Oleg the Octopus

Oleg the Octopus is the first crochet pattern I made from Lydia Tresselt of lalylala. In fact, after an amigurumi Oompa Loompa doll and a minion hat, Oleg, is only the third crochet project I have ever done.

Materials Notes

Being new to crochet, finding the yarn for Oleg was a bit of a challenge. Lalylala is from Germany and the yarns she calls for are not easily available in the United States.

Light Blue

The primary yarn for Oleg was specified to be Atelier Zitron Trekking XXL Tweed - 4 ply - color: 209 lichtblau. It is a fingering weight yarn with a gauge of 10x10cm (4×4inch) = 30M/42R. I called all over the country trying to find this yarn and came up empty handed. I was told by my local yarn stores that tweed yarns aren't very popular and aren't often stocked. I only found a few stores that carried the Trekking XXL Tweed and none of those had the right color. I ended up using On-Line Supersocke 100 Cotton-Tweed, color 1382 sourced from Little Knits in Seattle. It has the same gauge and the tweed flecks are multicolored. And it was cheap at $6.50 for 100g (I used about 65g of this yarn for this pattern).

After some more digging, I realized Skacel Knitting is the US importer for Trekking XXL and they happened to be in the Seattle area. I gave them a call and was told they run a retail store called Makers' Mercantile in Kent, WA. I stopped in and they do carry the entire line of Trekking XXL tweed, but at $17.00 for 100g, I decided to stick with the Supersocke. They don't have an online store, but I'm sure if you really want this yarn, they could ship some to you.

Dark Blue

The pattern calls for Schoppel Wolle, Admiral tweed - 4ply - color: 3593 Tinte. A darker blue tweed fingering yarn with the same gauge as the light blue yarn. Again, this was impossible to find in the US. There is so little of this yarn used in the pattern that I don't think you need to search out a tweed yarn. I was making another purchase from Knit Picks at the time, so I grabbed one skein of Stroll Tweed fingering yarn in Marine Heather.

White

Again, I had a hard time finding the specified Schachenmayr Catania - 4ply - color: 130 (creme). This is a white or cream colored yarn with a gauge of 10x10cm (4x4inch) = 26M/36R. The pattern gives instructions for both this gauge and for yarns that match the gauge of the Light/Dark blue yarns (going up to either 54 or 66 stitches in the round). I used Elsebeth Lavold Hempathy - Bleached White (Color #54) at $5.99 from Little Knits. With these yarns and my tension, I found to match the 66 stitches in the hood, I needed to crochet the head going up to 60 stitches in the round. I love the look of this yarn, but it has almost zero stretch I found it fairly difficult to work with when using the tight tensions used in amigurumi.

Beads

I found a pack of mutlicolored opaque 6/0 seed beads at Joann's for a few dollars. There were red, white, black, blue, green, yellow, etc. I searched through to find a few red and white that matched.

Eyes

6mm black plastic safety eyes from Joann's.

Pattern Notes

I mostly followed the pattern as written with a few notable exceptions:

The pattern calls for a 2.5mm crochet hook. I used a 2.75mm, US size D Susan Bates hook.

As I mentioned above, the pattern gives directions to increase to either 54 or 66 stitches on the head depending on the gauge of the yarn used. I found with my yarn, I had to increase to 60 stitches.

The pattern has you crochet each of the legs separately starting at where they will join to the body and finishing at the tips. I am terrible and decreasing down to nothing so I did the arms in reverse. It took a little figuring out, but I started with 4 stitches in a magic circle, and increased until I could work the tentacles in reverse. Contact me if you need specific directions.

The directions for connecting the head to the body made no sense to me. It says to single crochet the body and head together by single crochet at the neck. I contacted Lalylala and she was very helpful in clarifying things. It turns out you insert the hook from outside the body through a stitch to the inside of the body (like normal), then you insert the hook from the inside of the head to the outside the head, yarn over, pull through both the head and body, yarn over, then pull through the two loops on the hook. You can make this easier by pinching together head and the body such that the inside of each touch each other, lining up the stitches. This leads to a round of stitches facing out around the neck - almost like a collar. It is very clean way to join the two.

If you like the pattern, you can find this plus many more at lalylala or on Etsy.