Hello there!

Have you ever wanted to knit your very own Kiko plushie? Wha.. No? Well anyhow, now you can! Following this (hopefully) easy tutorial, knitting a kiko is only few steps away! All you need is basic knowledge of knitting, some yarn, double pointed needles and a little time!
(list of all the actual supplies goming up later.)
I hope this tutorial will actually be useful to someone. :)

I'm also afraid that my vocabulary on knitting terms is quite bad, so if you spot mistakes, inform me and I'll fix it.

Quick jump to different body parts:

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Kikos by others

Supplies

• yarn in the color you want your kiko to be (amount depends on how big you're going to make your plushie)
• white yarn for the fingers (other colors can be used)
• black yarn for the hair
• felt for the eyes (white and color)
• cotton for stuffing
• scissors
• double pointed needles (size depending to your yarn, I used 3½)
• crochet hook (size depends)
• needle with big mesh
• marker
• textile or other suitable glue
• pipe-cleaner thingy you can get from crafts store (black or other dark color)
• real plasters, check the right size from your almost finished plushie

You may also need a regular tapestry needle and thread.
(You're not going to need as much stuff as there is in the picture, I just kind of put everything I had close to me that CAN be used in making the plushie).

Tension used in "regular" sized kiko is about 25 stitches = 10cm (4inch) and 32 rows = 10cm (4inch).


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Body

1. CO 20 stitches.
2. Knit plain until the height of the knitting is three times it's width (eg. width 8cm (3,2inch): height 24cm (9,5inch) ) then bind off.
3. Knit another piece like this one.

By casting more or less stitches you can alter the size of the kiko. If you do this, remember that you have to do the same for the hands too.
Size will also alter if your tension differs from what I've had here.





4. Place the pieces as they're in the picture (top of one piece at the center of the other).
5. Start sewing the pieces together, I've colored the spots that'll be attatched to each other with same colors.
6. Taking one stich from the other piece and one from other gets you quite clean seam. You can also sew differenly if you want.

NB! Remember to leave a unsewed edge where you can put in the stuffing!





7. Stuff the body really, REALLY well so that it will form ball instead of something deformed.
8. Sew the last edge.





TADAAH! Your body piece is done and you can now start doing the hands. They'll be little more complicated but I think we can do it. :D


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Hands

1. Cast on the same amount of stitches you casted for the body piece (if you didn't alter the amount then it's 20).
2. Divide the stiches for four double pointed needels (5 for each).
3. Knit 15-16 rows plain.





4. Start increasing the stiches at the beginning of each needle. Increase by working into front and back of stitch. After one row of increasing you should have 24 stitches in total.
5. Continue increasing for two more rows. Now you have 32 stitches.
6. Knit three rows and then change color to white (or what ever you choose to use).





7. Knit two rows with white then start decreasing the stitches by following system:

• At the ending of the 1st and 3rd needle knit two stitches together.
• At the beginning of the 2nd and 4th needle slip one stitch, knit one, pass slipped stitch over the knitted one.

8. Repeat this cycle of decreasing until you have four stitches remaining (two stitches per needle). Bind off.





9. Stuff the hand.
If you want the hand to be a bit longer, you can keep mezzanine (?) between the first increasing and decreasing rows and knit three rows with white yarn before starting decreasing the stitches.





10. Sew two lines down the white part to make up the feeling of fingers.
11. Close the armhole by sewing.

Thumbs

You can decide either to do or not to do the thumbs. I think it'd be possible to do them the same way you do thumbs on gloves, but this how I did them. Improvement tips are welcome.




1. Here you can see where the thumb will go on the right hand (left hand is the mirror image). Use crochet hook to.. well, hook stitches for the thumb, 3x4 = 12 total.
2. Put the stitches to double pointed needles.
3. Knit 2-3 rows, then decrease stitches at every needles both ends (at the beginnig of the needle use skp and at the ending use K2tog). Now you have six stitches.
4. Knit with these six until you think the thumb is long enough (2-4rows). Thread the yarn through the remaining stitches with the crochet hook but do not close the gap by pulling!




5. Stuff the thumb. Now you can close the gap and bind off the endings.




Here's what the hands are supposed to look like. The yellow one has longer hands done as I instructed earlier. Now all that's left to do is to attach the hands to the body. Like this:





Sew the hand to body from it's all sides. With this our creation is finally starting to look like a kiko! Yay! Next up is the detail work.


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Face

The face is freestyle, you can pretty much create just the look you want with yarn, needle and felt. The only limit is your imagination. But here is one very basic look you can give your kiko. A happy face. :)





1. Model the size of the eyes with paper. Do also the inner parts.





2. Cut the pieces from felt and attach the parts first to each other and then to the body. You can sew (like I did) or be wiser than me, save some time and glue them with textile glue.
3. Sew the mouth with some pink/red/-ish yarn.





Such a happy kiko we have there! The yellow one got even cheerier (but just as uncreative) look.
(I left out the black parts from the eyes because my white felt was so thick that adding one more level of felt would've made the eyes look very stupid. If you have the same problem, you can just paint them or color them with black marker.)


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Hair-thingy

We're very close to the end now, huh? Two more things to add, first being the antenna kikos have. If you happen to have black pipe-cleaner thing (what is it really called anyway?) these following steps can be passed and you can just shape it to look okay and then brutally stick it to the top of the head. You can, however, still do what I did bacause it gives a bit cleaner look to it.





1. Wrap black yarn over the pipe-cleaner.
2. Cut when it's long enough.
3. Glue the end so that it won't come apart.
4. Brace your soul and... brutally stick to the top of the head. If it won't go in, you can strech one of the stitches and try to stick it at the same time.


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Plasters

Good, now your kiko is only missing the plasters on its head. I tried to knit and crochet the plaster, but it always ended up looking ridiculous. After spending a week in despair, my friend came over and asked why I didn't just use real ones. =__=
So for now it's real plasters (if someone comes up with a good-loking way to knit/crochet them, NM me and I'll put it up here with credits).





1. Glue the plasters on right place (yep, that's it).

ALTERNATIVE! Cut the plasters from right-coloured felt, then stich the white four parts on them and glue. Thanks shanni12345678911 for the idea.

Finished!

That's it boys and girls, now you have your very own kiko. If you don't understand something on this tutorial feel free NM me. All good suggestions are also welcome. I'm currently (quite slowly since I have life too but...) trying to come up with multi-colored patterns for painted colors such as disco, spotted, striped etc. so this page will be updated at some point.
It'd also be nice if you'd send me pictures of YOUR kiko so that I can put it up here for show. Everything will be credited.

DO NOT ENTER KIKOS DONE WITH MY PATTERN TO ANY KIND OF CONTEST, that'd make me very sad. :'(

Kikos made with this pattern

This is a cloud kiko made by mandyscog . Cute isn't it? ^^
Here are the changes she made and yarn she used for it:

I knit a cloud Kiko plushie using Bernat Softee yarn in the color ocean which consists of two strands of white and one strand of blue. But instead of using a pipe cleaner wrapped in black yarn I wrapped two folded over lengths of floral wire in 1/8 inch black ribbon. When I put it in the plushie, I bent it in such a way that it is hooked onto the knitting and doesn't move on it's own. I also pieced the eyes together by first cutting out all the ovals, then putting the blue on the white and carefully cutting around it, then doing the same with the black and the blue, and finally, gluing them all to a thin piece of scrap fabric before gluing them to the plushie; so there is only one layer of felt on it.

Coding help from:

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