01
What this one is
This is the kind of set you make when someone you love is expecting, and you want to give them something that rattles and something that clips, both wearing the same small brown-and-beige monkey face. One piece loops around a 70mm wooden ring for shaking, the other ends in a pacifier clip, so the gift covers two jobs without you having to design two separate toys.
Your hands spend most of the time on the head, thirteen rounds of brown and beige worked around 6mm safety eyes, and the rest on two short collars built from double crochet shells and single crochet increases. Between the yarn, the eyes, and threading on the wooden balls and star bead, plan on an afternoon, maybe a bit more if you stop to admire the monkey face as it forms.
02
Try it another way
Once you have made the monkey set as written, there is room to play. You could swap the 70mm wooden ring for a smaller one if you want a daintier rattle, or thread on only the 16mm wooden balls instead of mixing in the 10mm ones for a chunkier sound. The beige yarn used for the face and inner ear sections could be swapped for cream or a soft gray to change the monkey's whole expression while keeping the brown body the same. If you only want one item rather than the full set, the pacifier holder collar with its shell stitch pattern stands on its own and can be clipped straight onto the pacifier clip without making the rattle at all, or the reverse, make just the rattle collar with its 2 rounds of increases around the wooden ring and skip the clip hardware entirely. The star bead is a nice place to experiment too, since swapping it for a different bead shape or color gives the finished piece a slightly different personality without touching the stitch count anywhere else in the pattern.
What makes this one satisfying is the contrast between the fiddly head and the quick, almost architectural collars. The head starts from a simple ring and builds up in brown and beige through thirteen rounds, so you get to watch a monkey face assemble itself stitch by stitch before the safety eyes go in. Then you shift gears entirely: the rattle collar is just increase rounds of double crochet and single crochet worked flat and fast, while the pacifier holder collar uses a shell pattern, dc-ch1-dc repeats finished with four more dc and a single crochet in the gaps. Stringing the 10mm and 16mm wooden balls and the star bead onto the 70mm ring at the end feels like the payoff round, turning careful stitching into something that genuinely shakes and clicks.
