Art of Making Amigurumi

Amigurumi is the Japanese art of making dolls, whether by crochet  or knitting.

It is also the art of embodiment of any form in life with crochet or knitting, whether it is a doll, teddy bear, cardboard or fruit figures, etc.

This delicate art, which needs extreme patience and accuracy, has spread in Egypt in the recent period.

SEE managed to get up close and personal with one of the pioneers of this art, engineer Amani Adel, who talked about this art.

[caption id="attachment_88082" align="aligncenter" width="486"] Eng. Amani Adel[/caption]

* The beginning

Adel is an interior design graduate from the Academy of Arts, and a wife and a mother-of-two. During her pregnancy with her first daughter, she desired to make her a unique gift from her hands; something for her to wear once she was born. This made her enroll in a school that teaches the arts of crochet and knitting.

[caption id="attachment_88087" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Amigurumi art[/caption]

“Frankly, I did not go deeper in the work of crochet as I did not feel the passion for it, but I continued as a method of entertainment until a video of beautiful crocheted bunny caught my eye from one of the channels that I followed on YouTube,” Adel said.

She continued: “I kept trying to follow the walk-through video but did not reach the desired result, then, I kept repeating the steps night and day over a week, until I learned to the crochet pattern whether in symbols, written or drawn,”

[caption id="attachment_88083" align="alignnone" width="720"] Amigurumi's doll[/caption]

*Celebrity dolls

There are dolls for celebrities such as Mohamed Salah or actress Shimaa Seif in her wedding dress, which Adel created.

“The idea of celebrity dolls represent a challenge for us, to see if we can create a lookalike doll of a celebrity,” she added. “The closer the doll looks like the celebrity the larger the victory.”

Speaking about Saif’s bride doll, she said: “Shimaa Seif bride doll, size of 30 cm, took two months to prepare and two months of work because lookalike doll is generally different from the ordinary doll, especially since it has no fixed steps (pattern) to work on it,”

“This is because I designed and worked on every detail in the doll, how it would look like and its suitable clothes fit for the doll,” Adel added.

“Amigurumi dolls are like a painting that we continue to add and remove from until we reach the closest image in our imagination and apply the thread.”

[caption id="attachment_88086" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Shaymaa seif doll by Amani Adel[/caption]

*Good initiative

Adel began to put her own dolls designs so that fans of this art can make their dolls. This is because the prices of the Amigurumi dolls are very expensive and are not affordable for everyone, and because unique creativity takes time and effort.

She made a 15-second film for the usage of the dolls other than to play with or as a decoration.

Contributed by Yara Sameh