I've mentioned this before in previous reviews, but I don't like Red Heart yarn. Don't get me wrong, Red Heart yarn is affordable, widely and readily available, and comes in a lot of colors, so I understand why so many people use it, but the quality is just...not the best. Red Heart Super Saver is understandable; you get a lot of yarn for not much money, and the color range is great (...this is what frustrates me the most, and the reason why I even buy Red Heart yarn; it comes in so many colors that I just can't find in other brands of worsted weight yarn), but their more expensive/'premium' yarns are not worth it in my opinion (again, unless you're looking for a specific color that you can't find otherwise).
So it may seem odd that I even purchased the Red Heart Amigurumi yarn cakes in the first place. I was skeptical at first, and only bought four originally out of curiosity, but after completing the dinosaurs, I was so impressed, that I ended up buying the entire series of twelve!
My very first Red Heart Amigurumi cake (and the main reason why I was interested in these at all originally) was the Dinosaur one. The sample plushie just looked so cute! Plus, I thought this was an intriguing concept; these aren't kits since you're only getting the yarn and pattern and you have to supply everything else, but each cake is basically a complete project concept.
There are twelve different color schemes in this series (at least from what I could find), and each cake has enough yarn to make both plushies pictured on the label. I purchased all of my cakes from Amazon at $7.20 each, but you may be able to find them for cheaper from other retailers (Blick art supplies had them for under $7, and they were on clearance, though all sold out, at Michaels for less than $3 each).
The patterns for all the plushies are available for free from the Red Heart website, and they're all available in both crochet or knit (the sample plushies on the labels are either one or the other, but you can crochet or knit all of them).
Each cake has four colors (the patterns mention that if there is a color that is used twice in the cakes that you can combine them into one ball of yarn during the preparation stage but...none of them do, so maybe there were some that were planned but then cut/changed). Before starting your project, you're supposed to separate each color; the easiest way to do so is to start in the middle and pop each color out.
Each color is blended into the next, creating these weird little connections that you need to cut.
The instructions also suggested to rewind all the colors into balls...but I don't have a yarn winder and am lazy, so I left the yarn hanks as is. I didn't run into any issues with the yarn tangling or anything until I got near the end of a color, so I think it's fine to skip this step.
Here are the cuties I made! I was so surprised at how great these turned out! I was also surprised at how different my plushies looked compared to the samples; I didn't add a mouth because I thought they looked better without one, but otherwise I used the same hook size (B/2.25mm), eye size (9mm), and yarn (obviously, lol) as the pattern recommended. I do tend to crochet tighter than average (one of the reasons why I don't like to make clothing is that I hate figuring out my gauge for each project, and I can't just use the recommend hook size since it won't fit if I do).
The yarn, again to my surprise, was actually really nice! It feels good to work with (smooth and easy to crochet, but still strong enough to not easily fray or tear) and the colors are vibrant. It's 100% acrylic and is a fine weight yarn (as per the pattern; it's pretty thin, but I think it's more like a sport weight).
Each cake of yarn states that it includes enough yarn to make two plushies, but I had enough left over to make a Plesiosaurus!
The pattern for these little guys was very easy to follow, and I like the subtle shaping on the heads. The only changes I made were to the eye placement (I moved them one more row back from the nose as I thought it looked better) and the back spikes (the pattern says to slip stitch the first row, but I sc'd instead since I find it annoying to have to crochet into slips stitches).
Even after making my extra dinosaur, I still had enough yarn left over to probably make a fourth.
Since there are twelve of these, and I have a lot of other kits I want to make posts about, I'm going to try to review these cakes two at time. This is burger cake, one of the simpler, and weirder, projects. I'm not super into crocheted food anymore (I've made a lot of it in the past, though), so I wouldn't have bought this cake if I didn't decide to try the whole series, but I do like how the plushies turned out. As stated above, even though the sample project on the label is knitted, all these patterns come in both crochet and knit.
I like the color scheme of this cake; it's simple since they could only include four different colors, but the contrast between the neutrals and the bright colors is really eye catching.
This pattern was really interesting; it's simple, and it looks really weird at first, but there's additional shaping of the patty (done by sewing the top and bottom of the patty together after it's stuffed to make it stick out) that makes it look more complicated than it actually is. The lettuce part also extends outside the rest of the plushie.
I did make a change to the pattern as I didn't want to make the lettuce as a separate piece and then attach it (...I am lazy). I just attached the green yarn to the tomato layer (make sure you do this with the wrong side facing you, as you want to make sure the right side of the lettuce is facing out when you're done), sc'd around once, completed rd 2 of the lettuce in the back loops only (BLO), then did rds 3 and 4 as written.
The pattern and color scheme for each burger is exactly the same, so while the cake does technically make two plushies...it's two of the same plushie. To be fair, though, almost all of these cakes make the same plushies, just palette swapped, and there's not a lot of color options for burgers that have to use the same four colors between them. You can barely see it here, but I added some sesame seeds with off-white scrap yarn.
The pattern has the bottom of the bun in the same dark brown as the patty, but I didn't like how it looked, so I made my second burger without it. Surprisingly, especially after how much yarn I had left over from the dinosaur cake, you only get enough beige yarn to do with with one burger.
Seriously, look at how little beige yarn I had left. Again, this really surprised me since I had so much yarn left over in all the colors after the dinosaurs, but at least I do have a lot of that gorgeous red left!
Overall, these yarn cakes and patterns were unexpectedly good! I enjoyed making the plushies, the designs and color schemes are cute, well-thought out and vibrant, and the yarn is of decent quality.
You do have to supply all the materials for the plushies except the yarn and patterns (which, to be fair, make up the bulk of most kits), so I wouldn't recommend these cakes for 100% absolute beginners (as you will need to already have a collection of stuffing, eyes, and tools and notions, or be willing to buy them), but otherwise, these cakes are great for all skill levels.
Thank you for reading! <3
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