When I designed my Duck and Goose crochet pattern last winter, I was already planning for future Canada Goose and Mallard expansion packs. I also designed my Ducklings and Goslings pattern so the babies would be ready to complete the families once their parents were finished. Now that moment has arrived, and my Duck and Goose Collection is complete!

Click to see a larger photo of the Duck and Goose Collection – there’s a lot to see here 🙂

Now you can make four different amigurumi duck and goose families: white ducks with single-coloured ducklings, white geese with single-coloured goslings, and Canada Goose and Mallard families each with their own distinctively-coloured babies. Yay!

Let’s take a closer look at the new patterns:

Canada Goose Expansion Pack

Also known as Canadian geese or ‘cobra chickens’, Canada geese are native to Canada and the northern US, but have also been introduced into many other countries. They are fiercely protective of their babies and will hiss and and even attack if you approach too closely during breeding season, but every year I enjoy having to wait while a family of Canada geese crosses the road ahead of my car – the fluffy goslings are so adorable!

The Canada Goose Expansion Pack includes all the modifications you’ll need to convert the white goose from the Duck and Goose pattern into a realistic Canada goose with its iconic black head and neck and white ‘chinstrap’.

Mallards Expansion Pack

Mallards are the most common species of wild duck, and they are found naturally throughout most of the northern hemisphere. Did you know that almost all domestic ducks, no matter their colouring, are descended from mallards?

The Mallards Expansion Pack includes all the modifications you’ll need to convert the white duck from the Duck and Goose pattern into a pair of realistic mallards. The drake is the star of this show with his classic green head and bold markings. While he’s what most people think of when they hear the word mallard, I’ve also included a female with a simple but clever brown eye stripe to round out your mallard family!

What is an Expansion Pack?

• An Expansion Pack is an add-on to an existing PlanetJune pattern.
• The Expansion Pack lets you modify or add to the original pattern to create something else.
• You cannot use the Expansion Pack alone – you must also purchase the original pattern in order to be able to complete the pictured items in the Expansion Pack pattern.

Purchase Options

Okay, you have several bundle options here, so I’ll go through them all for you:

• If you already have the Duck and Goose pattern, you can buy the Canada Goose Expansion Pack and/or Mallards Expansion Pack individually from the shop.
• If you haven’t yet bought Duck and Goose, you can buy it and add-on either (or both) expansion packs to save 50c on each pack you add.
• Or, for the best deal of all, pick up the complete Duck and Goose Collection, which includes all four of the patterns picture above (the babies too!) for a special price!

I have listings for any possible combination you could want in the shop (search for ‘waterfowl’ to see them all!), but if you’re confused, feel free to email me (or comment below) and I’ll help you to get the best deal on the patterns you want.

And, if you’re not ready to crochet your favourite waterfowl right now, you can heart and queue them on Ravelry so you don’t forget about them:

Canada Goose:

Mallards:

Duck and Goose:

Ducklings and Goslings:

I’m so happy with this pattern collection, and I hope you’ll love them too! Which duck or goose pattern is your favourite?

I absolutely loved growing and eating cherry tomatoes last year, and for 2024 my main gardening goal was to improve my tomato-growing skills. Living in Canada, the growing season is short, so I have to make the most of it before we’re back to snow! But the more you discover about gardening, the more you realise how much there is still to learn: so many varieties of tomato, so many different ways to grow them, and so much conflicting advice… How do you decide who to believe and which advice to follow?

Thanks to my science background, my answer is always to do my own experiments and see what actually works best for me! So I decided to try a lot of different things in my 2024 garden, and build what I learn into a solid plan for my future tomatoes. I filled my garden with 22 tomato plants of 12 different varieties (plus 2 more plants kept indoors).

A selection of the cherry tomatoes I grew in 2024

And here’s a small part of my tomato jungle!

Of course, I’m not saying my results are the definitive answers – I’m not an expert, and with only one plant to compare in each experiment, my results aren’t statistically significant. But I wanted to document everything for myself, and who knows? Maybe you’ll find some of it interesting or even helpful if you want to try growing cherry tomatoes like these!

For each of my experiments, I used the same type of tomato for both cases and tried to only change the variable I was testing for to give a fair comparison. There are too many other factors at play to make this a scientifically valid test, but I’ve still learnt a lot from trying so many things this season! Read on to find out what I discovered…

It’s been a year since my pup Maggie recovered from her surgery to remove a tumour from her shoulder. It was such an exhausting and traumatic time, but she made a full recovery and so far there’s no sign of reoccurrence, and she’s a very happy, healthy and energetic almost-12 year old!

Now that things are better, I want to document my solution for keeping her wound protected from licking and covered to prevent infection without using a plastic cone or bandages. I hope someone will find this post in the future if they need tips for protecting their dog or cat’s shoulder wound after surgery.

Avoiding the ‘Cone of Shame’

When Maggie came home from her surgery, I wasn’t expecting her tiny half-inch lump to have needed such extensive surgery. The biopsy later revealed they only just got it all, with less than a mm of clearance(!), so the surgeon did exactly the right thing.

Her incision was massive, running from her neck all the way down to her elbow. She clearly felt terrible, and she was in so much pain. She was supposed to wear a hard plastic cone around her neck for two whole weeks, but she looked utterly miserable in it and I couldn’t make her do that.

(Trigger warning: Don’t click the following link if the sight of fresh stitches will upset you! Here’s a pic of her when she first came home with her cone.)

Luckily, the inflatable collar I’d bought for my much-missed cat Maui fit her perfectly. These are so much more comfortable for a dog or cat than a hard plastic cone – it’s more like a travel neck pillow than a medical device! The neck size is adjustable, you can customize the amount of inflation for comfort, and the soft cover is removable so you can wash it.

It’s easy to remove so your pet can eat comfortably, and then refasten it around their neck with the velcro strip. I think this is a much more comfortable option for pets, and it provides a built-in comfy pillow for nap time!

Note: An inflatable collar isn’t a perfect replacement for a cone in all cases – as you can see from the above photo, Maggie could still reach her paws and tail while wearing the inflatable collar. If she needed to be stopped from licking those areas, I would have tried a soft cone collar instead.

Custom T-shirt (a dog Hospital Gown!)

Wounds apparently heal better with airflow vs tight bandages, so I was instructed to protect the incision site from infection by putting a t-shirt or something on her. That was a challenge, as she couldn’t move or bend her leg without pulling on her stitches, so I realised I needed a shirt that tied or zipped up the back, so it would be easier to put on.

I’ve made t-shirts for Maggie before, by cutting down my old t-shirts to fit her. (Having a small white dog who loves to walk in all weather means she doesn’t stay white for very long at certain times of year! The t-shirts don’t only look cute: they work really well to protect her forelegs and tummy from getting filthy during mud season.)

Maggie in her anti-mud shirt

So I jumped into gear while my sweet girl was sleeping off her sedatives, and got to work on a new shirt – luckily I knew her measurements from the notes I kept from her old shirts. If you need a similar solution you could save yourself some time by buying a dog t-shirt – or using an old one you already have – as your starting point. I needed to keep myself busy until Maggie woke up, so I made a new shirt from scratch.

To make the shirt easy to remove, I cut it all the way down the middle of the back, and planned to stabilize each side of the cut edge with cotton twill tape. While knit jersey fabric doesn’t fray, a cut edge will curl up, and the non-stretchy twill tape prevents that. I also thought that attaching the ribbons to a strong non-stretchy base would spread the load of the attachment points – I didn’t want the ribbons to rip out of the t-shirt fabric as Maggie got more active.

I measured and cut two pieces of twill tape to match the length of the shirt, and then securely stitched one end of four lengths of ribbon at right angles to each tape, to form the ties. (If your shirt is large enough to overlap at the back once you’ve cut it, you could use snaps or velcro instead, but I like that the ribbons make the shirt a bit more customizable; you can make a looser fit by leaving a gap between the two sides of the shirt when you tie the pairs of ribbons together.)

The final step was to attach one tape-with-ribbons to each cut side of the shirt back. This was a bit tricky, as jersey t-shirt fabric is so stretchy! I arranged the tape so the cut ends of the ribbons were sandwiched between the t-shirt and the tape, and I used lots of pins to hold the layers together so the jersey couldn’t stretch too much while I sewed each side of the twill tape down along the length of the shirt.

Right side (top): t-shirt fabric with two lines of stitching
Wrong side (bottom): twill tape with ribbons stitches to it at intervals

Although the stitching to attach the ribbons to the tape was a bit messy and my stitching lines are a bit wonky, the overall effect from the right side isn’t too bad, as you only see the two lines of stitching from where I attached the tape to the shirt. And I was going for function over form – I don’t think a recovery shirt needs to be beautifully finished! The important thing is that the ties hold securely and the shirt stays in place, and it did just that:

I could slip Maggie’s paws into the sleeves, then lift the sides of the shirt and tie the ribbons together down her back to secure it together, just like a hospital gown! (If it works for people, why not for a dog?!)

It worked really well – I could put the shirt on without causing any pain, and untie the top ribbons to check on the wound without needing to remove the whole thing.

My solution let Maggie relax as she recovered, with a comfortable loose covering protecting her wound. I kept the inflatable collar on her too, but I took it off when I could monitor her closely to make sure she wasn’t trying to lick the wound.

Maggie enjoyed convalescing in the sunshine in her ‘hospital gown’, and snoozing the rest of the day away with her inflatable pillow. When she was allowed to take some gentle walks again, I also made her a little crop top to keep the wound covered while it continued to heal without overheating her with the full t-shirt.

Sassy girl rocking her crop top!

The hardest part of Maggie’s recovery was supervising her full time to make sure she didn’t rip her stitches by running or jumping about too soon! How do you tell a dog they’re not allowed to move for weeks?!

I’m sure the fresh air helped her feel better – as you can see, she was very happy to be outside enjoying the sunshine with me while she recuperated! And I was happy to see that her wound stayed fully covered, no matter how much she rolled around on the grass.

Verdict

Despite the vet tech telling me Maggie would be left with a ‘gnarly scar’, she healed up incredibly well. She has a tiny scar remaining at the top of her leg (you can just see it as a redder spot in the photo below, before her fur fully grew back). She did sometimes get to lick that area by pushing up the t-shirt sleeves when she wasn’t wearing the inflatable collar, and that’s probably my fault for not always supervising her closely enough.

But the most important thing is that her wound healed cleanly, with no infections and no tumour remaining, and we don’t mind a small battle scar to remind us of what a survivor she is! Now she’s as happy and healthy as ever, and enjoying her garden again this summer without any silly clothes to slow her down 😉

Isn’t she a sweetie?

I hope you’ll never need the info from this post, but if your furbaby ever needs to recover from injury or surgery, I hope you’ll find something useful in Maggie’s recovery story.

I’m so happy to be able to re-release my Barn Owl crochet pattern with a new option that lets you choose the direction you want your owl to look!

I’ve always regretted that I wasn’t able to do this in the original pattern, but I was trying not to over-complicate the pattern. Now I’ve come up with an easy way to branch the pattern into the original straight-ahead option and the new turned-head option, and look how cute they are together…

Aren’t they an adorable pair?! Barn owls have always been my favourite owl, and this addition is the icing on the cake for me. Having a pair of barn owls in two different poses makes them look so dynamic and lifelike – I’m completely satisfied with my design now 🙂

About the Pattern

Barn Owl is an Expansion Pack for my Owl Collection pattern, a clever low-sew design. The head, body, legs and wings are all crocheted as one piece, giving you an elegant bird silhouette with the perfect owl posture and an effortlessly smooth result!

The Barn Owl Expansion Pack includes all the modifications required to crochet a Barn Owl with realistic face shape and markings. The original option has the owl looking straight ahead:

And the new additional option, presented as separate right-handed and left-handed versions for clarity, allows you to have your owl looking to the left or right (and also includes instructions for letting your owl look in any direction, so you can choose your favourite angle!)

What is an Expansion Pack?

• An Expansion Pack is an add-on to an existing PlanetJune pattern.
• The Expansion Pack lets you modify or add to the original pattern to create something else.
• You cannot use the Expansion Pack alone – you must also purchase the original pattern in order to be able to complete the pictured items in the Expansion Pack pattern.

Links to Buy

• If you’ve already bought the Barn Owl pattern, this version is a free update for you! You can download the new PDF from My Patterns in your PlanetJune account.
• If you already own the Owl Collection, but not the Barn Owl, you can buy the Barn Owl Expansion Pack (including both Barn Owl options) individually for only $3.50.
• If you haven’t yet bought either, pick up the multipack of both owl patterns and you’ll save 50c on the pair.

I’m so happy with this update to my Barn Owl pattern. I love how the two options look together – it adds so much realism to have them in different poses, just like a real-life pair of owls! I hope you’ll love making them too 🙂

The Ravellenic Games – a two-week event hosted by Ravelry where participants challenge themselves to start and finish crochet/knitting projects, timed to coincide with a certain global sports competition – ended on Sunday. I wasn’t sure if we’d have a Team PlanetJune this year, as our Ravelry group has grown quieter, with most of our community activities moving to our more private and chat-friendly Discord. But I’m so glad we decided to go for it anyway!

From July 26th to August 11th 2024, our small but mighty team challenged ourselves to start and finish any crochet projects based on PlanetJune patterns (and those from my books), and look how well we did!

42 projects completed by Team PlanetJune in just over 2 weeks, and don’t they all look wonderful?

We had a lovely variety of projects: amigurumi animals, plants, accessories and home decor. You can see them all in the new Team PlanetJune Ravellenic Games Gallery. (And if you want to make any of these for yourself, clicking any photo in the gallery will take you to the pattern!)

It was such fun to see everyone picking projects to make and inspiring and cheering each other on to finish them, and the team spirit and camaraderie was a tonic for me, too. It’s been difficult to get back into the swing of my usual designing life after spending a year as a book publisher, so I challenged myself to complete a new design for the games. And look what happened: not one but four new PlanetJune birds sprang off my hook!

L-R: Mallard Drake, Mallard Duck, Barn Owl, Canada Goose

I don’t quite know where I found the energy to accomplish all this, although I did spend days, evenings and weekends crocheting up a storm, and enjoying it! I think it was a combination of the lure of the challenge plus the encouragement of my teammates; the more projects I completed, the more I thought “maybe I could fit in one more before the deadline…?” And, when you feel the call, stopping to do other things isn’t really an option 🙂

Where are the patterns? If you’d like to make these birds too, the patterns will all be coming! The pair of Mallards and the Canada Goose will each become an Expansion Pack for my Duck and Goose pattern in the coming months, and the new turned-head version of the Barn Owl will be a new option that I’ll add to the existing Barn Owl Expansion Pack for my main Owl Collection (and it’ll be a free upgrade, if you’ve already bought the Barn Owl pattern).

Although I didn’t intend this, 2024 looks like it’s shaping up to be the PlanetJune Year of Birds – which is a nice change after 2023’s Year of Snakes. I’m just going with it: following where the inspiration takes me is always the most joyous way, as you can probably tell by how prolific I’ve been this month!

I have been asking myself how I managed to create so much in such a short time, and the answer is… I didn’t, not really. Although I did all the prototyping and crocheting during the timeframe of the games, none of these is a new idea for me: I’ve been planning to make Mallard and Canada Goose expansion packs ever since I designed the original Duck and Goose pattern at the start of this year, and I’d already done the research and planning long before the games began. And I’d always wanted to make a Barn Owl with a turned head, although I decided against it in my original pattern (as it would over-complicate things), but the spirit of the games inspired me to go for the challenge. I’m so glad I did!

I think this event has been really good for my crojo (that’s crochet mojo, if you didn’t know) – a little boost to my confidence that shows I can get back into the saddle of regular designing again. But now I have to deal with the fallout: it’s going to be a long time before I can pick up my hook again, as I have all these new designs to write up, photograph, and turn into new patterns! Note to self: maybe one design at a time isn’t such a bad idea for the future…

So I’d like to give a huge thanks to everyone who joined Team PlanetJune for the games – I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did!

And if you missed out, or just want more crochet-along fun, I’d love for you to join us this winter for the fourth annual PlanetJune Reindeer Games, starting November 1st! It’s like the Ravellenic Games, but way more relaxed, with a whole two months to crochet anything you want from my patterns and earn virtual medals.

Our CAL and online social event is always a fun way to end the year together. If you’d like a little nudge when it’s about to start, click here and I’ll send you a reminder!

I always love to see people customizing my AmiDogs and AmiCats crochet patterns to make closer matches to specific pets. These patterns are so easy to customize by choosing the closest pattern and changing colours to match your pet. If you want to get more adventurous, you can mix and match parts, and add strategic embellishments to match a different breed or specific dog more closely.

You may remember that I’ve already crocheted custom amigurumi versions of my furbabies Maui and Maggie. Last Christmas, I decided to make a mini-me of Dudley, one of Maggie’s best friends. (Check out his Instagram here!) As you’ll see, Dudley is an absolutely gorgeous long-haired cream dachshund, and I knew that, with a little customizing, my AmiDogs Dachshund pattern would be a perfect match!

I took my best guesses from my yarn bobbins box to choose the closest colour:

And used my AmiDogs Dachshund pattern to make my ami-Dudley:

I followed the pattern exactly, choosing slightly larger eyes to match the real Dudley’s soulful gaze, and I strategically brushed the ears, tail, and backs of the legs to mimic his long flowing fur.

And here’s Dudley with his amigurumi mini-me!

Maggie and Dudley are so cute together:

…and so are their amigurumi counterparts:

If you’d like to make a custom amigurumi dog or cat to match your furbabies, or as an incredibly meaningful gift for a pet parent, I have 24 AmiDogs and 8 AmiCats patterns for you to choose from as your starting point:

And you can find instructions for all the techniques you could ever want for customizing and embellishing your amigurumi in Part 2 (Customizing Amigurumi) of my latest book, The Essential Guide to Amigurumi, now available in print from Amazon and as an ebook direct from me. (You should also take a look at ‘Designing Custom Amigurumi’ in Part 3, for inspiration and examples of what you can achieve!)

I hope this inspires you to make amigurumi versions of the beloved animals in your life!

Don’t miss the Ravellenic Games discount on this pattern until Aug 11 – keep reading for details!

It feels like forever since I designed a new amigurumi mammal – my latest designs have all been plants, birds, and reptiles – so I had to get back to my PlanetJune roots and make a new cute and realistic amigurumi animal for you. And here’s the result: my Raccoon crochet pattern!

Raccoon Fun Facts

• Raccoons are naturally found throughout North America, but they’ve also been introduced into Europe and Japan.
• They are named for their dexterous hands, from the Algonquian word aroughcun. At night, they can ‘see’ their food by touch.
• Raccoons are very adaptable and thrive in both wild and urban environments. As omnivores, they can eat any available food.
• Urban raccoons are nicknamed ‘masked bandits’ and (my favourite) ‘trash pandas’ for their black face markings and habit of scavenging garbage!

About the Design

I’m shocked it’s taken this long for me to design a raccoon pattern – I’ve had a soft spot for trash pandas since we first moved to Canada and had occasional raccoon visitors to our birdfeeders, and once a litter of adorable babies playing on the garage roof!

My very old photos, from 2006-7 (sorry about the quality – this was before the days of cellphone cameras with low-light modes!)

Before I started this design, I thought it’d be pretty easy – cross the colours of my Badger with the markings of my Red Panda, and boom! instant Raccoon! – but every single part of the Raccoon needed to be a different shape and size from my previous patterns, so I didn’t get to take any shortcuts with this pattern 😀

The iconic striped tail gives you a perfect opportunity to practice my Ultimate Stripes technique. (I also include alternatives in the pattern, if you prefer speed to perfection.)

And although the all-important face mask has detailed colour changes, they’re limited to just 5 rounds, and the rest of the pattern is fast and easy, with realistic shaping built right in.

In real life, raccoons can come in many shades of grey and brown. I chose to make mine pale grey, and used a very dark grey instead of black for the mask to help the eyes stand out. But you can go with the classic black/white/grey combo, or make a raccoon with a warmer colouring by using a warm grey or even brown for the main colour and cream or off-white for the face. That’s one of the great things about amigurumi: it’s so easy to make a unique animal just by choosing different yarn colours!

Buy Now

Are you ready to get started on your Raccoon? If so, you can pick up the Raccoon amigurumi crochet pattern right now from my shop (but check for the discount below first!)

Or, if you’re not quite ready to buy, why not favourite/queue it on Ravelry so you don’t forget about it?

Ravellenic Games Discount!

The 2024 Ravellenic Games start this Friday! If you’d like to challenge yourself to crochet anything from any of my patterns during the timeframe of the Olympic Games (July 26 – Aug 11 2024), join Team PlanetJune and compete along with us to earn virtual medals and laurel awards.

If you’d like to make a Raccoon for Team PlanetJune, look out for the exclusive Team PJ discount code in the Ravelry or Discord PlanetJune Community groups.

From this year, I’ll be awarding our team laurels via the new Team PlanetJune microsite, where you’ll find all the info for how to join, plus links to the Team PJ project archives for every games since 2012! (If you don’t use Ravelry, you can still join in via the Team PJ site and I’ll award all your Team PJ laurels, but note that you’ll only be eligible for event medals if you cross the official Ravellenic Games finish lines on Ravelry.)

Whether or not you decide to join us for the Rav Games, I hope you’ll enjoy my Raccoon pattern! And if you make a raccoon, I’d love to see it – please share it in one of the PJ groups, or tag me (I’m @planetjune on all the socials) if you post a pic anywhere else 🙂

Over the past couple of years, I’ve fallen out of the blogging habit. After my seclusion while writing The Essential Guide to Amigurumi, I found it difficult to get back into the comfortable swing of sharing things online.

I’ve been putting way too much pressure on myself to make things perfect, and trying to figure out what it means to be ‘professional’ without losing myself and what’s important to me. Posting online used to be easy, but then my anxious brain got in the way with thoughts that I may be old and irrelevant in today’s fast-paced and noisy social media landscape.

Then I remembered: blogging is the way I always enjoyed sharing – it’s slower, more thoughtful, higher quality and longer-lasting than social media. And I don’t (and won’t ever) have ads on my site, so visiting my blog can be a calming respite from the visual assault of endless ads and auto-playing videos – for me as well as you.

So, I’m going to try to relax and start posting here more frequently again, sharing my creative pursuits and what I’m enjoying. That’s mostly crochet and other crafts, with an occasional post about wildlife and nature, growing food in my garden, cooking/baking, and whatever else I find interesting!

I won’t be consistent – as always with me, I’ll only publish things when they’re ready. But I can tell you that I hope to have somewhere between a couple and a few posts per month, depending on my energy and other commitments.

I have lots of projects to catch you up on, so I hope you’ll join me in the coming months for my crochet content, explorations of different crafts, garden experiments, and behind-the-scenes posts about what it actually takes to write and publish a craft book like EGA!

Choose Your Options

You can hear from me and engage as much or as little as you like. Here are the ways you can stay connected:

• All the Blog Posts: If this sounds good, please subscribe to the blog now, and all my posts will be sent directly to your inbox in future so you’ll never miss another post!
• Just the Crochet (Newsletter): If you’re only here for my crochet content, please don’t subscribe to this blog. My monthly(ish) newsletter includes all my crochet-related news for the month including any relevant blog posts, so you’ll never miss out on any new patterns, tutorials or tips I have for you, without the other topics.
• Join In: If you’d like to share about your crafting, reading, cooking, gardening, pets, and life with other positive, friendly, crafty people, I highly recommend you join us in the PlanetJune Discord server! It’s our private ad-free space for text chatting and sharing pics. I find it’s a beautiful antidote to the noise of what social media has become, and our small group gives you a chance to make real connections and friendships with other like-minded souls.

So, hello again, and welcome if you’re new here! I’m really looking forward to sharing more of myself with you again. I hope you’ll enjoy my upcoming posts, and please do comment from time to time if you do – knowing you’re out there will be really encouraging as I try to get back into the swing of blogging…