Amy's amigurumi project begins

It's been a full work week since I've been fired.  Now, I am not the type of person who most people (including me) would ever believe was capable of getting fired.  But it DID happen and it was one of the worst experiences of my life.  Not only was I not allowed to defend myself at the "termination meeting" against the vague reasons I was being let go, which left me feeling so angry, but now I was left with the understandable need to make sense of it all.  And that leaves you doubting your skills, your conscientiousness, and your ability to fit in with people.  None of these are good feelings, especially when self-esteem is already something I have to be conscious about boosting everyday.


After a couple of days of complete depression and anger, I wanted to do something for ME.  I had the time now.  I love to knit and crochet.  The last project I worked on was knitting a sweater for my son...and it came out beautiful and was very rewarding to complete, but now I needed something that would make me feel like I accomplished something with more instant gratification.  The only things I crocheted were baby blankets or afghans, although once I crocheted a little monkey for a baby gift.  But how I made the leap from that idea to Amy's Amigurumi is lost to me.  Because I had no idea what amigurumi was when the day began, and somehow I knew a lot about it by the end of the day.  


Ami (ah-mee) means crochet in Japanese.  With the strong need to feel like I had some purpose (besides being a mommy), I felt it was too coincidental that the word for crochet in Japanese was so close to my own name.  As I looked at more of the amigurumi creations that were on the web, I started to feel motivated.  Motivated!  That's not something I typically feel.  It's just not my personality I guess.


My first project was from Lion Brands free patterns and it was an octopus.  I took a picture with my phone camera (I still have to learn the art of taking a great picture) and sent it to my buddy Liz @ http://www.lizohsiekdesigns.com/


I wasn't feeling too confident about putting a cute face on it, so I set a pair of paper eyes I made in seconds on the octopus.

He looks sort of the way I feel...like "Are you going to mess with me?  Really?  Take that job and shove it."  He makes me happy.