counts on three rounds, and I spent an evening unpicking a head that would not close. That evening is basically why this site exists. Every build here carries a count on every single round, because the round where a count is missing is always the round where something goes wrong.

The addiction part of the name is not marketing. I make the same animal until it stops annoying me, which is usually four goes and occasionally seven. What you read as a finished build is the last one in that pile. The earlier ones are in a box under the bench and they are what the snag list is made of.

What a build has to pass before it gets a number

A build starts as a scribble and a rough count, and it does not get a number until four things are true. It has been worked all the way through at least twice, the second time following only what is written. Every round in every table ends with the stitch total that came off the hook. Every part named in the manifest has its own table. And the finished piece has been measured stuffed, with a ruler, not calculated from a gauge swatch.

The snag list is the part I am most attached to. Those entries are not hypothetical mistakes written to fill a section — they are the things that went wrong on my bench, usually more than once, and the fix is what I did about it. If a build has four snags it is because I made four different mistakes making it.

When something turns out to be wrong after a build is issued, the page is corrected and the mk number steps up. I would rather a build say Mk 2 and be right than look untouched and be quietly edited.

What this site does not do

There are no files. Nothing downloads, nothing is emailed to you, and there is no account to make. The build is the page, and the page is free.

There are no videos and no paper packs. I would rather spend the time making the next animal than filming this one, and a printed sheet goes stale the moment a count is corrected.

There are no star ratings and no counts of how many people made a thing. I have no honest way to measure either, so the site does not pretend to.

Yarn, hooks and the things I actually use

Almost everything here is worked in worsted cotton on a 2.5 mm hook, which is a smaller hook than the yarn asks for and exactly the point: amigurumi fabric has to be tight enough that stuffing does not show through it. A few of the sea builds are DK on a 2.25 mm hook because a smoother fabric suits a fin better.

I use plastic safety eyes for anything that lives on a shelf and embroidered eyes for anything going to a small child. Every build that names safety eyes tells you the size and tells you where the embroidered alternative goes.

Stuffing is ordinary polyester fibrefill, added in pieces the size of a walnut rather than in handfuls. A firm amigurumi is stuffed in twenty small additions, not four big ones.

The bench record

Maker

Odile Ferreira

Role

Maker at the bench

Terms used

US, throughout, with the shorthand repeated on every build

Usual yarn

Worsted cotton on a 2.5 mm hook; DK on 2.25 mm for the sea builds

Makes before a build is issued

Two, minimum: one to draft, one to follow

Corrections

Worked again on the bench, then the build steps to the next mk

Write to

hello@amigurumiaddict.com

Odile — issued from the bench