If you’re looking for an alternative to plastic eyes for your amigurumi, there are lots of ways to make child-safe options: for example, you can embroider the eyes onto the head, cut out felt circles and stitch them on, or needlefelt a felt circle or ball of roving onto the head. But I’m most frequently asked about making crocheted eyes for amigurumi, so I thought I’d give you a tutorial today in case you’ve also been wondering how to do this!

Basic Method for Crocheted Eyes

Step 1. Crochet a Circle

1. Consult the Eye Sizes table, below, to find the appropriate hook and yarn/thread size for the eye size you want to make.
2. With black yarn, make a magic ring, ch 1.
3. Crochet 6 sc stitches into the ring, then pull the ring tightly closed.
4. Join the last stitch to the first stitch, either with a sl st or, for a neater finish, use an invisible join (see my Invisible Join tutorial for instructions).

Step 2. Add a Glint

• To add life to your eyes, add a catchlight – a ‘glint’ of light – to the eye with a small white stitch (see Glinting Eyes for Amigurumi for details and tips).

Step 3: Repeat

• Make a second eye to match!

Step 4: Attach

• Attach both eyes to your amigurumi. Crocheted eyes are basically tiny appliques, so see my Attaching Appliques tutorial for the neatest way to stitch them to the head.

My Gingerbread Man pattern uses crocheted eyes

Eye Sizes

If you want to replace safety eyes with crocheted eyes, you need to make eyes that are the right size for your amigurumi. The following table gives you the results of my experiments to crochet eyes that closely match the standard amigurumi eye sizes: 8, 9, 10, 12 and 15mm.

Please treat this table as a starting point for the eye size you’re looking for – it’s very likely that you’ll need to play around a bit if you’re looking to make an exact mm size! See the Size Adjustment Tips section, below, for easy methods to tweak the size you’re making.

Eye size	Yarn	Hook
8mm	embroidery floss (5 of the 6 strands) or #20 crochet thread	2.25mm (B)
9mm	embroidery floss (all 6 strands)	2.25mm (B)
10mm	#10 crochet thread	2.75mm (C)
12mm	sport (#2) – DK (#3, light) yarn1	2.75mm (C)
15mm	worsted weight (#4, medium) yarn	3.5mm (E)

1. I used Patons Grace yarn for my test, which is marked as a #3 weight yarn, but in my opinion it’s more like a #2.

Size Adjustment Tips

I tested out making a variety of eyes with different yarns, hooks, and stitch counts. From my experiments, I learnt that, as the entire eye is formed from a single round comprising just a few stitches, every stitch makes a big difference. This means that while yarn weight, hook size and number of stitches all play a part in the size of the finished eye, there are other intangible factors that will also affect the size, for example how tightly you pull your magic ring closed, how tightly you crochet, and the properties of your specific yarn, so it’s impossible to give an exact formula for an exact eye size!

But it only takes a minute to make another eye, so, if your eye turns out a bit larger or smaller than you wanted, you can just try again, using one or more of these options to adjust the size:

Slightly increase the size:

• Go up a hook size
• Use a (slightly) thicker yarn or thread
• For embroidery floss eyes, add one (or more) additional strands to your floss
• Add more stitches into the magic ring (see below)
• Use 8 or 9 hdc stitches in the magic ring instead of 6 sc

Slightly reduce the size:

• Go down a hook size
• Use a (slightly) thinner yarn or thread
• For embroidery floss eyes, remove one (or more) strands from your floss
• Add fewer stitches into the magic ring (see below)

Adjusting the stitch count:
Below you can see the results of my test making eyes with 4, 5, 6 (the standard), 7, and 8 sc stitches into the magic ring.

They’d all make acceptable eyes, and the overall size is definitely altered slightly by adding/removing stitches. But there are limits:

• 4 sc gives a more 3-dimensional ball-shaped result (after a little manipulation!), but the eye may start to look a bit square with so few stitches, so I’d recommend using 5 or more stitches.
• 8 sc gives a plumper result, but it becomes more difficult to pull the magic ring tightly closed as you work more stitches into the ring. Depending on your yarn, you may be able to pull an 8 sc ring tightly closed (if not, please adjust the size using one of the other methods above – don’t leave a hole in the middle of your eye!)

Much Larger or Smaller Eyes?

If you’d like to make even smaller eyes for your amigurumi, I recommend you use my Tiny Yarn Eyes for Amigurumi technique instead – it makes a maximum 6mm eye that can easily be scaled down further by using finer yarn.

Baby Snake using ~6mm Tiny Yarn Eyes

And, if you’d like to make larger eyes for your giant amigurumi, my ebook The Complete Guide to Giant Amigurumi includes patterns for 3 sizes of dimensional crocheted eyes (approx 20, 30 and 40mm) that have the glint crocheted right in.

Giant Tiny Whale using 20mm Giant Crocheted Eyes from the Giant Amigurumi ebook

Bonus Tip

I found that I prefer cotton yarn/thread for these small crocheted eyes, to give them cleaner edges without the slight fuzziness you can see on the acrylic yarn samples. If you look at my final samples again (below), all of these except the 15mm use cotton instead of acrylic, and you can see the difference!

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I hope you’ll find this guide helpful if you want to make crocheted eyes for your amigurumi! And please don’t forget to add that glint to your finished eyes, to give them the spark of life – it really does make all the difference…