The pokemon crochet journey!

So as my resolutions suggested, I'm going to try and participate in every single baking and cooking challenge from the Daring Kitchens this year. The January 2014 Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Francijn of "Koken in de Brouwerij". She challenged us all to bake layered cakes in the tradition of Baumkuchen (tree cake) and Schichttorte (layered cake).  I had made this cake back in November and I think it turned out quite well for a first attempt. But there were a lot of things I wanted to fix up for my second attempt at this cake. I got my recipe from Global Table Adventure for the actual cake and I am not sure where I found my almond paste recipe but looking through google shows that this same recipe is used in many different places by many different people so I can't go wrong with it. The first attempt of my cake was made with a nut free marzipan recipe as a work colleague of mine has a nut allergy.  This time around I'm going to be

And here we are in the final phase of the growlithe. On hindsight I should have sewn on the black before sewing on the tail because some of the tail overlaps the black but that's okay! If you are reading along with this you can learn from my not quite planning ahead. I am not going to have a pattern for the black lines on there because I think the black lines on a growlithe should be unique to each mon. The way I did the black lines is I chained together a random amount of stitches in black DK weight yarn (half the weight of the yarn I used for the rest of growlithe) and then crochet'd a few rows. I then used the tail I left to sew it on. To make the V shaped black on the front, I crocheted two rows, then I chained an amount that was similar to the rows I crocheted. On the way back I crocheted across the short end of the previous row and that created a V. Or you can crochet two small rectangles and sew them together to form a V. To get around the tail part, I

So growlithe isn't progressing as quickly as I would like him to but we will continue on with this! There's only the legs, tail, stripes and chest bushy part to go. This is pretty much the home stretch. And we copy the legend again and off we go! Legend (This is all US crochet terminology) * SC - Single crochet * SC2tog - Single crochet two stitches together * SCx[A] - Single crochet A amount of times * [SCxA]xB - repeat whatever is in the bracket B amount of times * [A]SC - single crochet A times in the same stitch * LS - loop stitch * SS - Slip stitch * HDC - Half double crochet * CH - chain * When I write my colour change, I will write "change to <colour>", that means the next stitch is the new colour. Eg, SCx3 (change to white) SC It means on the last stitch of the x3 you will change to white and the SC is the first stitch in white. * The number in the brackets is how many stitches should be in that round This is what we have so far!