Here is the third of the little amigurumi toys I spent my break making:

Her name is "Sakura," which is Japanese for "cherry blossom." (And also is the name of a company that makes craft supplies, specifically Pigma pens.).

She is made out of Shire Silk- a 100% silk yarn by (IIRC) Plymouth. It's kind of a raw-silk yarn, it's sort of "crunchy" and textured. It's really nice to crochet with, or at least I found it to be.

I was originally going to give her a Hobbitish name ("Shire" Silk, get it?) but when she was done, nothing came to me, but Sakura seemed to work.

The finished bear is tiny - as you can see from the photo - she's maybe 3.5 or 4 inches tall. The yarn feels really nice made up into a toy, firm but "squishy" enough to be pleasing to hold. One of the things I like about making these little toys is that you can use lots of different yarns and see how they look and feel. After completing the bear I went back to the shop and bought another skein of the pink (I had about half of the first skein left over) and two skeins of a pale green that coordinated well with the pink and am making single-color granny squares to make a little scarf out of. (I'm nearly done with the granny squares but then they must all be sewn together).

Making granny squares is fun. The pattern's easily memorized (and I guess there are different variants of it out there) and they go together quickly. I do think doing them each in a single color looks a bit more "up to date" than the multicolor kinds (which for me are reminiscent of the 1960s-70s craft books my mom had when I was growing up).

Actually, I wonder when granny squares first originated? I associate them with the "hippie days" because they were in fashion then but I suspect they're older than that. (1930s, maybe? It seems like a lot of "good craft things" came out of the 1930s). When we were up visiting family near Traverse City, my mom and I took a morning and went to the Grand Traverse Lighthouse (which is interesting but rather expensive to get into - you have to pay for a state park pass and THEN pay admission to the lighthouse) and it was decorated in the style of the time (early 1900s) that it was an active lighthouse. And there was a large granny square afghan on a chaise in the living room. And I wondered if that was an anachronism or not (like a lot of museums, the interior decor was largely assembled from purchases of things that "might" have been used at the time, rather than everything being inherited of-a-piece from the original owners). So now I'm curious when granny squares were first used...whether they were the product of a particular designer's mind, or, if like so many of the basic craft procedures we use, one of those things that just kind of appeared or evolved on its own.

Another use of granny squares is to use different colored ones as "pixels" to make pictorial afghans. There's the "Color Bars" afghan (representing the RBGCMYK test-pattern from color television) in "Happy Hooker" and I think I've also seen a Super Mario afghan out there. (But you could do anything, if you had graph paper, a good imagination, and the fortitude to make as many single-color granny squares as required.)

I think once I finish the scarf I might start on that "Color Bars" afghan, now that I've found how "friendly" granny squares are to make - if you're doing just a single color, they're pretty portable (all you need is the yarn, a hook, and something to cut the yarn with as you finish the square) and they're something easily enough done when you're attending to other things (like trying to read the map for your father to help him avoid bad construction).