King Porkington, Clementine the Fox and Kippie the Penguin are just a few friends from the marvelous menagerie Jacki Donhou has created—and you can make them, too. The Gaithersburg mom started Dear Jacki Stitchery to sell her amigurumi pattern designs. Amigurumi is a Japanese word meaning knit or crocheted stuffed toy, and Donhou has dreamed up dozens of charming designs for other crochet crafters to follow.
“They all have a different special place in my heart,” Donhou, 46, says of the 95 colorful characters she has brought from imagination to reality over the years, including Maple the Kitty and Willa the Koala. Murph the Troll, Donhou says, is modeled after her husband, Chris, with whom she has two daughters and a son. Chris and Murph are tall with thick, curly hair.
“She has such a creative mind,” says pattern tester and customer Christina Krieger of Peoria, Arizona. “The patterns are easy to follow and she documents everything with pictures, so someone new to amigurumi can easily follow along.”
Donhou started crocheting in 2012 as a stay-at-home mom in Seattle with a bit of spare time. She learned how to crochet by watching tutorials on YouTube and admired the amigurumi. “I found these little amigurumi monsters, and after making one or two of them, which happened to be not pretty at all, I was totally hooked.”
She honed her craft for two years, then came up with her first pattern: Fairlee the Unicorn. More amigurumi patterns followed, as well as the opening of an Etsy online store. Depending on the design, patterns run between $2.47 and $5.46. The more complicated the pattern in the types of stitches and details, the higher the price. In the past decade, Donhou estimates she has sold about 1,500 patterns a year.
In 2020, Donhou started working on a book of patterns, which took about 18 months to write, she says. Cute creatures introduced in the book such as Tillie the Lamb, Weatherly the Unicorn and Garrick the Dragon offer challenging projects for every level of skill.
“I didn’t feel like there were enough amigurumi crochet books out there,” she says. “At that point, since I did so much in my craft to better myself, I needed to write a book.”
Donhou and her family moved to Gaithersburg in 2021 when her husband took a job as a technical engineer with the ABC News Bureau in Washington, D.C. Her book Yarn Cake Amigurumi: 15 Cute Creatures to Crochet was published in October 2023 by GMC Publications. The book features patterns and step-by-step photos for 15 creatures to crochet. Krieger helped test patterns for the book and says it takes her four to five hours to create Donhou’s smaller-size amigurumi animals (about 4 inches tall) and eight to 10 hours of craft time to complete the larger critters (about 9 inches tall). The amigurumi community has three standard levels of skill, which Donhou posts on each pattern: beginner, intermediate or experienced.
“They’re fun and challenging and complex enough that for experienced amigurumi makers, they’re still a blast to make,” Krieger says.
Donhou doesn’t market adorable amigurumi animals in their finished form, just the patterns for crafters to create their own versions. The digital downloads are available through her Etsy site and on the websites Ravelry and Amigurumi.com. Customers receive PDFs of patterns, as well as information on yarn, hook size, colors and more.
“She pours herself into her patterns, and I feel like they’re a reflection of her,” says Gaithersburg customer Elizabeth Bush. “Each of her patterns has a little touch that makes it a little bit extra—in a good way.”
Donhou’s hobby has turned into a full-time gig. Her next amigurumi pattern book, Crocheted Mythical Creatures: 15 Makes From Legends, Folklore and Fairytales, is scheduled to come out in March, and Crochet Christmas: 25 Festive Decorations to Make is due out in July. She also intends on teaching classes beginning in January.
Her sample creatures, created during the pattern process, are distributed to friends and family.
“It just makes me feel so warm inside that somebody enjoys something that I made that they can re-create,” Donhou says.
This appears in the January/February 2025 issue of Bethesda Magazine.
