Designing your own amigurumi from simple shapes

Updated 13 November 2026 · 7 min read · by FamCraftsShop

How to break a character into balls, eggs, cones and tubes, size each part, write the rounds and check them before you crochet a stitch.

Almost every amigurumi, however detailed it looks, is built from four shapes: the ball, the egg, the cone and the tube. A bear is a ball head, an egg body and tube limbs. A mushroom is a squashed ball cap on a tube stem. A carrot is a cone with leaves. Designing your own starts with seeing a character as a set of those shapes.

1. Sketch it as shapes

Draw your character roughly from the front. Then go over it and outline each part as one of the four shapes:

• Ball — heads, noses, round bodies, berries, eyes made of yarn.
• Egg — most bodies, bellies, birds, beans, fruit.
• Cone — hats, carrots, horns, beaks, ears that come to a point, tails that taper.
• Tube — arms, legs, necks, stems, snouts, fingers.

Some parts are a combination: a teardrop is a cone that turns into a ball; a bottle is a tube with a ball on the bottom. That's fine — write those as one piece that changes shape partway.

2. Pick a size and a yarn

Decide how tall the finished toy should be, then measure each shape on your sketch at that scale. Write down the widest width and the height of every part.

Choose your yarn and hook next, because they decide how many stitches each centimetre needs. Amigurumi uses a hook a size or two smaller than the yarn label suggests, so the fabric is tight. DK yarn on a 2.5–3 mm hook is a good, forgiving starting point.

3. Turn sizes into rounds

For each part:

1. Work out the widest stitch count: width × 3.14 ÷ the width of one of your stitches, rounded to a multiple of 6.
2. Increase 6 per round from MR 6 until you reach that count.
3. Work plain rounds until the piece is tall enough, minus the height the decrease rounds will add.
4. Decrease back down and close (or leave the end open to sew on).

The increase and decrease maths guide has the details, including cones and uneven numbers.

You can also let StitchCheck do it. Open the Shape builder, pick ball, egg, tube or cone, type the width and height in centimetres, and it writes the rounds for you — keeping counts in sixes and staggering the increases if you want. For shapes that aren't a standard one, choose Draw my own outline: sketch one side of the silhouette on the grid, and StitchCheck turns bulges into increases, narrowing into decreases and straight sections into plain rounds.

4. Check and preview before you crochet

This is where most designers lose time: they crochet a piece, find it's the wrong shape, rip it out and adjust. Instead, paste or generate the rounds in StitchCheck and look at the 3D preview first.

• Does the head look round, or is it too tall? Remove a plain round or two.
• Does the body need a flatter bottom? Add a back-loop-only round where the base ends.
• Do the proportions work when the parts sit together? Build each part and compare them.

The checker also confirms every round adds up, so the pattern you eventually share won't have counting errors in it.

5. Plan colour and details

Colour changes go at the start of a round, or partway through for a belly patch or a face mask. In StitchCheck you can paint single stitches or whole rounds to try colours, and place safety eyes to find the right spot for the face before you commit. Eyes on most heads sit a few rounds below the widest round and seven to nine stitches apart, but the right placement depends on the character — trying it is quicker than guessing.

6. Write it up clearly

When you're happy, write the pattern the way you'd want to read it:

• one round per line, with a round label and the stitch count in brackets at the end;
• the abbreviations and terms (US or UK) listed at the top;
• a note wherever you stuff, change colour or work in back loops;
• assembly notes: which round each part is sewn to.

Here is a small example — a mushroom cap — written that way. Open it to see it checked and built.

R1: MR 6 (6)
R2: 6 inc (12)
R3: (sc, inc) x6 (18)
R4: (2 sc, inc) x6 (24)
R5: (3 sc, inc) x6 (30)
R6: (4 sc, inc) x6 (36)
R7-9: sc around (36)
R10: BLO (4 sc, dec) x6 (30)
R11: (3 sc, dec) x6 (24)
R12: (2 sc, dec) x6 (18)

Then crochet a test piece, adjust, and test again. Every designer tests — the preview just means fewer rounds to undo.