Have you heard the wonderful Polish saying, “Not my circus, not my monkeys.” A very expressive way of saying, “not my problem.”* An embrassingly long time ago, my friend Theresa was talking about it on Facebook, and I promised to make her a monkey. He’s finally done.

He is acid green to match Theresa’s hair at the time I started making him. His feet and hands are a lot more detailed than those on the first monkeys I made when I was learning.

This is monkey’s original vest and hat, but I felt like the colours were just not working with the neon green and looked a bit sad.

My partner brought home this purple sparkly yarn (with a ton of others) from the Aldi random stuff aisle. It’s strong enough to contrast with the green, and the sparkle gives it a circusy feel.

This colour is really hard to photograph!

I had a green button, but this lemony yellow picked up the highlights in the fur and wasn’t too “matchy matchy”.

My first go at making a crochet dog. Wanted a generic little mongrel.

I tried making his ruff with elastic, but gave up on that. It is removable, but stays on ok.

The ruff is made with hyperbolic crochet – i.e. you just increase a lot every round. In this case, increased every other stitch.

The body is made in one piece. At the tail end, I decreased, then chained, then double-crocheted into the chain.

Of course dog needs a hoop to jump through. It’s made with straight crochet wound on the diagonal around a scoubidou loop and stitched.

Here’s monkey and dog performing together.

Theresa has been having a pretty amazing year, working through a list of challenges, including having a different hair colour every month, making a stop motion animation film, and writing and releasing her own single. She also writes a lively blog about life lessons from her beagle Cooper, with supercute illustrations by Chantal Bourgonje. Visit The Barklife Way to take a look.

I hope Theresa and her new crochet friends get up to lots of monkey business together!

* Unfortunately, I can vouch for the fact that this doesn’t work when you are one of the monkeys.