As we are in shark week month (coming up on the tail end of shark week itself) I decided to make some crochet sharks. At first I went looking for some free shark patterns, and I even found some really cute ones (links at the end of the post) but none of them were what I was looking for. I wanted a nice great white pattern, one that had the torpedo shape of the shark. The pattern from Sir Purl Grey was nice, but the turned up tail wasn’t what I was going for. In then end I took the start of Sir Purl Grey’s shark pattern and ended up adjusting it to fit what I was looking for.
The main changes I made (through trial and error) were expansions in the length and moving the decreases. For the expansions it was to get a more torpedo shape. The original pattern made a pretty short shark, not terribly noticeable with the upturned tail but more noticeable when it came to make it in a straight line. Similarly when I made the fins to add to the shark they were a little stubby for what I was looking for, so I ended up adding a few extra rows so that the fins would be larger. Since the white shark “stomach” is made separately and then added to the shark that also had to be adjusted so that it would be long enough to cover the full belly of the shark, but not so long that it interfered with adding the tail fins. In total I added maybe 3 extra rows to the shark body and belly, and two to the tail.
Similarly, I had to move the placement on the decreases when it came to the original pattern. The decreases were originally clustered in one spot and involved increases on the opposite side of the tail so that the tail would be pulled up while still making a nice arc. To make the tail go straight the decreases had to be redistributed to make one even decrease in the row.
I like the way the sharks turned out (especially the tails) and I think I’ve got a pretty friendly school of sharks swimming with me. I’m looking to make a whale shark as well, hopefully I’ll be posting about that soon!
The patterns I found that I really liked:
great white: https://sirpurlgrey.com/free-shark-crochet-pattern/
Whale shark: https://storylandamis.blog/free-whale-shark-amigurumi-pattern-easy-crochet-tutorial/
