Video Transcript:
This is Jess from jesshuff.com. Have you ever crocheted an animal or doll that ended up with a droopy, wobbly head?
In this video, I’ll show you a kid-safe method to stop the wobble by supporting the neck and head with a crocheted dowel.
In this example, the body of our animal is crocheted bottom-to-top, and the head is crocheted front-to-back.
So the first step is to create a hole in the bottom of the head, that we can insert the dowel into later.
Some of my patterns will instruct you where to leave this hole. But if the pattern you’re following doesn’t, leave the hole in the middle of the single crochet rounds that have no increases or decreases.
For example, if the head has 10 rounds of single crochet, you would create the hole after completing the 5th round.
Start by marking off nine stitches centered on the bottom of the head. In this example, the blue strands of yarn represent where I’ll be attaching the ears, and the pink strands are where I’ll be placing the eyes.
So our stitch markers should go on the opposite side of the head, centered between the eyes and ears.
I’m going to fold the head in half to help me find the center. And let’s make sure that this looks centered from all angles. That looks pretty good.
Now, we’re going to crochet around as directed by the pattern, until you hit the first marked stitch. Chain 9.
Then single crochet in the first stitch, after the 9 marked stitches. You can now remove those two stitch markers.
And make sure you’re leaving your end-of-round marker in place. Crochet the rest of the round as normal.
As you crochet the next round, work into the chains like normal stitches. I’ll complete the next round so you can see what that looks like.
And that’s all there is to it. We now have a hole on the bottom of the head, to insert the dowel into at a later step. Complete the rest of the head as instructed by your pattern.
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