Hippo

Hello, everyone! I’d love to crochet a hippo (a Nile hippopotamus) out of hexagons. If you Google it, you’ll find lots of examples.

https://www.google.de/search?q=Hippo&espv=2&biw=1920&bih=955&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0CAYQ_AUoAWoVChMIxcGE-5uuyAIVh94sCh1l0AD3#tbm=isch&q=Hippo+h%C3%A4keln

Unfortunately, I can’t quite picture how the sewn-together hexagons will come together before the project is finished. Has anyone here done something like this before? The English patterns I’ve found online aren’t helping me, unfortunately.

Best regards—Gabi :-)

Hello Gabi, welcome to our forum and to the platform. I’ll bump your thread back up; maybe someone else would like to say something about it?
Have you already tried using the search function? Click here: All the current hippo patterns are clearly shown on one page. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen one with hexagons yet, but maybe one of our sellers has a suitable pattern tucked away? Good luck
 

Hello Gabi, have you also noticed that this doesn’t just involve hexagons, but also pentagons, heptagons, and maybe other polygons as well?

.... but yes, I found all those cute hippos ;-)

Hi Inna—oh my goodness—I hadn’t even noticed that they’re all quite different shapes. Oh dear, this is getting more and more complicated. I think I’ll try it out with paper first.

You only mentioned hexagons, and since I know you can only make something flat out of hexagons, I suspected that hexagons weren’t the only shapes used. And sure enough, each hippo uses polygonal shapes. That’s exactly what I wanted to point out to you, in case you hadn’t noticed.
If you can crochet squares, pentagons, hexagons, and heptagons, then it shouldn’t really be a big problem to connect them using the pictures on Google. Or am I wrong?

Oh, how funny—while I was trying to explain what I meant, you’d already figured it
out.
But trying it out with paper (or fabric) first is a great idea!

Hi Inna, right now I’m crocheting all kinds of other little animals and working on your Advent calendar pattern. In between, I also just crochet x...-gons. Then I lay them out as a flat net and join them with generous seams—we’ll see, maybe a hippo will come together all by itself. That’s probably the best way to see which x...-gons need to be crocheted together where.

If all sides of the x-sided shape are the same length, then you can connect them however you like without ending up with a hippo—so it would definitely be helpful to use the pictures as a guide, but I’m sure that’s what you mean too :-).
I’d be really curious to see if it actually works out in the end—there aren’t any pictures showing the hippo from underneath, so I hope that will somehow become clear once everything else is finished.

.... lol, of course I meant it that way. I’ve already printed out some pictures of finished hippos. When I start on the hippo, I’ll take pictures of it (if it actually turns out to be a hippo) and post them here. There are so many other animals made from these x...-gons—I just think they’re great.

Okay, I’m curious!
...and I’m going to look for other animals—I haven’t seen any of those yet...

Take a look here:

https://www.etsy.com/de/search?q=African+flower

Oh, great! Thank you so much! The animals are really awesome! And there’s even an underside view of the hippo there :-).