Friday, July 4, 2014

Hello Kitty says Selamat Datang!



Did you know that Sanrio Hello Kitty has its first theme park outside Japan? It is located in Johor, a Malaysian state at the tip of the peninsula, next to Singapore.


Hello Kitty has many fans among the Malaysians and in my opinion, particularly among the oriental Asians. McDonald's in Malaysia would occasionally design a collection of Hello Kitty soft toys for sale. And fans would queue up to purchase the meals just for the sake of collecting each design.


Anyway, this is a congratulatory post to applaud my sister-in-law, Mei Li, who has been scouted & found online by a Philadelphian book publisher to share her amigurumei patterns for Sanrio.



Click here to read about Mei Li's book


Mei Li was discovered & picked by Quirk Books to share her Japanese crochet toy designs in conjunction with the iconic Hello Kitty's 40th anniversary. It is Sanrio's first amigurumi book in English and it would be officially made available to the public on 16th September 2014. But if you want to make sure you have a copy, you could pre-order it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Canada and UK.


Meantime, go check out her blog, amiguruMEI, where she shares her kawaii amigurumi patterns & tutorials. All free! Since 2012, her blog has received about 550,000 hits while her Instagram followers has risen to 10,000 and counting. She also shares some of the patterns with a UK based magazine, Simply Crochet, and craft ideas via a Malaysian  newspaper's biweekly craft column.