The best way to successfully recite the teasingly tongue twister-ish title of this blog post is really rather slowly. Obviously the sloths have no problem whatsoever with that. These three, Three Toed, Brown Throated tree sloths have lots of time for practicing tongue twisters – when they’re not sleeping for their usual 18 hours a day that is.

Slocombe the Sloth is a bit of a hippy at heart. He’s a chilled out, tree hugging, totally relaxed kind of dude and a great example to all of us who are always rushing around in today’s busy world. Slocombe knows that simply hanging out with his friends is one of life’s great pleasures and he’s in no hurry to join the rat race and set his stress levels soaring through the roof.

Ok, so he may not have a high powered job or a fancy new yacht but he has inner peace and a nice tree, and that counts for a lot. He also has a loyal band of furry friends who love to come around for a playdate.

They climb the trees together in the garden whenever they can.

It’s a fabulous life just chillin’ with your best buddies. No wonder these sloths are always smiling!

I used King Cole Moments yarn for all of the sloths in the pictures above as it comes in a fabulous range of natural colours but any DK (double knit/light worsted weight) furry eyelash yarn will do just as well.

From left to right, below, I made one in shade 1612 (Squirrel), one in shade 497 (Beaver) and one by alternating each of those two colours, one round at a time.

Two 50g balls of this yarn are plenty for one sloth. I accented mine with shade 499 (Koala) on the last few rounds of the body, the base of the toes  and along the hairline. This shade name is a bit confusing as I’ve never actually seen a chocolate brown koala, but there you go!

Orwell the Orangutan loves his new playmates. They all have a great time lounging around in my arbour.

If you prefer, you can use a mohair yarn instead of an eyelash type furry yarn for this pattern. (I’m going to try this with Orwell too at some point).

Any weight and make of mohair yarn should work out fine. Just be sure to match the weight of the smooth yarns used for the face and toes to the weight of the mohair yarn you’ve chosen throughout each sloth so that the relative proportions come out the same.

I used a Yeoman yarn called Chogamohair (shade – Pebble) for this particular sloth…

Though it is described as a DK yarn I judged it to be rather heavier than that when it arrived through the post and I saw it in real life. It’s just so difficult to tell these things from a picture on Ebay.

As a result of its greater than expected bulk I matched the Chogamohair with Aran (worsted weight) yarns for the non furry bits and so he came out rather larger than his DK King Cole counterparts, but no less cute for that. (If you do the same I suggest upsizing to a 15mm safety eye too).

Big or small, every sloth likes a good hug!

You can buy Slocombe’s pattern from any of my online shops should you suddenly develop the desire to crochet up one of these slow motion twig eating folivores for yourself. If you do I’d love to see a picture so be sure to hop on over and post one on my Moji-Moji Facebook page. We need more sloths in the world to put a smile on our faces and make us go ‘awww’!

I greatly admired the slogan on the Slothville.com website…”The slow shall inherit the earth”. It would be nice if that were true so we could all give ourselves permission to change down a gear or two and stop to smell the roses on a much more regular basis!