Crochet Monkey Amigurumi Free Pattern – Long-Legged Monkey Toy

Drape this crochet monkey amigurumi over a shelf edge and the long arms do the rest. Light stuffing in the limbs is what lets them hang, and the muzzle is the only other colour needed.

Long arms and legs are the whole silhouette of this crochet monkey amigurumi free pattern long-legged monkey toy, each worked as a narrow tube running well past the body’s length so they hang rather than stick out. The body is a small rounded piece with a lighter muzzle and matching ears set flat at the sides. A curled tail attaches at the back. Keep the limbs lightly stuffed, since firm ones stand out stiffly and lose the dangling effect.

Crochet Monkey Amigurumi

Long limbs are what sell this design. Most crocheted primates come out short and round, closer to a bear with a tail sewn on as an afterthought. This one runs about eight inches of leg below the body, with arms cut to match, so the finished toy flops properly. It sits crooked on a shelf edge. It hangs off a bedpost. The snout is worked flat as a small oval and stuffed lightly before it oes on, and that single piece is what gives the face its push-forward profile instead of a flat embroidered blur. Add the hat and it reads as a character.

Countdown Before You Start

• One monkey, start to finish: seven to nine hours of actual hooking, spread across two or three evenings. The legs eat more of that than you expect.
• A batch of six: forty to fifty hours. Budget two full weeks at an hour a night, or four solid weekend days.
• Latest safe start for a single gift: ten days out at a relaxed pace, five days out if you can give it two hours a night.
• Latest safe start for six: three weeks out. Anything tighter and the sewing stage becomes the bottleneck, not the crocheting.
• The sewing alone is roughly ninety minutes per monkey. Nine pieces have to be attached and aligned, and rushing that is where a good pattern turns into a lopsided toy.

What You Will Need

• Skin-tone yarn for the face area, snout, ears, hands and feet. Worsted weight works best.
• A contrasting main colour for the body, upper legs, upper arms, tail and hat.
• Hook one to one and a half sizes smaller than the yarn label suggests, so the stuffing never shows through.
• Polyester fibrefill or cotton stuffing.
• Stitch marker. On a piece with an eight-inch straight tube you will lose your round start without one.
• Yarn needle with an eye wide enough for your main colour doubled.
• Black yarn or embroidery floss for the eyes, nose and mouth line.
• Safety eyes in 9mm or 12mm, only if the toy is going to an older child or an adult.

Pieces You Will Make

• Head and body:
• Hat: one,
• Legs:
• Hands and arms:
• Ears:
• Tail:
• Snout:

A note on scope. The pattern written out below covers the legs, hands, tail, ears, snout and the full assembly, which is what the material for this post actually demonstrates. The head, body and hat are made first in a separate part of the tutorial, so work those from your own preferred sphere-and-tube base or from the original Part 1 video before you start here.

Safety Eyes and When to Place Them

Safety eyes go in while the head is still open. Once you close and stuff that sphere, the backs are unreachable and the washer will never seat properly.

• Insert them on the head, roughly four rounds above where the snout will sit, before the final decrease rounds close the opening.
• Push the washer on from inside and press until it clicks flush. If it rocks at all, it is not seated.
• Test-place both eyes with the snout pinned in position first. On a face this narrow, half a stitch of asymmetry is visible from across a room.
• For anyone under three, skip the safety eyes entirely and embroider them instead. The method wraps yarn around the needle four or five times to build a raised French knot, which gives you a domed eye that catches light almost as well as plastic.
• Embroider rather than insert for anything heading into a party bag, a classroom, a school fair table, or a hamper you will not be there to supervise. A recipient you have not met is a recipient whose toddler sibling you have not met either.

The Pattern

Work in continuous rounds throughout unless told otherwise. Move your marker every round.

Legs (Make 2)

• Start in skin colour. Magic ring, 6 sc into the ring (6)
• Round 2: 2 sc in every st around (12)
• Round 3: 1 sc, 2 sc in next st, repeat around (18)
• Round 4: 1 sc in next 2 sts, 2 sc in next st, repeat around (24). Checkpoint: this should now sit as a shallow saucer, not a cone. If the edges are curling upward already, your tension is too tight and the foot will end up a ball.
• Rounds 5 and 6: 1 sc in each st around (24). Checkpoint: the sides should stand up slightly here, giving you a flat-bottomed dish about the size of a bottle cap.
• Round 7: 1 sc in next 2 sts, dec, repeat around (18)
• Round 8: 1 sc, dec, repeat around (12). Checkpoint: the foot is now formed. Look at it side-on. You want a rounded toe end and a narrowed ankle, roughly the shape of a small boot.
• Round 9: change to main body colour, 1 sc in each st around (12)
• Rounds 10 onward: 1 sc in each st around until the leg measures about 8 inches from the toe (12). Checkpoint: stuff as you go, every inch or so, rather than at the end. An eight-inch tube stuffed after the fact always develops a lumpy waist.
• Fasten off and leave a long tail for sewing.

Hands and Arms (Make 2)

• Start in skin colour. Magic ring, 6 sc into the ring (6)
• Round 2: 2 sc in every st around (12)
• Round 3: 1 sc, 2 sc in next st, repeat around (18). Checkpoint: identical to the leg at this stage. If you have two legs already made, hold this against one and confirm they match before going further.
• Round 4: 1 sc, dec, repeat around (12)

• Round 5: dec twice, then 1 sc in each remaining st (10)
• Round 6: change to main body colour, 1 sc in each st around (10)
• Rounds 7 onward: 1 sc in each st around until the arm matches the finished length of the leg (10). Checkpoint: the arm should be visibly narrower than the leg but the same length. Held side by side, the two tubes should end level.
• Stuff lightly as you work. Fasten off with a long tail.

Tail

• Magic ring, 7 sc into the ring (7)
• Pull the ring tight
• Rounds 2 onward: 1 sc in each st around until the tail measures 6 inches (7). Checkpoint: at seven stitches this is a narrow tube and it will want to spiral. That is normal and it disappears once stuffed. Do not add stitches to correct it.
• Stuff very lightly. A hard tail sticks straight out and looks wrong. Fasten off with a long tail.

Ears (Make 2)

• Magic ring, 6 sc into the ring (6)
• Pull the ring tight
• Round 2: 2 sc in every st around (12)
• Rounds 3 to 6: 1 sc in each st around (12). Checkpoint: four straight rounds gives a short open cup. Flatten it with your thumb. It should fold into a neat half-circle with no puckering at the fold.
• Do not stuff. Slip stitch and leave a long tail for sewing.

Snout

• Using skin colour, ch 7
• Round 1: 1 sc in each ch across, work an extra sc into the end stitch, then continue down the opposite side of the chain with 1 sc in each st
• Rounds 2 and 3: work around in an oval, adding 2 sc into the stitches at each curved end while keeping the long sides worked plain, until the oval widens to the width you want [CHECK — increase placement is shown rather than counted in the; add roughly 4 sts per round]. Checkpoint: this must stay an oval. If it is turning into a circle, you are increasing along the sides as well as the ends.
• Rounds 4 and 5: 1 sc in each st around with no increases. Checkpoint: the plain rounds pull the edges upright and give the snout depth. Held on its side it should look like a shallow dish, not a flat patch.
• Slip stitch and leave a long tail for sewing.

Where Makers Usually Go Wrong on This One

• Under-stuffing the legs at the top. Everyone stuffs the foot well and then loses interest by inch six. The result is a monkey whose legs collapse at the hip. Push firmly right up to the last round.
• Sewing the snout on flat. It needs a light amount of stuffing pushed in through the opening while you pin it, not before. Stuff it first and it goes rigid and rolls under the needle.
• Making the arms as thick as the legs. The ten-stitch arm against the twelve-stitch leg is a small difference on paper and a large one on the finished toy. Resist the urge to round it up.
• Ear placement drift. Sewing one ear, admiring it, then sewing the second by eye is how you get a monkey with a permanent quizzical tilt. Pin both, walk away, come back and look again.
• Eyes too far apart. Amigurumi faces read as friendly when the eyes sit close, roughly two stitches either side of centre. Wide-set eyes on a long snout produce something unsettling, which is fine if that is your goal and a problem if it is not.
• A tail stuffed like a leg. Firm tails point. Soft tails curve. You want the curve.

Assembly

Pin everything before a single stitch goes in. All of it. Then look at the whole thing from two feet away.

• Start with the hat. Secure and sew around the hat edge onto the head neatly with the yarn needle, working stitch by stitch so the brim sits level.
• Sew the body to the base of the head, working all the way around the join stitch by stitch. This seam carries the weight of every other piece, so make it dense.
• Stuff the snout lightly, pin it centred on the lower front of the head, then sew it down around the full edge.
• Pin the ears about four rounds up from the snout line, one on each side, aligned with each other. Sew them flat against the head with the folded edge downward.
• Attach the arms to the upper body, just below the head seam.
• Attach the legs to the lower base of the body, spaced so the monkey can sit without toppling forward.
• Sew the tail securely to the back, low down where the body meets the legs.
• Eyes last. Wrap the yarn four or five times around the needle and pull through to form a raised knot for each eye, or seat your safety eyes before closing the head as described earlier.
• Stitch a small triangle for the nose on the upper snout, then a curved mouth line beneath it. Keep the mouth short. A wide grin on a small snout tips into something else entirely.

Stuffing Guide

• Head: firm. Any softness here shows as a dented face within a week.
• Body: firm, slightly less than the head, so the join has a little give.
• Legs: firm and even the whole way up. This is the piece that most often disappoints.
• Arms: light. They should bend when a child holds them.
• Tail: very light. Barely more than a whisper of fibrefill.
• Ears: none at all.
• Snout: light, added at the pinning stage.

Over-stuffing shows up first at the seams as visible gaps between stitches, and second on the legs as a hard sausage that will not bend. If you can see white through your fabric, take some out.

The Character Dial

This design goes two very different ways depending on how you finish the face, and the pattern itself does not change at all.

• Toward mischief. Set the eyes slightly wider and higher on the head. Make the mouth line longer and pull one end up further than the other for an uneven grin. Skip the raised French knot and embroider flat oval eyes with a small white highlight stitch off-centre in each, which reads as a sideways glance. Work the ears one round taller so they stick out. Angle the tail upward when you sew it rather than letting it hang. A slightly grubby oatmeal or greyish-brown main colour helps here far more than a clean brown does. Small hat, worn tilted.
• Toward sweetness. Eyes close together and low, sitting almost on the snout line. Keep them as raised knots, which catch light and look wet. Add two loose satin-stitch cheeks in dusty pink either side of the snout, three or four stitches each, kept soft rather than solid. Shorten the mouth to a small upward curve. Sew the ears flat and close to the head instead of proud. Round the tail into a downward hook. Pastel or cream main colour, and a hat in something soft like buttermilk or pale sage.
• The odd thing I noticed while working the snout: on a face this small, the vertical distance between the nose triangle and the mouth line changes the expression more than either the eyes or the mouth shape does. Two rounds of gap gives you a thoughtful monkey. One round gives you a cheeky one. Try both with pins before committing.

Colourways

• Cocoa and Oat. Deep cocoa body with a pale oat face, hands and feet. The classic reading, and still the one that photographs best.
• Slate and Bone. Cool grey body against a bone-white face. Reads more like a sculpture than a toy, and works well in a room with no other colour in it.
• Toffee and Blush. Warm caramel body with a soft blush-pink face and a cream hat. This is the nursery version and it sells relentlessly at craft fairs.
• Ink and Sand. Near-black body, warm sand face, a single bright accent on the hat in mustard or teal. Modern and graphic, and the accent gives you a hook for a matching mobile or blanket.

Display Ideas

• Hooked over a shelf edge by both arms so the long legs dangle down the front of the bookcase. This design was built for that.
• Draped over a curtain pole or the top of a door frame with the tail hanging free.
• Sitting on a bedpost or headboard corner, legs either side.
• Wound loosely around a nursery hook or a wall peg, arms tied in a knot at the front.
• Clipped by the tail to a backpack strap or a school bag zip, if you sew a small ring in during assembly.
• Slung over the back of a rocking chair, one arm forward.
• Sitting on a stack of books on a desk, legs over the edge, which is the version most people end up keeping for themselves.

After the Season

Store it hanging or lying flat, never folded. The eight-inch legs will keep a crease if they sit bent in a box for six months, and stuffed crochet does not steam out the way fabric does. If you must box it, lay the legs and arms straight along the bottom and put nothing on top. A cotton pillowcase in a wardrobe is better than a sealed plastic tub, because the fibrefill needs to breathe and plastic traps damp that turns into a musty smell you will not shift. Give the face a quick check when you bring it out and re-tighten any embroidered eye knots that have loosened.

Quick Answers

• How long does one actually take? Around seven to nine hours if you are comfortable with amigurumi, and a fair chunk of that is the two long legs and the sewing. Split it over three evenings and it never feels like work.
• Can I make the legs shorter? You can, but the whole character of the toy comes from that length. If you want it shorter, take it down to six inches rather than four, and shorten the arms by exactly the same amount so they still end level.
• Is it machine washable? If you have used acrylic and embroidered the face, yes, in a pillowcase on a cool gentle cycle. Air dry flat with the limbs straight. Safety eyes usually survive it, but the snout seam is the part that gives up first, so reinforce it if the toy is going to a child who will need it washed often.
• What if my snout count comes out different from the pattern? It does not matter much, as long as the oval is symmetrical and it covers the lower third of the face when you pin it. Snouts are sized by eye against your own head piece, not by a fixed number.