Continuing on with the Red Heart Amigurumi series, the next two yarn cakes/patterns I'll review are the Flamingo and Bird 'sets', 'sets' in quotation marks as the yarn and pattern are designed to go together, but you only really get the yarn and downloadable pattern and you have to supply everything else to make the plushies.
Some of these photos are quite old, such as this one of the Flamingo yarn cake, so please excuse the lower quality pictures.
While I actually like almost all of these yarn cake/pattern 'sets', the Bird cake/pattern is my least favorite. As you can see, they were very heavily inspired by 'Angry Birds'; I'm not sure if this pattern/cake was created in collaboration with Angry Birds and the collab expired so now Red Heart has to sell it as a generic 'bird' set without referencing Angry Birds...or if someone at Red Heart just thought that people really love Angry Birds and that a design inspired by it would sell really well. I ended up making some pretty significant modifications to the design/pattern to make my birds more unique.
Since I've reviewed these cakes before, I'll give a quick recap of the Red Heart Amigurumi line; if you want more detailed information, please check out my previous reviews. These yarn cakes include four colors of Super Fine/1 weight (though in my opinion, the yarn is more like a 2 weight), 100% acrylic yarn, themed after a specific knitting or crochet amigurumi pattern that is available for free from Red Heart's website. You get enough yarn to make the two plushies shown on the labels, and all the patterns have both knitting and crochet versions, even though the labels show only one or the other. These cakes retail between $3-$8, depending on where you purchase them and/or if they are on sale.
The Flamingo cake includes black, grey, dark pink, and light pink yarns. I think all four colors in each cake come in equal amounts, but I haven't measured them to make sure (and the labels don't specify the length of each color).
I'm really happy with how the flamingos came out. The pattern was great; the shaping of the body/head and the legs/feet was easy to follow and both look very...flamingo-esque.
Since these are on the smaller side, I had enough yarn left over to make some alternate colorways! The grey flamingo is similar to a what they look like as chicks, and the black flamingo is like an...anti-flamingo (fun fact: flamingos are actually white and turn pink because of what they eat).
They all look so cute together! They're a little too big to be keychains, and a little too small to be toys, but I think they would make a great desk decoration for someone who likes flamingos. Incidentally, have you ever looked at a closeup of a real flamingo's face? They're kind of creepy, with their tiny eyes and huge, weirdly shaped beaks.
The Bird cake includes red, yellow, white, and black yarns. I do like the stark intensity of this color scheme, and wish that Red Heart had done something else instead of the weird Angry Bird birds they went with.
Initially, I was only going to remove the unibrow since that was the worst part of the design (in my opinion; it was the most Angry Bird-part), but I didn't like how the wings and feet were white, so I changed those, too. When I first showed this bird to my husband, he thought the black stomach was a mouth and the beak was a nose, so it looked like a really weird interpretation of a screaming Elmo head. So now I can't unsee that.
I changed the colors of the yellow bird's wings and feet as well, and I made its stomach white. I think the yellow bird is much cuter than the red, but I think that has to do with the screaming Elmo head-phenomenon.
I still don't like them that much, and they're still my least favorite out of all the Red Heart Amigurumi 'sets' I've done, but they're much better than their original Angry Bird knock-off interation.
Also they have little tails.
This design relied really heavily on the yellow and red colors of yarn, leaving me with a ton of white and black. I could probably make another bird or two, but I would much rather use the yarn for a different amigurumi (the black is really useful for embroidering details on bigger plushies).
As with the other Red Heart Amigurumi Yarn 'sets', these are surprisingly good. The yarn is fine to work with, not too rough and not too slick, and the patterns are easy enough to follow and most of the designs are quite cute, like the flamingos. The only issue I have with the Bird 'set' is the design, and even then I was able to modify it using the yarn I was given to something I liked at least a little bit better. If you like these designs, and are able to get a good deal, I do recommend these yarn and pattern sets.
Thank you for reading! <3
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