I challenged myself to make smallest plushie I've ever made

Last week, I made the smallest plushie I've ever made. To tell you the truth, I'm not sure it even counts as a plushie because of how small it is. Arguably, it isn't the smallest plushie I've made either, I did make a tiny duck, but it is the smallest plushie that I've designed myself and made. Technically, I guess this is my biggest smallest plushie I've made, if you compare it to the no-sew ones I made. I'm pretty proud of it.

For a little background, I first discovered microcrochet through Tiktok. There's someone in Germany, I think, making a full size blanket out of microcrocheted granny squares. I believe they use sewing thread and a 0.5mm crochet hook. As someone who has never made a granny square and has no desire to start, it got me wondering whether the same type of crochet could be replicated with amigurumi because I thought it would be a perfect travel activity. I figured I could bring minimal supplies with me but still pass time by crocheting and use up some of the 100s of sewing threads I had at the time.

I thought about doing this far too late and ended up needing to use Amazon Prime for a crochet hook. The smallest hook I could get for a reasonable price that would arrive before I was set to travel was a 1.25mm or 1.mm hook. In Amigurumi terms, this hook was too big for what I wanted to do so it was an absolute fail. The idea was packed away in an imaginary box. Fast forward a little bit and I bought a yarn winder to make yarn cakes. This is something I highly recommend for anyone who uses yarn because it makes storing and organising yarn so much less stressful, even if it does active "play mode" for my kitten. With my yarn winder, came various knitting and crochet items, including a selection of crochet hooks ranging from 0.75mm to 1.5mm. I have successfully used the 0.75mm hook with sewing thread but the lighting was terrible and I was miserable, it's something I'll revisit eventually though because I have since bought a great ring light.

For Christmas, my mother-in-law gifted me a thing of cotton lace yarn. I'm not sure what you call them, is it still a skein? Is it a spool? She didn't know this, but I've wanted to crochet flowers using that kind of yarn for so long, but I'd been putting off taking the plunge to this variation of crochet. This gift really opened a can of worms and using the white I was gifted; I made a rose - which took all day. Then, I ordered more colours and made more flowers, some of which I need to sew together still.

I'd bought quite a few no-sew patterns from HaruCrochets for a series of quick crochet plushies to make for markets and I absolutely loved the duck so much. Coincidentally, I had the right colours to microcrochet a duck, so that's what I did. Then I made a lion, a bunny, two elephants, a second lion and another duck. All of these were reasonably fast to make, because although microcrochet does take longer than crocheting with plush yarn, the no-sew aspect was a massive help. I was having a big debate with myself on whether I should take my microcrochet one step further and before I knew it, I was microcrocheting a cow.

I feel a little bit embarrassed to say that this cow took me over four hours to make. I originally downplayed this to be 2.5-3 hours when I posted it because I was thinking "wow that took me forever and it only takes an hour or so when I make a chenille plushie with the same pattern". And then I thought about it properly and considered the fact that I was using sewing scissors to push the stitches out in the right direction after doing the second round of stitches and stuffing it with pointy tweezers and it actually makes complete sense that it took so long. I had to use a sewing needle to sew the body parts on which is drastically different to using a darning needle with chenille yarn. Apparently with microcrochet, people wax the yarn/thread they're using, which is something I didn't want to do so it need keep splitting into small strands and I'd have to undo the stitch and try again. It took a valid amount of time, especially when the body alone has over 500 stitches and there's eight parts to sew on plus eyes to sew.

I knew fairly early on in the making process that this was a project that I didn't intend on allowing to take over my business and become "the new product" for my shop. It's great fun and it's a cool thing to show at markets and for social media, but I knew it could very easily reach a point where I was in a vicious cycle of underpricing this, it selling and then I'd feel obligated to make more in order to feed into a potential demand for a product that is incredibly time consuming and would eventually wreck my eyes. So, it was more important for me to not underprice this cow for the amount of time and skill required, than for it to sell. People on Tiktok really did not like this and I received a large number of nasty comments about a product I didn't even want to sell in the first place.

But anyway, I'll pretend people didn't say what they say and focus on the fact that I made a really cute, tiny cow. If you'd like to make one too, I used my cow pattern, a 1mm crochet hook, lace yarn from Hobbii, polyfil stuffing, two different sizes of needle and black sewing thread. You can get glass eyes that are 2mm small, but I didn't like the idea of using glass, so I decided to sew the eyes on with the sewing thread instead. I've made one tiny plushie in this style since and I think the next one I'm going to make will be a lilac mouse, but if you have a different request for what I should make next, let me know in the comments.