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Cinthia Vallet’s Beloved Animals & How It All Started!
If you are a knitter who is active on social media, you most likely already know some of them. Frankie the Fox, for example, with his perfectly pointed nose and blue dungarees, or Agi the Sheep, with her floppy little ears and furry vest, or Edward the Badger, with his charming black-and-white face and matching trousers. These intricately knitted animals look amazingly lifelike, true to their real-life counterparts, yet still totally unique and fairytale-like in appearance.
They are all part of the universe created by Cinthia Vallet, a French designer and the author of Mouche & Friends: Seamless Toys to Knit and Love (2023), as well as the newly released Chez Myrtil: More Seamless Friends to Knit and Love (2026). These two books have sparked a worldwide crafting phenomenon: more than just knitting books, they resemble works of children’s literature, with little backstories for each of the toy animals that give them personality and bring them closer to the reader.
Besides the charming characters, knitters have also fallen in love with Cinthia’s original knitting method, in which the toys are worked seamlessly in the round, guided by illustrated step-by-step tutorials. “I love not having to knit a bunch of small pieces together afterwards,” one of our customers wrote in her review of Mouche & Friends.
But did you know that it all started with a simple knitted sock? Here, Cinthia tells the story of how she first came up with the idea for her animals!
Myrtil the Firstborn
“Myrtil the Bear has a special place in my heart because he is my first (woollen)born,” Cinthia says.
Myrtil is a cheerful bear with a big heart and the main character of Cinthia’s new book. He started to take shape in Cinthia’s mind in 2018, after she had discovered the magic of seamless knitting methods. Cinthia remembers holding a freshly knitted sock in her hands, fascinated by its three-dimensional shape. She loved the small scale of the project, as well as the feeling of knitting it — the process flowed naturally, offering just the right amount of challenge and focus.
Then she began to look at the sock and see more possibilities in it than simply wearing it.
“Of course, socks have a well-known potential for becoming puppets. But I started to wonder if similar shaping could lead somewhere else. Not just one turn for a heel, but a few twists that would allow me to bring to life the characters I had been thinking about.”
And there were already plenty of them in her head, thanks to her lifelong love of animals, both real ones and those who live in the pages of books. Cinthia had always considered herself someone who couldn’t draw, but now knitting finally offered her a way to bring these animal friends to life.
Designing the Process
At first, Cinthia focused on making the knitting process as smooth as possible. Through visualisation and testing, she developed her original method, in which a three-dimensional animal is knitted in one piece, without any assembly at the end.
“I wanted to understand how to add volume where I needed it, and when to switch from circular to flat knitting and vice versa, while following an organic process — something that would grow without obstacles,” Cinthia says.
Cinthia admits that she is prone to procrastination, so she wanted to create a method that would minimise the risk of that happening. This meant breaking the process into multiple small steps, each giving the knitter a sense of pride and achievement, and starting with the character’s head. This helps bring the animal to life very early on, motivating the knitter to see the project through to completion.
“And for me, knitting without seams was non-negotiable. Not because I value it more than a method involving separate pieces to assemble, but because it suited the way my brain works much better, and I thought other knitters might feel the same way, too.”
A bear seemed like a comforting animal to start with. It is a familiar and, in a way, universal figure in stories — a character that would “speak” to everyone, while its simple shapes also offered a good starting point for figuring out the right construction. At the same time, it presented a challenge: exploring what makes a bear a bear. This is how Cinthia and Myrtil took their first steps together. Then came Winston the Lion and Odile the Bunny, followed by Merri the Mole and Didi the Little Mole, who, in Cinthia’s own words, “held her hand during the pandemic”.
“And so I kept making animals, applying my newfound method and learning to observe which details would bring each character to life, and how to translate those details into knitting.”
A House of Paper
As a lover of illustrated books, a former bookshop employee, and a parent who loves reading, Cinthia has a lifelong passion for animal characters who inhabit written stories. It therefore felt natural for her to incorporate storytelling into her own knitted characters, too.
“Right from the beginning, writing became a very important component of my work. First, the technical writing and all the explanations that would hold the knitter’s hand throughout the process. Then, as these technical aspects became more settled, the desire for narrative writing began to have more room to bloom.”
This was when the idea of making a book began to take root in Cinthia’s mind. She wanted to share her inner world and its characters with knitters, and a book felt like the best format for doing two things at once: creating a supportive framework for the knitter and giving her animals a space where they could all live together.
“Books are the common thread running through my life. If I had to mention one thing that has always been there with me, it would be books. So I could not imagine this journey without making one at some point. And because of Laine’s unique way of making books, we could find a balance between whimsy and technique, open a door to childhood and playfulness, and create the poetic vessel through which my characters could find their way to you.”
This is how Mouche & Friends came to be in 2023. It featured 12 new knitted characters and has since captured knitters’ hearts, selling 20 000 copies worldwide. Following that success, Cinthia naturally wanted her earlier characters — the ones who had taken their first steps with her — to have this beautiful house of paper, too. In Chez Myrtil, you will get to know Myrtil, who welcomes you into his bustling boarding house, where he hosts his beloved animal friends.
“And I’m calm and confident because I know they will be in your loving hands,” Cinthia says.
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