I’ve found that I repeatedly use three types of eyes for my knitted toys: plastic “safety” eyes, eyes embroidered with yarn, and eyes embroidered with embroidery thread or floss. They each have pluses and minuses.

(I can’t say that my techniques are the definitive way to make eyes—they’re just how I’ve come to do them. If you have different techniques or suggestions, please feel free to add them to the comments to this post.)

Safety Eyes

These are safety eyes.

They consist of a front and a back that fit together in the manner shown above.

Safety eyes are cute and super easy to use. They can be a little hard to find in craft stores, so I buy mine online from Harvey’s Hobby Hut. (I usually use the 9mm size.) To use safety eyes, position them just as you want them, then snap on the backs from the backside of your knitting. Once you snap the white back part onto the front, however, there’s no getting them apart, so make sure you’ve decided on your final placement before securing them!

What I usually do is stuff my toy first, leaving a small opening of some kind (in this case, the hole at the top of circular knitting), then place the eyes where I want them in the front, then attach the backs through the opening before closing up. Simple!

The main disadvantage to safety eyes is, ironically, their safety. When used in knitted toys, there is a chance that a small child could rip the small plastic pieces entirely out of the knitting and swallow them. Maybe it’s unlikely, but just to be safe, they’re not recommended for toys that you plan to give to a small kid with an oral fixation.

Yarn Eyes

Yarn eyes are almost as simple as safety eyes. All you need is a contrasting colored yarn (I usually choose black) and a tapestry needle. I add these eyes after the toy is completely stuffed and sewn up, and I often temporarily pop in some safety eyes first (without attaching the backs) to figure out placement before making any stitches.

The size of your toy will determine how big you want to make the eyes (obviously), which will determine how many stitches wide to make your eyes. In the case of my sample critter (it’s the body of Looper, in case you were wondering), I’m going to make the eyes one and a half stitches wide. (So it’s OK to split stitches, but less OK to split yarn.)

Start by bringing the threaded needle out where you want the left side of your eye to be, drawing the loose end of the yarn up into the toy…

…then poke the needle in one and a half stitches to the right (without pulling the yarn too tight), and back out again in the same place you started.

Make several horizontal stitches in and out of the same two places.

In this case, I think I made about four stitches total for each eye. The more stitches you make, the more circular your eyes will look.

Once you’ve finished the eyes, simply weave the loose end of the yarn back into your toy.

Obviously, you can customize your eyes with yarn in a way that you can’t with plastic eyes. Add some small stitches around your eyes, and you have eyelashes. Or, make a sleepy or happy eye using backstitch. (If you’re not familiar with backstitch, you can see a tutorial here.)

One disadvantage to embroidering on eyes with yarn is that it can be tricky to make a perfect circular eye, especially if you’re using a bulky yarn. Another disadvantage is that the stitches can be pulled out by determined little fingers. So it’s child-safe, but not completely child-proof.

Embroidery Thread Eyes

Embroidering on eyes with thread or embroidery floss is the most time-consuming of the three techniques, but if done with patience, it can yield nice results that are very secure. Again, it’s a good idea to use safety eyes or pins as placeholders to decide where to place your eyes before making that first stitch.

In the case of eyes embroidered with thread, it’s OK to split the yarn. In fact, it’s best to just treat your knitting as if it were a solid piece of fabric. However, it’s important to be careful not to pull your stitches too tight, or else you will warp the knitting.

First, use backstitch to “draw” the outline of your eye. (Again, you can see a tutorial here if you need a backstitch refresher.)

(This circle is bigger than I would normally make for a toy this size, but for the sake of clarity, I’m demonstrating with a jumbo eye.)

Don’t worry if your circle is less than perfect. It’s actually going to get even less perfect, but then you will smooth everything out.

Once you complete your circle, you begin to fill it in using satin stitch. To do this, start by bringing your needle out through the very top left corner of your circle. Poke your needle in through the very top right corner of your circle, and bring your needle back out just a little bit below and to the left of where you started, sticking close to the outline of the circle.

Then you’ll poke your needle in just a bit below and to the right from where you when in before, and back out again on the left side.

Continue to make these (not too tight!) horizontal stitches all the way down the circle. Even if you don’t pull the thread tightly, your circle will probably warp a little and become elongated.

Once you’ve filled in the whole circle with satin stitch, you can re-shape the circle a little by pinching it into a better shape.

You’ll probably still see room for improvement, so at this point you should smooth out the circle by going around the outside circumference of it with backstitch again, filling out the sides until you achieve a more perfect circle.

This may take several revolutions around the circle and extra pinching at intervals, but once you’re done, you can end up with nice, solid eyes that can’t be pulled out!

And of course, you can also embellish with eyelashes or embroider other shapes of eyes in the same way as you can when using yarn—though you’ll probably have to go over your embroidery a few times to get the lines to your desired thickness.

The disadvantage to the embroidery thread technique is, of course, the time it takes to do it. But with practice it gets much faster.

And that’s how I do all the eyes on my Mochimochi Land toys. Please let me know in the comments if you have any questions or suggestions of your own!

There are several good mattress stitch tutorials on the web, but since there are some specific issues with seaming toys that aren’t found so much in garment knitting, I thought it might be helpful to do a toy-specific tutorial on the techniques. In this post, I’ll cover the basic “flat” seaming: vertical, horizontal, and vertical-to-horizontal mattress stitch. Then I’ll demonstrate how to use mattress stitch to sew on a 3-dimensional limb, such as an arm, and also how to sew on a limb at an angle. (I’m not going to do any techniques for garter stitch, since I rarely use it in my toys.)

Vertical Mattress Stitch

Vertical mattress stitch is used to join the edges of two pieces together when the knitting is running the same direction on both pieces . Among Mochimochi Land patterns, Grass, Evolving Punk, andLuvgun call for this basic stitch.

Start by placing your two pieces side by side with the right sides up. For toys, you will actually often start by holding the pieces together with wrong sides facing each other, but the technique is exactly the same, and easier to demonstrate when laid flat.

Insert your tapestry needle under the horizontal bar between the first two stitches on the edge you want to join.

Pull the yarn through and slip the needle through the opposite horizontal bar on the other piece.

Continue to go back and forth under the horizontal bars along the seam.

Now for the magic: pull on the yarn to tighten up your stitches…

And they disappear entirely! No matter now how many times I see that, I still ooh and ahh at the trick.

So that’s the basic mattress stitch, and it’s beautiful. But what if you need to seam around all of the edges of the pieces, as with many toys? When you get to the top of the knitting, you can simply turn the corner and seam the top of the knitting together with horizontal mattress stitch.

Horizontal Mattress Stitch

This stitch is used when you are seaming together the cast-on or bound-off edges of two pieces of knitting. If you’ve just finished vertically seaming up one side of the knitting, just turn the corner and continue with horizontal mattress stitch. (It will look pretty strange at first, but when you tighten up your yarn, the seam will disappear.) Horizontal mattress stitch is also used when sewing up the holes between the feet or ears of animals, as in the Mochimochi Reindeer.

For clarity, I’m again demonstrating this technique with the knitted pieces side by side, though with a toy you would normally be holding the pieces together with the wrong sides facing each other.

Insert your needle under the point of the V of the first stitch. Pull the yarn through, and do the same with the opposite stitch.

Continue back and forth across the edges, tightening up your yarn a bit after the first few stitches.

Here’s a photo of our square seamed together all around the sides, using vertical and horizontal mattress stitch. Since you’re sewing on the outside of the knitting, you can stuff as you go before closing off. (On a side note, if you’re using safety eyes, remember to attach them before closing off.)

Vertical-to-Horizontal Mattress Stitch

Sometimes, you need to seam together two pieces with the knitting running perpendicularly. This occurs in the pattern for Tubby, for example.

The technique, as you might expect, is basically a combination of vertical and horizontal mattress stitch. Insert your needle under the horizontal bar of one piece, then under the opposite V of the stitch in the other piece.

However, since rows of knitting are slightly more compact than horizontal stitches, they usually won’t match up with a perfect 1:1 ratio, and you will need to make some adjustments as you go along the seam. This is best done by occasionally inserting your needle under two horizontal bars at once.

There isn’t an exact formula for how often you will need to insert your needle under two bars instead of one to make the two pieces match up; you will need to eye it for yourself as you go along. This can seem a bit tricky, but the good news is that the seam will again be virtually invisible once you’re finished, and you shouldn’t be able to tell where you made the adjustments.

Sewing on a Limb (perpendicularly)

Above, we have seen how mattress stitch can make beautiful seams when joining flat pieces together. It’s even more of a lifesaver when attaching limbs (arms legs, ears, etc.) to a toy. Again, it’s almost invisible, and it also makes it easy to sew on limbs at any angle.

Let’s attach an arm to our square, which we’ll now call the toy body. First, decide where on the body you want to place the arm.

You’ll see that some of the stitches on the arm line up with the horizontal stitches on the square. That’s where I like to start seaming, using horizontal mattress stitch.

Soon, the stitches stop lining up, and you have to turn a corner, so to speak. Insert your needle under one side of a stitch on the body, and up through the middle of the stitch immediately below it (or immediately above it, as the case may be.)

The next few stitches will line up vertical-to-horizontal, so continue with vertical-to-horizontal mattress stitch.

You’ll then turn the corner again, and switch back to horizontal mattress stitch. Continue to seam around the circumference of the arm until you arrive at where you started. You will end up with an arm that is sticking straight out.

Sewing on a Limb (at an angle)

Not all knitted toys want to hold their arms straight out. Some want to have them down at their sides, or reaching upward, or out in front of them.

Since we’ve attached one of our toy’s arms out straight, let’s angle the other arm down at its side. First, sew along the side of the arm opposite from the side to be folded down or up—in our case, the top of the arm, since the bottom will be folded down. Use horizontal mattress stitch along the top of the arm, then turn the corner with a diagonal stitch, just as you would with a straight-out arm.

Now we’re on the front side of the arm. For the next stitch on the body, insert your needle under two stitches. Then, instead of inserting your needle under the bottommost stitch on the arm, insert it under the next stitch up.

Repeat this along the side of the arm, until you get to the part of the arm that should be flat against the body. (Since our arm is relatively small, we’ll repeat only once more.)

Now you’ve reached the bottom of the arm, or the armpit. Use horizontal mattress stitch to continue along the bottom, but for the stitches on the arm, now insert the needle under the third or fourth V-stitch from the base of the arm.

This will pull the arm downward.

Once you’ve finished with the armpit, continue up the back side of the arm, in the same way that you did with the front side: insert your needle through two stitches on the body, and through the second-from-bottom stitch on the arm.

When you come back around to the top of the arm, you will end up with a nicely downward-pointed limb. And a new friend!

I hope this tutorial comes in handy to some people. I would greatly appreciate any feedback, and I’m happy to answer any questions in the comments.