Recently I revisited some old posts which renewed my interest in some old projects. If you have been following my blog you will already be aware of my 52 Granny Squares project. I rediscovered the crochet puzzle ball from April 2017 and decided to challenge myself to complete one of the animals that are so appealing. I chose the Giraffe.

The book is “Amamani Puzzle Balls” by Dedri Uys and I borrowed it from my local library. My local yarn shop, appropriately named “The Yarn Inn”, stocks a great collection of natural fibres and this fulfils another personal challenge to use only natural fibres whenever possible. I chose Kilcarra Tweed, a UK Aran weight 100% wool in colour 4802 Hiero (now discontinued), it required three 50 g balls. Strictly speaking, this is an Australian 10 ply but because the size of the toy is not important, I treated it as if it were 8 ply.

Finally, learning from my earlier project where the stuffing was visible through the stitches, I used a 2.75 mm (UK/Canada 11, US C/2) crochet hook, this created an extremely tight stitch that was difficult to master and a slightly larger hook would have been easier but I did not have my full range of hooks available at the time. However, the final product was worth the effort.