Ithaqua was my first large scale crochet creature and one of my earliest attempts at making a creature that was one solid piece of crochet. Almost the whole creature is crocheted in the round, no parts have been sewn on, even the mouth is crocheted in.
It has no armature other than pipe cleaners in the fingers, toes and head tentacles. At around 50cm tall it is probably about as big as you can go without extra support.
Teeth and claws are made from polymer clay – my first attempt, and looking back now they seem very lumpy and crude.
They have wire baked in but that is mostly to give the pipe cleaners something to anchor on to and strengthen the top. The claw itself is held in by tightening the starting loop into the groove at the top.
I basically made it up as I went starting with the toes and continuing up.
Each toe or finger is crocheted separately then joined into a larger round with the others, this round is then extended to make the arm or leg.
I’m not entirely sure where the burning desire to make these all in one piece came from – I had been experimenting with amigurumi at the time which tends to be very much done in units that are sewn together after crocheting.
The mouth was tricky. I essentially crocheted in the round from the center of the nose, but stopped and started again on each side of the mouth insert.
The teeth are a little inclined to poke out so you can see the attachment points, it was my first attempt and the design definitely has some flaws.
I like to think that the extreme snaggletoothiness is part of its charm.
I wasn’t sure how to finish the head, I did not want hair, or fur, or horns, or just a plain dome.
Eventually decided to make tentacle hair (good old HP loved his unspeakable tentacles).
These were crocheted out from the head rather than starting at the tip, in keeping with the plan to start at the toes and keep going till I hit the top of the head.
He does have a bit of a dome head under all the tentacles though – because I was crocheting outwards at this point I couldn’t fill the entire back of the head with tentacles without breaking my self imposed restriction on sewing anything in.