June 2014 – amiguruMEI

We’re in Simply Crochet Issue 19!

Several months ago, I was asked to design a sweet butterfly girl for the magazine and boy, was I excited to start!

The pattern took several weeks to perfect — I had originally made the wings in black and blue (pretty like the Blue Morpho butterfly) but had to change them to lighter colours so that they would stand out a little more.

Cho-Cho (蝶 or Chō is butterfly in Japanese) can be seen on the cover and also on the mag’s web. I was delighted to find it hovering here at this page!

Here’s a closer look at Cho-Cho, the tiniest queen of the garden:

Here’s what Cho-Cho looked like from before. What do you think?

P/S Grab a copy of Simply Crochet Issue 19 to make your own Cho-Cho! 🙂

Last year, I took two and a half months off work to focus on a special project. I’ve kept mum all this while but now it’s finally time to spill the beans: I’ve been working on my first book and it’ll finally be out in September!

Yes, it’s an amigurumi book alright…but it’s also an official Hello Kitty amigurumi book!

It’s called Hello Kitty Crochet and here’s a sneak peek of the cover:

It’s been an honour being chosen to work on this supercute project and just in time for our favourite feline, Hello Kitty’s 40th anniversary too!

When Quirk Books first e-mailed me about the project early last year, I practically woke everyone up in the neighbourhood because I was jumping up and down and making whooping noises at 12 midnight (there’s a 12-hour time difference between Malaysia and Philadelphia, where Quirk Books is based). I’ve always had a soft spot for Hello Kitty growing up so I said yes almost right away and the journey has been a dream come true!

Some of you may have already noticed the title at Amazon — thank you so much for sending me e-mails and messages to check if the Mei Li Lee listed as the author of the book is really me (yes, it is!).

Now I’m sure you’d want to hear more about the book; you can read more at this page here (written by the wonderful team over at Quirk Books), but what I can tell you is this: there are 25 Sanrio characters for you to fawn over and most of them even come with their very own crochet accessories! If your childhood was peppered by Hello Kitty and Sanrio merchandise (like mine was), you’d be delighted to have a copy of this book, whether you’re an amigurumi beginner or just plain in love with crafts.

Save the date: September 16 2014 is when Hello Kitty Crochet will be officially made available to the public.

Before then, you can make pre-orders here:

Working with Quirk Books and Sanrio has been amazing and super-fun, I really can’t wait for the book to be out — Hello Kitty is a wonderful character to crochet, but it also comes with its fair share of challenges (getting the facial features just right, or the unique shape of the head) and my book, Hello Kitty Crochet, hopes to address all these tiny grievances for the first time ever, and in the English language.

I still can’t get over how I got the chance to collaborate with Sanrio on designing Hello Kitty and her friends’ amigurumi patterns. It was difficult playing favourites but I must say that I’ve fallen in love (all over again) with each and every one of the kawaii characters that I’ve had the pleasure of spending the past year with in my craft room. Can you guess which character patterns made it into the book? (hint: picture below)

I’ll be sharing more fun stuff in the next few months so don’t forget to check back in to hear more about Hello Kitty Crochet!

P/S I’m now an official Hello Kitty addict so if you don’t hear from me very often, you know I’m off on one of my tirades making more of them cute faces…