Fuzzy Brushed Amigurumi and how they got that way

A Short History of Fuzzy Brushed Amigurumi (crocheted and knitted toys)

In response to a question asked regarding my post of Fuzzy Hello Kitty, I mentioned the history of the Brushed Amigurumi Technique.  There was a little confusion (lack of clarity on my part) and the commenter thought it was my technique, but no, I'm not so clever as that.  ;o)


(I've noted here my recollections which I have verified as best as I can with net research.)


Who's on first?

As I remember, my first encounter with this idea was in 2007, the first year I was making amigurumi.  Wibit, aka Roman Sock had made a fabulous Pomeranian, and described her method of getting that marvellous furry effect by brushing mohair, or mohair blend yarn with a wire pet slicker brush.
http://littlegreen.typepad.com/romansock/2007/09/my-pomerianians.html
http://littlegreen.typepad.com/romansock/2007/09/free-to-a-lovin.html

Roman Sock's adorable Crocheted and Brushed Pomeranian

You can get the free pattern here:
http://littlegreen.typepad.com/romansock/files/pomeranian.pdf

Roman Sock posted a tutorial on how to brush crocheted fabric, including the results with several types of yarns, here:
http://littlegreen.typepad.com/romansock/brushed-crochet.html


The Next Mentions of Using a Pet Slicker Brush

The next mention of this amazing brushed yarn technique, that I  remember seeing, was from Roxycraft, who has a terrific photo tutorial on how to achieve a fuzzy look with ordinary yarn and a slicker brush.

 ---link to Roxycraft's photo tute ---

http://tamiesnow.typepad.com/roxycraft/2009/06/tutorial-making-brushed-amigurumi.html

And later she did a crochet-along for a very cute fuzzy panda, with video tutorials.

(sorry, that pic won't post - click on the first link to see the panda)

--- links to Roxycraft's crochet along and video tute ----
http://blog.craftzine.com/archive/2009/09/crochet-along_fuzzy_panda_amig.html
http://blog.craftzine.com/archive/2009/09/crochet-along_lesson_one_-_the.html
http://blog.craftzine.com/archive/2009/09/crochet-along_lesson_two_-_ass.html


And there was also chezmichelle's fuzzy critters and information.   Possibly around mid 2008? Around the same time that I saw Roxycaft's, or maybe a couple of months before.  The wee fellow directly below was crocheted with bamboo yarn, which chezmichelle said gave an excellent result.

Link to chezmichelle and her cute free patterns here:
http://www.suncatchereyes.net/Fuzzball.html

Unfortunately, like many of us who had blogs on vox.com, chezmichelle lost hers when vox disappeared and much of her info seems to be unavailable.
(except for a few bits and pieces, without photos, through the wayback machine's web archive http://www.archive.org )

P.S. to the vox.com issue - I did transfer my blog to blogspot.com - I have never had the time/energy to fix the look of the early posts, whose formatting got rather messed up in the process of the transfer.  But at least the content is all there.


What kind of yarn fibers work well?

It seems as though you can use this brushing technique with most yarns, but best to test your yarn by brushing a swatch before starting a project.   Some will work better than others.  I've seen wonderful results from wool, bamboo and acrylic yarns, and I'm sure other fibers will work well also.  Cotton yarn may not yield the results we want, but I haven't tried it so can't say for sure.  I've used Caron's Simply Soft, Vanna's Choice and Bernat Softee Baby, acrylic yarns, and all worked well.  I'll post a wee limbless kitty soon (hopefully) that I made with Simply Soft.  The outcome was very soft and silky.  Vanna's Choice came out wonderfully fluffy and fuzzy (see my Fuzzy Hello Kitty).


It's very simple to do, and really magical!  :o)  A very nice crocheted or knit amigurumi suddenly becomes a fuzzy, furry, cuddly softie!  Okay, maybe not suddenly, it's a bit of work to get it to a really fuzzy state, but it's still like magic to me!  :o)


xposted to weloveamigurumi.livejournal.com and theknittycat.blogspot.com

Notes on moving a vox blog to typepad, blogspot and wordpress...

UPDATED WITH MORE DETAILED INFO ON MOVING A VOX BLOG TO BLOGSPOT

see the bottom of this post for more information

After the shock of the news of vox's demise wore off a bit, the concern over the task of moving my blog to another site set in. However, importing this blog to other sites was surprisingly easy!  Tweaking the sites to look how I want them to was time consuming (especially doing three at a time!) but the actual import was no problem.

Importing to typepad, with the automatic set-up that vox is providing, was glitchy at first (maybe because I was moving very soon after the notice appeared on our blogs and there may have been a lot of folks going at once), and I did have to restart it, but all the posts and pics moved over with no real issues.

Importing to wordpress was super easy and super fast!  :o). And from there I was able to import to blogspot.  Wordpress has an import choice specifically for vox. Click this and give your vox info and it's done.

Blogspot was less simple, since blogspot only has the option to import a blogspot export file. Hmmm. Not very good marketing strategy, is it. However, once imported to a wordpress blog, you can export your blog to a file from wordpress (too bad vox didn't give us this option), and then convert this file with this handy wordpress2blogger utility:

http://wordpress2blogger.appspot.com/

The only bad thing is that there is a file size limitation, so this may not work for large blogs. There may be another utility for larger ones out there.  This utility converted my wordpress file perfectly and I was able to quickly import it to blogspot.

Update...
Warning: I have discovered that importing to blogspot with the wordpress file will bring links to photos in your wordpress library, if the photos in your posts were previously in your vox library (and not at flickr, photobucket, picasaweb or another photosite).  What this means is that if you delete your wordpress account, the photos linked to in your posts will disappear.  :o/  If your photos were not in your vox library to begin with, this is not a problem.  Also, if you just keep the wordpress account, it's not a problem, either.  The solution that I will have to apply is to change the link manually for each one affected to point to the photos on flickr.com.  Since I have a very small number of posts (though quite photo heavy), this won't be as daunting for me as for many of you with hundreds of posts to go through.

I've spent a few days with the three sites and so far, I'm most pleased with blogspot.  Here are my thoughts on the three sites:

Wordpress

Though wordpress has the nicest looking interface for composition and design, it has some real problems with pictures. And since my blog is totally picture heavy (except for this post, of course), this isn't a good thing for me.  Also, it's difficult to change the size of your text. Other than some header options, there is no sizing button, or font button in their composer. You have to manually change the HTML!  Ugh!

While posting this to wordpress, the font sizes went all wonky.  I can't see any size tags in the html window, so ???  Like I said, there are problems with this one.  :o/

Typepad

I wasn't pleased with Typepad at all. It's too restrictive. And I couldn't even have my own banner at the top of the blog. Their theme choices were very meager and allowed very little tweaking to allow you to make it better or even personalize it. Now this is a free account, so maybe there are more options for paid ones, but since I'm offering my tutorials, and patterns and hints as a service and gift for others, I'd like it to continue when I'm not around to pay a fee to keep the site, so I need a free site.  I didn't do much with this site since I disliked the look I was able to achieve there, so I can't speak as to it's functionality.

While putting in this post, I have played with the tools a little and there are some nice posting features.  An option to go full screen, so you can see all of your post, instead of being restricted to a little box (wordpress has this option as well, but blogspot only has the option of making the fairly generously sized box longer, not wider), and some additional fonts, that the others don't support, including, Comic Sans MS.  As well as having Heading1,2,3 etc, it has a lovely array of font sizes in a strange little wheel (instead of small, normal, large, extra large on blogspot, and paragraph, Heading1, heading2, etc. on wordpress).  Presumably you can really tweak the sizes if you have the patience, since you cannot type a number into this box but must use ctrl-shift-uparrow or downarrow to adjust it.  My efforts were, however, not successful. I also see an "insert a file" button, that the others don't have, and that has an intriguing sound to it.  I'll have to check that out.

Blogspot

Although the interface at blogspot isn't as classy-looking as the one at wordpress, while playing around with it to set up what I wanted, I found it to be surprisingly functional!  I was able to do pretty nearly everything I wanted to do, and with minimal effort. And most importantly, everything WORKED!  This, of course, is a big deal!  :o)

I was delighted to find that I could not only set the size and font of what i was posting (with limited font choices), i could also change the size and font of the text across my entire blog with built in, and easy to achieve, customizations to the template.  And there are lots of other easy-to-do customizations of the look and content, so I can really make this look how I want it to look.

I was frustrated at one point with the site header in the theme that I chose, as it was forcing the text to be all caps in the name of the site, and I wanted all lowercase, but everything else was working, so I figured I'd live with it for the moment. But then I discovered that I could easily get to the HTML of the template itself, and modify it!  And it was simple to take out the instructions to force uppercase. Hurray!  :o)


Results

If you'd like to take a look at the results on all three sites, they're here:

theknittycat.blogspot.com

theknittycat.typepad.com

theknittycat.wordpress.com

Leave a comment if you'd like to let me (and others) know your opinions of the sites, when moving your blogs. Of course, after the 15th of September you'll have to leave your comments on one of my other sites (I'd suggest blogspot since it looks like that will be the winner for my purposes), since we won't be able to do so on vox after that. :o(

Best of luck in your new homes, everyone!

UPDATE 09/17/2010 - 

MORE DETAILED INFO ON MOVING YOUR VOX BLOG TO BLOGSPOT

Vox to blogspot

1. Sign up for an account at wordpress.com
    (yes, I did mean wordpress - you need to get an export file of your blog from wordpress
     because blogspot won't import from vox directly)
2. Import your vox blog to wordpress
    a. go to your dashboard by clicking the button at the top left of the page
    "my blogs" then "dashboard" from the dropdown list
    b. on the left side of the dashboard is a list of links, near the bottom is "tools", click this to open the box
    c. click on "import" in the box (below "tools")
    d. find "vox" in the list in the center and click it
    e. fill out the form
    "host name" is the name of your vox blog - mine was "knittycat" for knittycat.vox.com
    "username" is the email address associated with your vox blog
3. Export your wordpress blog to a file and import it to blogspot following the instructions here:
    http://wordpress2blogger.appspot.com/

Ta daaa! You now have your blog copied to both wordpress and
blogspot. Any photos that were in your library on vox are now in your
wordpress library and are being linked to by your blogspot posts.

(This online conversion program may not work for large blogs as the file size limit is 1meg. However an exported blog is all text with links to pictures, so may not be as large as you think. If your blog is larger and this app doesn't work for you, I can't help, but try doing a google search for other ways to convert a wordpress export file to a blogger import file.  In the meantime, your blog is safely copied to wordpress.com)

If you have any problems, check the help forums on wordpress.com and blogspot.com, but I didn't have any difficulties with it.

Good Luck! :o)