What Is Amigurumi? Meaning, Pronunciation and How It's Made

Amigurumi is the craft of crocheting or knitting small stuffed toys and creatures. These days, most amigurumi is crocheted: cute animals, food, plants and characters, made in tight little stitches and stuffed until firm and huggable.

What does amigurumi mean?

This term comes from Japanese. It puts together ami, which is crocheted or knitted, and nuigurumi, a stuffed doll or soft toy. So amigurumi just means a crocheted or knitted stuffed toy.

How do you pronounce amigurumi?

Say it ah-mee-goo-roo-mee, and make each syllable pretty much as strong as the rest. For more than one, you use the same word: one amigurumi, two amigurumi.

How amigurumi is made

• In rounds, in a spiral. For most pieces, you begin with a magic ring and work in rounds without joining, which means you'll want to mark the first stitch of every round.
• With single crochet, worked tightly. A small hook for the yarn keeps the stitches close, so the stuffing doesn't show through.
• Shaped by increases and decreases. If you add stitches, your work gets wider; if you take them away, it pulls in. That's what shapes a ball, a cone, or a long piece.
• In pieces. The head, body, arms and ears are made separately, stuffed, and sewn together at the end.

What you need to start

• Yarn: Cotton and acrylic are both fine. Fingering or DK yarn gives you tiny, detailed toys. Worsted or chunky yarn gives you larger ones that stitch up quick.
• A crochet hook a size or two smaller than the yarn label suggests, for tight stitches.
• Stuffing: polyester fiberfill.
• Eyes: safety eyes, or yarn to embroider them.
• A yarn needle, a stitch marker and scissors.

The stitches you'll use

Stitch	What it does
Magic ring	Starts a piece with no hole in the middle
Single crochet (sc)	The stitch almost every amigurumi is made of
Increase (inc)	2 sc in one stitch: the piece grows
Decrease (dec)	2 stitches worked together: the piece closes. The invisible decrease looks neatest
Slip stitch (sl st)	Finishes a piece neatly

Our crochet abbreviations page explains every one.

Is amigurumi hard?

Once you can make one single crochet, you're set. Simple patterns stick to just those stitches, so the tricky part is mainly keeping stitches snug and counting every round. It gets a lot simpler with a pattern that gives the stitch count after each round and shows how each piece should look.

Try it on a toy

Choose one of our free patterns and use the method, or make your own pattern from a photo of something you like.