In an unexpectedly speedy turn of events, I’ve just discovered that I’ll be going in for my knee surgery this Wednesday! I’m very happy to be getting my knee sorted out after a year of chronic pain, but it’s going to affect operations at PlanetJune for as long as it takes me to recover from the surgery.

Hopefully it won’t take too long, but please bear with me in the meantime. Here’s how it’ll play out:

Patterns: No change

You can always buy my patterns from the PlanetJune shop at any time, as they are automatically available for download. (I will be temporarily closing my external Etsy and ArtFire shops though.)

Shipped items: Order today, or wait…

I won’t be able to fulfill any orders for physical items until my knee is fully recovered and I’m able to drive to the post office again! So, if you think you may need a stuffing tool, stitch markers, or an amigurumi kit in the near future, please place your order by the end of the day today (Monday), so I can ship them to you tomorrow before my surgery on Wednesday.

If you miss the deadline and would like to be notified when PlanetJune crochet tools are available to ship again, please sign up for the one-off notification email.

Help: Check my resources first

I’ll be offline while I recover, so anything that requires personal attention from me will be unavailable for a time – how much time depends on how long my recovery takes. If you email me for help, I’ll reply when I’m able to, but I suggest you check my online resources first – you may well find the answer to your question:

• If you have crochet questions, please visit my Crochet Tutorials page for help. (And if you’re having trouble with a PlanetJune pattern, but aren’t sure what you’re doing wrong, check my Amigurumi Troubleshooter to find which of my tutorials will solve your problem!)
• If you have any other questions for me, please check the FAQ first to see if I’ve already answered them there.
• If those pages don’t answer your question, feel free to ask for further assistance in the PlanetJune Ravelry group, where your friendly fellow PJers are ready and waiting to help! This is the quickest way to receive knowledgeable help from a real live person.

If you still have questions about PlanetJune patterns or tutorials, or anything else you’d like to say to me, you can still e-mail me, but please be aware that I may not be able to respond for days (or weeks), depending on how my recovery is going and how many email questions have piled up.

Please keep me in your thoughts on Wednesday. My health has to be my first priority for a little while, but I’ll be crossing my fingers for a full and speedy recovery so I can get back to coming up with new designs for PlanetJune!

Today has an extra reason to be known as Hump Day, because it’s Camel time! For my latest commission, I’ve designed a realistic camel complete with curved neck, eyelids, tasseled tail, and of course the essential hump:

The Camel crochet pattern is a new addition to my natural fibres range of amigurumi designs (together with the alpaca Alpaca and the angora Baby Bunny) and I’ve been waiting for almost 3 years to have the chance to use the 100% baby camel yarn I bought just for this purpose. Of course, I created my design with standard worsted weight acrylic yarn in mind – there’s no need to splash out on pricey camel yarn unless you want that added realism 🙂

The regular worsted weight camel is a sturdy 8.5″ (21cm) long. My little camel-yarn camel is only 6.5″ long, because the camel yarn is finer (DK weight) so I used a smaller hook (C US/2.75mm) to keep the stitches tidy. (You can get the same scaling effect with any of my patterns by using a thicker/thinner yarn and a correspondingly larger/smaller hook to resize the pattern to any scale you wish.)

I love how my two samples look like they’re part of an amigurumi camel train:

Camel Fun Facts

• There are two types of camel: the one-humped dromedary (like my design), and the two-humped Bactrian camel.
• The dromedary is adapted to survive in the hot, dry desert environment of northern Africa and the Middle East.
• The Bactrian camel comes from Asian climates that can get much colder. Its soft thick undercoat is shed annually and is used to make camel yarn.
• Camels store fatty deposits in their humps that let them survive in drought conditions.
• They also have other clever adaptations like the ability to close their nostrils in sandstorms!

It’s been a long journey to get to this point, and I’d like to give an extra-special thank you to every one of my patrons who commissioned this pattern last year, paid for it the week before my home invasion trauma, and have been waiting ever since for me to be able to complete their pattern. I’m so grateful for your patience and trust through these many months, and I’m delighted to be able to finally say that your pattern is now ready for you to download from your PlanetJune account!

If you weren’t one of the camel commissioners, my Camel pattern is now available to purchase from the PlanetJune shop.

Or, if you’re not ready to buy just yet, please add my Camel to your queue or favourites on Ravelry, so you don’t forget about it:

I hope you like my Camel design!

As you may know, I’ll be going for knee surgery at some time in the next few weeks. As I can’t predict how long my recovery will take, I’ll wait until I’m better before I accept payment for my next commission, as I don’t want to create another situation like the Camel where personal circumstances cause months of delay between your payment and receiving your pattern. So, if you’ve pledged towards the Armadillo design, please know that I won’t be sending out the invoices until I’m ready to begin work on your design. 🙂

It’s been about 3 years since I launched my crowd-sourced model for crochet pattern commissions. The first 18 months went amazingly well, and the second 18 months didn’t – not through the fault of my system, but from all the other things that kept me from working on commissions (book-writing, health issues, etc).

I designed all these patterns thanks to my crowd-sourced design commissions!

Now I’ve picked up the reins of the commissions again, and I’m very happy that my next commissioned design (Camel) will be launched this week.

So, today seems like the perfect time to make some more changes to the commissions process, firstly to give me a chance to work through the huge waiting list of commissioned designs, and secondly to make the commissions process sustainable for the future.

Summary of Commission Changes

I’ve written a long post below to explain my thoughts, but, if you don’t have time to wade through it all, here’s a summary of the changes:

• As of today, I’ve raised the commission price to $300.
• All patterns that were fully pledged at the old price will remain fully pledged.
• I’ll revisit this pricing decision once I’ve cleared the backlog of commissioned designs.
• Please continue to pledge for the designs you really want me to make!
• If you’d like to cancel any pledges, just let me know (you can check what you’ve pledged for here).

It may seem like an extreme measure to double the price of my commissioned designs, but I have good reasons. I like to run my business transparently, so I’ll explain my reasoning below…

Wow, what an amazing month January has been: the response to my AmiCats far exceeded my expectations (although I had been secretly hoping that my 3 years of refining prototypes would end up paying off financially as well as artistically) and it’s so rewarding to finally see my patterns out in the world after all this time of working on them.

AmiCats CAL

The AmiCats crochet-along is in full swing! We’re only a couple of weeks into this CAL, and just look at the cute kitties:

We’ve already got AmiCats representing 4 continents of crocheters, so I’m hoping they’ll be popping up all around the world very soon…

The AmiCats CAL runs until the end of February, so if you’ve bought the patterns, please join us in the PlanetJune Ravelry group and post photos of your ami kitties to the CAL so we can all enjoy them! (If you haven’t bought the patterns yet, you can find them all in the AmiCats section of my shop.)

Love Hearts pattern

With Valentine’s Day fast approaching, I thought I’d remind you of my free heart pattern for your seasonal decorations. Love Hearts includes perfectly-shaped flat hearts in 3 sizes, plus a puffy heart:

Love Hearts is a donationware pattern, so you’re free to use it at no cost, and, if you’d like to leave me a donation of whatever you feel it’s worth, you’ll also get a handy printable PDF version as a thank-you. 🙂

Hack Attack

My web server was subjected to a DDoS attack over the past few days. It’s been very stressful – after the first wave of the attack was blocked, another popped up to take its place – and I apologise if you experienced any difficulties accessing PlanetJune (e.g. slowness, pages not loading correctly) in the past week.

The attacks have all now been blocked (thanks to stellar tech support from my webhost, ServInt), and PlanetJune is running smoothly again. Phew!

Review and Win contest

You’re automatically entered in the next monthly draw every time you write a review for a PlanetJune pattern you’ve enjoyed – and you’ll also be helping future customers make an informed decision about patterns they are considering buying.

I have two months of prizes to announces today, as I posted my 2014 Year In Review instead of a monthly update in January.

December’s winner is Simone N‘s review of my Chinchilla:

This great pattern provides you with easy-to-follow instructions for a super cute, realistic Chinchilla. Also the sewing part is very easy to understand, thereby guaranteeing an amigurumi you’ll immediately want to cuddle with!

And January’s winner is Alexa B‘s review of my Iguana:

As you can see, this iguana is highly realistic and also surprisingly easy to make. I really liked the color changes here, you can barely see them, unlike with most patterns. Great technique!

Thank you for your reviews, and congratulations to both of you – I’ve emailed you both to find out which pattern you’d like as your prize!

What’s Next?

I’m happy to be making good progress with my latest commissioned design, so there’ll be a new PlanetJune Camel pattern coming very soon. I can’t wait to be able to show it to you – watch this space…