Crochet Bees: Joined Rounds in Amigurumi

In mid-May I decided to crochet an amigurumi bee. Spring seems like the right time to make a bee, and I was looking for a quick project that I could easily complete in the space of an afternoon.

I’d already seen quite a lot of pictures of amigurumi bees, and I’d done enough crochet by that point that I was at a point of being able to freehand crochet the body based on the pictures I’d seen. For the wings I used this pattern by Hooked by Robin.

One thing I noticed about the amigurumi bees I’d seen is that most people seem to work them in continuous rounds, rather than joined rounds. I’m still fairly new to crochet but from what I can tell, amigurumi is usually worked in continuous spirals in order to avoid the little bump that forms on the outside of the work when you join them with a slip stitch. But I actually think spirals aren’t ideal for this pattern - making the stripes in continuous rounds means that you end up with an uneven section that at the bottom of the bee. It doesn’t look great, and that’s really inconvenient on a project like this, which is the kind of thing I can imagine turning into a keychain, or see kids playing with.

So after crocheting my first bee the usual way, I wanted to try making another one with uniform, even stripes. To achieve this, I decided join my rounds.

To avoid a visible bump, I used a type of join that I’d stumbled across about a month previously. I’m still not sure if this join has a name - I think it might be an invisible join, but there’s no name mentioned in the tutorial where I found it, which is by Crochet with Julia. Whatever it’s called, it’s a really natural-looking join, and it’s worked well for me both when following this tutorial and in some top-down hats I went on to make afterwards. The tutorial uses double crochet stitches, but I figured it should be easy enough to adapt the same method to work with single crochet.

The second time around, I also decided to make a Pride Bee instead of a regular bee. These things seem to be a rite of passage amongst queer crocheters, substituting the black and yellow stripes for pride flag colours. I’m not sure whether the idea of a crochet Pride Bee (and this bee pattern more broadly) has ever been attributed to one particular person - from what I can tell it seems to be a general trend. But I figure someone had to do it first, and I’d really like to be able to credit them at the very least. So if you know whose pattern this was originally, please let me know in the comments!

In any case, let’s take a look at the differences between a bee worked in spirals, and a bee worked in joined rounds!

Having now tried both methods, I’d say my preference is definitely joined rounds for this project. As you can see above, the bump where I’ve made the join is barely noticeable, and the stripes also look way less awkward now that they all line up.

So on balance, I’d say that using joined rounds in crochet is completely viable, as long as you know the above method for creating an invisible join. I doubt I’ll be joining my rounds for every single amigurumi project I make in the future, but for patterns with visible stripes I definitely want to try this method again!