Christmas keychains – Super Mario
After the Korean animal keychains it’s time to tell you more about the other keychains I made for Christmas.
As I said in my previous post, while crocheting the SKZOO I started to doubt whether this gift was appropriate for all my nieces and nephews. I actually based myself entirely on what my oldest godchild likes and assumed that the rest would also like this. Ok yes, in the worst case, the bead chain on the animals could simply be removed to simply make a wolf, rabbit, dog, etc. But, the doubt was there and yes, honestly, I had found another idea on the YouTube channel of Amis Tejiendo Momentos that wouldn’t let go of me, namely characters from video games.
My nieces and nephews like to play Mario Kart, The Legend of Zelda and Animal Crossing, so my head was buzzing with lots of options for keychains with heads of those characters. I made a whole list of options and decided to start with what I thought would be the easiest: Super Mario
Mario himself was up first.
I crocheted the head and ears using my own pattern for the dolls I made earlier. For the hair, moustache and cap I found inspiration from Amis Tejiendo Momentos Mario doll. Of course, it is a lot bigger than my keychain, so I couldn’t just use her pattern, but I could use it as a blueprint to get a similar effect and shapes. For the eyes I used 9mm blue safety eyes that I had lying around. And for attaching the key ring and the beads I followed the same technique as with the SKZOO animals. I was also super happy when I found wooden mushrooms in my boxes of craft materials. I got these once in a swap, I think, and they were attached to ribbons to hang on a mobile phone. I could remove them with some prying and use them as an extra bead on the beaded chain. I thought that was very fitting.
For Luigi I followed the same approach as for Mario, with a few adjustments. For example, I made his head a bit more elongated and changed the pattern for the moustache so that it was less wavy and more like two large moustache points, more fitting for this character.
Next on my list was Yoshi, which took me a while to figure out what different parts it consisted of. I had already written down a few things, but I still googled to see if I could find a ready-made pattern. Why reinvent the wheel, right?
And so I found another YouTube channel full of free crochet patterns, namely Ami Saigon, where I found a large pattern for a full Yoshi doll. Just like with the Mario doll, this pattern is way too large for what I wanted, but it helped me to figure out the construction of the parts better, to conjure up my own, smaller version.
I think Yoshi turned out really well in the end, but I had to put a lot of time into it. Finding the right proportions for the parts, so that everything fits together well, required some trial and error and although I was still having a lot of fun, Christmas was now very close and I wanted to make at least one more keychain, to get an even and correctly divisible number.
I first had Princess Peach on my list, but at that moment I didn’t really feel like having to come up with one anymore. So I went for something simpler, a Super Star. My first attempt crocheted very quickly, but also turned out very small. I did have an idea of how I could make it bigger, but I also thought that little star was really cute. So I changed tack and added another iconic power-up, the Super Mushroom. The star and mushroom went together on one power-up keychain, without a bead chain this time.
And then, after having produced a total of twelve keychains in three weeks, I had had enough 😀
Something in me was still really enthusiastic about crocheting all sorts of extras – including that Princess Peach, but also Yoshis of different colours and a Tanuki Mario – but I also still had to wrap all my presents and my hands could really do with a crochet break.
Three full days before Christmas and I surveyed all that I had made. I was so happy with each keychain I had made and was super excited to see my niece and nephew’s reactions.
I wrapped each keychain individually and added a little tag with a “hint” about what was inside. For example, for Mario and Luigi I added a tag that said “the red brother” and “the green brother” respectively. Like that I came up with a little slogan for each keychain and let my nieces and nephews choose which present they wanted to open. I did see some keychains change owner afterwards, but I got the impression that they were all happy with the lot!
Cheers,
Charlotte
