The Three Billy Goats Gruff Large Goat

I've long been a fan of giving gifts of books combined with themed toys that help kids act out the book as it is being read and retell the story long after they've heard it. My next project is to go with a gift of The Three Billy Goats Gruff (Paul Galdone Classics) for a summer birthday gift.

The pattern for the goats comes from Once Upon a Time... in Crochet: 30 amigurumi characters from your favorite fairytales a book I picked up with a couple of fairy tale crochet books that I'm finally putting to use. I found a free pattern online for a troll that has some unique techniques I wanted to try out so, I'm experimenting with that pattern first as I liked the troll better and I wanted to see if I could manage the challenges of the other pattern. If it doesn't work out I'll be back working the troll from this book. I'm sure I'll be documenting my journey at some point.

I haven't been working much from books lately and one of the challenges is keeping your page. One of the things I appreciated about this book was the end pages that bend in to create page holders.

The pattern calls for fingering weight yarn and C or D hooks for the goats making them around 4-4 1/2" for those of you interested in the pattern as written. I had no interest in making them that small and I also wasn't crazy about working in the round in such a tight area. There was also my quest to use as much yarn on hand as I can. Using worsted weight yarn to make the goats means not ordering more yarn and that is important to my goals of trying to use up yarn on hand.

I often read reviews where people say they don't like X pattern because they prefer X yarn. The reality with amis is that most can be adjusted to different yarns but it will effect size and in some cases textures and patterns created if there are yarn/hook changes, etc. In the case of the goats making them larger was not a huge issue. These will actually be about the size of the farm animals I made previously and something tells me they may end up on the farm play sets along with their journey through the Three Billy Goats Gruff so making them a compatible size was not the worse choice I could make.