Inspired by a dear friend of mine who loves pen­guins :D

Remem­ber the tater tot pat­tern? It’s just adding a few things to the tots to make them look like penguins.

Super quick to make and hard­ly uses any yarn!

 

You’ll need:

A bit of yarn in pen­guin colours (blue, black, teal?)

A bit of felt in pen­guin colours

A bit of felt in white

A 3.5 or 3.75mm hook

Small round black beads for eyes

Sewing / embroi­dery needles

White, black, and pen­guin colour sewing thread

Orange embroi­der floss

Stuff­ing (I use yarn ends)

Jin­gle bells (option­al)

 

Sor­ry for some of the blur­ry pho­tos due to low light con­di­tions. It’s been dif­fi­cult try­ing to take pho­tos in full day light since day­light sav­ing time with the sun going down at 4pm :( If you need clar­i­fi­ca­tion please feel free to leave a com­ment or send me a message!

 

First, fol­low pat­tern for tater tots up to row 5 (before decreas­ing). Remove hook but don’t fas­ten off.

With white felt, cut a small round­ed trape­zoid-like shape for bel­ly and sew it onto the pen­guin body. Then sew on the eyes with the black beads and embroi­der the beak with orange embroi­dery floss. (Now that I look at it, it might look even cuter with some rosy cheeks with pink embroi­dery floss!)

 

After all sewing/embroidering is done stuff the pen­guin. I also threw in a jin­gle bell. The jin­gling is muf­fled by the stuff­ing but it still makes a fun noise.

 

Con­tin­ue onto row 6 and the rest of the tater tot pat­tern. 

Then, using the pen­guin colour felt, cut out two small teardrop shapes for wings, and sew them onto the sides of the penguin.

 

And guess what? Now you have a pen­guin! *jin­gle jin­gle jingle*

To make it into an orna­ment, I did­n’t want to just attach the yarn to the top of the pen­guin because it might pull it out of shape. So instead I hooked a piece of sil­very yarn right through the length of the body. This might be a bit tricky with the jin­gle bell in it, but it’s pos­si­ble to maneu­ver through.

 

Pull the piece of yarn from the bot­tom of the pen­guin and out through the top. Then pull the one end back down through a dif­fer­ent stitch from the top and out through a dif­fer­ent stitch at the bot­tom. This dia­gram here may make it eas­i­er to understand…

Through dif­fer­ent stitch­es at the top…

Through dif­fer­ent stitch­es at the bottom…

 

Now make a knot at the top…

 

And tie the two ends togeth­er at the bottom…

 

Then weave the ends into the body.

And our pen­guin is ready to dangle!

Cheers!