Making Time

2006 is dog year in Japan. Japan is big on dogs anyway, but the fact that it is the year of the dog, only heightens this. Since I’m planning on selling in Japan, I think it might be wise to try to make some dogs. Let me say firstly, I LOVE dogs (let me tell you about the time i was involved in a large scale rescue of street dogs in Taiwan with this amazing young woman). So this is not all conniving market research. OK, it is conniving!

I feel like monkeys, bunnies, and kitties are a focus, and see very few dogs in crafting. Maybe I haven’t been looking for it up until now?
I found this brilliant book called “Mame Wanko”. (pub 2001)

Japanese language point: Mame means ‘bean’ and wanko is a cute name for a dog (not an epithet as it may sound in English!) Inu is the Japanese word for dog, and wan-wan is the sound they make. Ko is ‘child’ so that is why ‘wanko’ is a cute name for a dog!

Mamegurumi まめぐるみ may sound familiar. You may have heard of Amigurumi あみぐるみ (stuffed animals made from crochet or knitting) and Nuigurumi ぬいぐうみ (stuffed animals made from fabric). Mamegurumi means “Stuffed animal as small as a bean or smaller“(!) Bah! You can add this to your mini-festish list.

The patterns are relatively simple, the instructions are in line drawings, not photos. I like photo-instructions, alas. The beginning of the book shows them posing with dogs bowls, dog baskets. All very small. The dogs are around 6cm ’small’ it says. Among the materials, these dogs use 3-5mm thick viscose, and 1cm thick mohair for the shaggier dogs.

Drawn from real dogs

These are not only recognisable breeds, they are modeled after dogs the author knows.

I really like realistic looking stuffed animals, and I think that is also why this book appeals to me. I love the old Steiff bears and bunnies* which look like they are based on the actual animal. I started a few animals based on my photos and sketches, but for some reason, I’ve fallen into making anthropomorphosized (phew) toy animals. They have heads, long legs, and proportions of a doll. (Except for the walrus, since you can’t really do that with a Walrus (^_^) )

Need more Mamegurumi?

• This page shows dogs a crafter made next to a 500 Yen coin, which is a little over 2cm wide, or 1 inch.
• This crafter posed her pups outside in the flowies. I love to see them outside, drawfed by leaves.
• This page shows more related books, and images from magazine articles!
• Oh! I did a search in english, and see that Looby Lu did one in ‘04; Maitreya at Craftlog did one; and another one in velvet
  Crafting Japanese shows another book on mamewanko which came out in 2002.
• (opening a can of worms here, have to get offline asap…)
• There’s a more images from the book on FLickr. Like Wisecraft’s.
• ok! Enough of research, must get offline!
• OK Just ONE more link to the generous Crafty McGee, who shares lots of pages from the other book on mamewanko.

footnote: Steiff is great but 8000+USD? check out this doozy wow!

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 25th, 2006 at 2:13 pm and is filed under Notes, Inspiration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.