Squaring the Circle: Crocheting a Minecraft Creeper

A request from the Overworld

My youngest son is deep into Minecraft. Not "plays it sometimes" deep: the kind of deep where the conversation at dinner is about redstone, and where a hissing sound anywhere in the house gets a reaction.

His older brother got a Luffy. It was only a matter of time before the little one wanted something too, and there was never any doubt about what it would be. It had to be a Creeper.

The problem with Creepers

Everything I had crocheted so far was round. Heads, bodies, egg hats, straw hats: all of it starts with a magic ring and grows outwards in circles, and amigurumi is very happy to live in that world. Round is what crochet does naturally.

A Creeper is not round. A Creeper is made of blocks, like everything else in Minecraft. A round Creeper is just a green potato with a face, and my son would have spotted it immediately.

So this time I had to learn something new: how to make squares and rectangles in crochet.

Learning to turn corners

The trick, once it clicked, is almost disappointingly simple. When you crochet a circle, you spread your increases evenly around the round, so the piece grows the same amount in every direction. For a square, you stop spreading them: you stack all the increases in four places, round after round, and those four places become corners.

Then the sides. To go from a flat top to a vertical wall, the piece has to turn a sharp edge rather than curve gently the way a ball does. And to close the cube, the whole thing again, in reverse.

It took me a few attempts, and the first ones were more cushion than cube. But at some point the stitches started behaving, the corners stayed where I had put them, and I had a green block sitting on the arm of the sofa.

The face is embroidered on in black yarn, square by square, trying to respect the pixel grid of the original. That famous sad, slightly menacing face is only a handful of pixels, so every one of them counts. Get one wrong and he stops looking like a Creeper and starts looking like a surprised frog.

Blocks all the way down

Once the head worked, the rest was the same lesson applied again: a tall rectangular block for the body, and chunky little blocks for the feet. Rectangles turned out to be squares with ambitions, so the method carried over without too much drama.

Crochet is soft, so none of these blocks are perfectly sharp. The edges are a bit rounded, the stuffing pushes the faces out a little. I decided I like it that way: he looks like a Creeper someone loves enough to hug, which is more or less what he is.

Ssssss…

And here he is. Cube head, block body, block feet, and that face.

What I loved about this one is that it was not just another amigurumi. It was a new trick. After a while of making round things I was starting to feel comfortable, and the Creeper pulled me back into not knowing how to do something, and then figuring it out. That is my favourite part of any hobby, and it is how I know I am getting better at this.

Now my son has a Creeper that will never explode. And I have a new skill, and a head already full of other blocky things to make.

Have you ever had to unlearn "round" in crochet? I would love to hear what your first square turned into.

Cheers,

Horacio Gonzalez - LostInBrittany