10 Years of Mochimochi Land: Tiny Knitting

Mochimochi Land has now been a thing for 10 whole years! While I’m taking care of a newborn and not getting much knitting done for a little while, I thought I’d share some highlights from a decade of Mochimochi Land.

I wouldn’t have been able to sustain Mochimochi Land over ten years without finding big new challenges to help my work stretch and grow. In 2009, I had just finished writing my first book of knitting patterns, Knitting Mochimochi, and I was looking for something new to do in my realm of knitted toys. The big new thing, I decided, was quick and small, and so my month of knitting tiny things began.

The first tiny thing was a tiny knitted brain. I love designing toys, and there’s something so satisfying about coming up with a concept, sketching it, and knitting it in a couple hours’ time. I posted a photo of the brain to my blog, and soon I was hearing requests for other tiny things from knitters and non-knitters alike. So I decided to knit a tiny thing a day for a month. That proved to be so addictive that I continued the challenge on a weekly basis for two entire years!

That’s a lot of tiny knitting. And when I was ready for a (tiny) break and no longer made a new miniature every week, I still continued knitting tiny stuff frequently. It turns out that just about everything you can think of is fun to knit in miniature. And when I think about it, it seems like I’ve tried to knit just about everything: an umbrella, a traffic cone, a helicopter, a computer, a raincloud, a Trump…

But there will always be new tiny things to knit. And I’m tickled when I see things that other knitters have come up with—just check out the entries from these past photo contests!

You can see more of the tiny stuff that I’ve knitted over the years here. Some of the tinys made their way into a book of patterns, and even more patterns are available for purchase and for free.