In the summer of 2017 my middle kiddo, then a teenager, was going through his first and worst heartbreak. My heart was breaking right alongside his. There was nothing I could do to change what he was going through or make it easier. He didn't want to talk about it, he didn't want hugs, he didn't even want a pint of Ben & Jerry's (my go-to for bad times).
So I sat down on the sofa with some yarn and just randomly crocheted a weird shape while watching Stampycat feed cake to his cats with my youngest for a few hours and...
The very first hugamonster was born!
I don't know if this hugamonster actually made my son feel better, but it did make him smile for a few minutes and it also made me feel less helpless.
I decided to crochet another one and write the pattern so other people could make these weird little monsters too. It was published as a free pattern and people are allowed to make and sell finished hugamonsters if they'd like.
The pattern went viral.
I didn't fully realize what that meant until I started getting the most amazing emails!
A teacher made a hugamonster for each student in her kindergarten classroom for a holiday gift.
A bus driver's mother crocheted hugamonsters for all of the kiddos on the bus.
People have crocheted boxes of hugamonsters and dropped them off at police stations, shelters, and hospitals to comfort kiddos who are having scary times.
Someone who was struggling with a loss crocheted one for a friend who was having a hard time, and crocheting a cute monster made her feel a little better too.
I still get emails like this seven years later, and every time I do I end up crying my eyes out because it makes me so happy that hugamonsters have had such an impact.
People have made hugamonsters in all shapes and sizes, furry ones, sparkly ones, hugamonsters with accessories...there are thousands of hugamonsters in the world! It's so much fun to see a new one pop up!
I've crocheted less than 25 hugamonsters. Every time I make one I say that's the last one...and then maybe a couple of years later I end up making a few more. 🤣
In January 2021, while minding my business taking a shower, I had an idea:
What if there was a crypto Etsy?
I didn't know a thing about crypto or NFTs, just that my kid had told me to buy bitcoin a few years prior and I'd rolled my eyes at the idea of magical internet money. 🤦♀
I eventually found myself on twitter in the middle of a brouhaha about crypto influencers posting thirst traps, and Eric Rhodes creating a thirst trap of his own as an NFT (I think he minted it? This was before I fully understood things.).
At any rate, I'd found the weirdos and shenanigans I was looking for! Surely someone had already built crypto Etsy.
NOPE.
(Still waiting! Plz take my idea and run with it!)
I started making friends and figuring out how blockchain and NFTs worked and was like welp, I'm not an artist, I'm totally screwed here unless...
What if I create hugamonsters as NFTs?
People weren't doing 1/1s + physicals back then so there were no models to follow. And I was hesitant to experiment because minting gas fees at the time were routinely $250+ USD and transactions routinely failed). Luckily cloudwhite (then the community manager for OpenSea) took me under his wing, enabled a collection on OpenSea, gave me some helpful marketing pointers, and lent me some ETH for gas + his support.
I held my breath, fully expecting to fail, launched the collection, and...
The first hugamonster sold for 0.125 ETH before I even had a chance to tweet about it 🤣
Hugamonsters have come a LONG way since then! I've taught myself how to make digital art, learned better photo editing skills, expanded the hugamonster universe into different mediums, created a Halloween collection, and crocheted the first ever Hugamemester, Kevin, who now resides with my fiber friendo Alanna Wilcox:
The hugamonsters I've crocheted live all over the world - Australia, Ireland, the UK, scattered across the US. You have no idea how happy this makes me!
In a lot of ways I've grown up with the hugamonsters. Even though I experiment with lots of different kinds of art, I always come back to hugamonsters. I'm them in human form, and they're me in monster form.
The other day Ashwini called them peacesters, and yes, though they have a range of emotions just like the human who created them, in the end they just want everyone to feel hugged. ❤
Gen 2 hugamonsters are crocheted and ready to make an appearance as soon as I decide where to launch the collection. I'd like to launch it in a HUG storefront, but I'm on the waiting list to open one and not sure how long I'll be waiting. I'm getting antsy to release these into the wild, they're eating me out of house and home! 😜
If you don't want to wait, there are two 1/1 NFTs + physicals available in the Halloween collection on Maker's Place: jensalittleloopy | MakersPlace
Where will hugamonsters end up next?
I have ideas. 😈
