Bowser Amigurumi

After the Mario film came out I asked my son which character he would like a toy of, and he chose Bowser.

This is pretty much the reason I started learning yarn craft in the first place, so I made him one.

The pattern I followed was from this particular blog post from 2011 https://epic-yarns.com/2011/10/04/bowser/

I submitted a comment asking for some clarification, but didn't get a response. I think the blog is somewhat abandoned.

However, you could consider this post as a supplement, as I have some suggestions on how to improve things.

1) First of all, the instructions for putting everything together are not the best. Even the follow up edit with photos doesn't make things much easier. As such, I will put some diagrams here (as they are clearer than photos)

2) The mouth is made of 10 pieces - 4 big balls, 1 small ball, 2 small tubes, and 3 big tubes. These all get stitched together using their tails. I'm not the best at stitching, and I would worry that things could come apart (I'm definitely not good with cutting the loose ends)

An improvement would be to combine the pieces together. For example, rather than 4 balls where there are 2 pairs of 2 connected with big tubes, instead, do the following:

Follow the ball pattern and stuff it. Then sc 3, inc, sc 3. SC8 for 7 rounds. Stuff the tube. SC3, decrease, sc3. Follow the ball pattern from round 2 onwards. Stuff the ball. Dec 3. Finish off.

If you do that twice, you now will have two bar-bell shapes, and have drastically reduced the amount of stitching required. Perhaps you could even put some sort of nubs (just keep stitching into the same stitch to create a lump) on one of the final rows of one of the balls to indicate where to attach the bottom jaw.

Regardless of if you do that, here are some diagrams showing how the parts of the head fit together

3) Personally, I wanted to avoid using felt, so they eyes and inside of the mouth were made entirely with yarn.

To make the inside of the mouth I did the "lower jaw flap" two more times in pink (though I think they were a round smaller). One was attached directly to the open part of the head, the other was stitched onto the inside of the lower jaw flap.

4) The shell is the wrong size. The instructions state to make the green piece, and then to make the white tube to equal the circumference of it, but doing that makes it too big for the body, and I had to stitch it really tightly to cover those gaps. I'm not sure how to fix this apart from making things smaller, or the instructions clearer.

5) Following on from that, the instructions mention putting the legs on before the shell and tail. I'm glad that I put the shell on first, because once I did so it vastly reduced the available space for the legs and tail. It was difficult to get everything balanced and in the right place. This could definitely be cleared up, though fixing the shell size issue may make it a non-issue.

6) The instructions are not clear as to what needs to be stuffed and what does not. The hair, for example (which many other people have asked about, but not had their questions answered) - when I was putting it on, I felt that it was better to not stuff those pieces, otherwise they would struggle to fit on.

7) The eyebrows. Honestly, this was easy to figure out, but not from the description or the pictures - funnily enough, it's hard to tell the difference between one layer of orange and another layer of the exact same orange in a photo. Diagrams (or photos with pieces in different colours) would help massively. Here are some more.

Finally, my other additions were a tongue for the inside of the mouth, and eyes. These were mainly done freehand, so I do not have patterns for them.

Next, I'm moving onto something self indulgent and hopefully easier, because this one was a nightmare!