Today’s PlanetJune Story comes from Dr Domino Joyce, an evolutionary biologist by day and crocheter by night, who found a novel way to use amigurumi to educate children (and adults) about evolution!

I’ll let Domino explain:

I’m an evolutionary biologist at the University of Hull, UK and I’ve wanted to learn to crochet for ages. Last year, when I was on maternity leave, I taught myself with YouTube videos, and I started making toys while my baby son slept on me. I became a little addicted to it and found some amazing patterns representing the diversity of life, but the PlanetJune site quickly became my favourite place because the animals are so much more realistic than many designs, and the patterns are amazingly clear and well designed.

Every year at Hull University, we have a Science Festival, and I began to formulate a way to combine science communication with my new crochet addiction. I thought I would make a poster containing a timeline of the history of earth, and use the toys to illustrate when particular things evolved. The PlanetJune dinosaur sets proved particularly inspiring for this!

I made a tabletop timeline poster, as well as backdrop posters with links to the patterns, and have made these available (here) for anyone who wants to download and print their own.

The key message I wanted to get across is that evolution has taken place over a timescale so long, it is hard to visualise. The earth is 4.5 billion years old, but most of the life we know about and see today evolved ‘only’ in the last 540 million years or so. There was a very long period of time when not much happened at all!

This weekend (after a lot of crocheting) the festival took place. It was a big success – we were expecting about 1500-2000 visitors, but received almost 5000. I asked the children who visited my stand to place the crochet dinosaurs on the timeline where they thought they should go, and nearly all of them put them right at the beginning of the line, and were amazed when I told them the correct place was much closer to “NOW” than they thought.

I was able to talk them through the history of (some!) life using the various organisms I had made, including a crochet Mary Anning and Charles Darwin representing Homo sapiens. My favourite part used the Emperor Penguin to convey the idea that birds are simply dinosaurs that survived and carried on evolving.

The toys worked really well to draw children and adults in to the stand to find out what it was about, and I think I convinced a few of the adults they should try crocheting, as well as inspiring a few who already crochet to try some of these patterns!

But most of all, I hope I helped both children and adults to understand the history of life on earth a little more clearly.

(Back to me, June, again!)

Based on your account and photos, I’m sure you accomplished that mission, Domino! Congratulations on such a successful event, and for coming up with such a great idea for a fun, interactive learning experience.

One of the things that makes me really proud as a designer of realistic animal and plant patterns is when professional scientists who study the organisms I reproduce in crochet are fans of my work – it’s high praise indeed whenever I hear from botanists, paleontologists, marine biologists (and now evolutionary biologists!) etc who appreciate my designs. And I’m so happy that my patterns could play a part in Domino’s Science Festival exhibit – it’s lovely to think that, even though I’m no longer working in the field of science, I’m still helping in some small way to educate the scientists of the future.

Thank you so much, Domino, for sharing your story with us today 🙂
Please leave Domino a comment if you’ve enjoyed this post!

Do you have a PlanetJune Story you’d like to share? I’d love to hear it! Please email your story to june@planetjune.com, together with one or more high quality photos showing what you’ve made from PlanetJune patterns. If I choose your story to feature here on the blog, I’ll send you your choice of pattern from my shop to say thank you!

PS – If you’re feeling inspired to crochet some PlanetJune dinosaurs and penguins too, you can find all the patterns in my shop:

• PlanetJune Dinosaur crochet patterns
• PlanetJune Penguin crochet patterns

Since I published my Baby Sea Turtle pattern two years ago, several people have attached the turtles to afghan squares or blankets showing the babies hatching on a beach and making their way to the sea. It’s such a sweet idea, as the turtles are quite flat, so they work well as an appliquéd element on a blanket or square.

About a week ago, one of these blankets went viral on Facebook and I’ve consequently had dozens of requests for a beach blanket to attach my baby sea turtles to, so I thought I’d modify my eyelet ripple crochet pattern into a ribbed ripple, to depict wavelets moving towards a beach. And here it is: Turtle Beach!

Note: The Baby Sea Turtle pattern is sold separately, here!

You can stitch Baby Sea Turtles to it, or just use it as a play mat or display background for turtles and other small aquatic amigurumi (like my Baby Cephalopods, perhaps!)

This is a Donationware pattern – my ribbed ripple stitch pattern, the basic pattern for a 10″ Turtle Beach square, and general instructions for making a Turtle Beach blanket are free for you to view on my website (links at the end of this post), but the PDF version includes lots of bonuses:

• Full patterns to make 3ft x 4ft Turtle Beach blankets with either 4 or 5 shades of yarn (yellow, white, and 2 or 3 blues)
• The modifications required to turn my Hatching Turtle (from the Baby Sea Turtle Collection pattern) into a Swimming Turtle that looks like the back half of its shell is submerged. (Now included in the Baby Sea Turtle Collection pattern instead.)
• Optional edging instructions to square off the rippled top and bottom edges, so you can use this as a beach-themed square in a larger blanket, or turn it into the front of a cushion cover, for example – and there are lots more applications.
• Any-size modification instructions, so you can make any size afghan square, a baby blanket, or even a huge blanket to fit a king-sized bed!

Both versions include the written stitch pattern, a charted stitch diagram, and suggestions for how to make the beach and sea colouring (and how to arrange the turtles).

You can also use the Ribbed Ripple stitch pattern with any other colourway if you don’t want a beachy blanket – a 2-row repeat in 2 or 3 colours would look amazing too. Here’s a small sample showing an alternate colourway and the bonus edging you’ll get in the PDF version:

I hope you’ll enjoy this pattern and that you’ll share what you’ve made with me, on Ravelry and/or on your favourite social media (tag me @PlanetJune to make sure I see it!)

We’re also running a Turtlemania CAL in the PlanetJune group on Ravelry from now until the end of April, and we’d love it if you’d join in if you’re making PlanetJune turtles, a Turtle Beach blanket, and/or a Wavy Stripes blanket from the Ribbed Ripple pattern!

Go to the free Ribbed Ripple stitch pattern >>

Go to the free Turtle Beach pattern/instructions >>

Go straight to buy the PDF version! >>

Yesterday, I spent the entire day transcribing all my crochet video tutorials so I could add closed captioning to my videos. From now on, if you’re hard of hearing or have any problems understanding my accent, you can turn on the subtitles (it’s the ‘CC’ option on all YouTube videos) and read along as I talk.

An example screenshot of one of my tutorials with CC turned on.

An added bonus is that, now YouTube is owned by Google, non-English speakers can use Google’s auto-translate to get a (reasonable, if not perfect) translation of my videos, too:

‘anneau magique’ = ‘magic ring’ in French! (Note: as far as I can see, auto-translate only works on the non-mobile version of YouTube at time of writing.)

I think adding these captions is a valuable addition to my video tutorials, and I’ll be creating transcripts for all my new videos in future, too. But doing this wasn’t something I’d planned…

Auto-Captions: a Cautionary Tale

Did you know that YouTube now adds automatic closed captioning to most videos? That sounds like a great feature, but it turns out it’s appallingly (and hilariously) inaccurate.

Yesterday, I looked at the auto-captions for my videos for the first time and was truly horrified. They made no sense at all; almost every word was wrong (e.g. it’s ‘loop stitch’, not ‘lipstick’). But, worst of all, they also included some adult words and phrases that often made it sound like I was describing something very different from crochet..!

After working so hard to produce clear, comprehensible video tutorials, to find YouTube had added this comedy subtitling was a big disappointment – anyone who’s tried to watch my videos with the closed captioning turned on must think I’m a complete idiot. (But, this was also an opportunity for me to enhance my videos by adding this feature properly, so it’s not all bad.)

As I was replacing the auto-captions on each video with my new transcripts, I kept a list of the old captions for one phrase that I always say at the start of every video: “this is June from PlanetJune”. It’s a good indication of how poor (and inconsistent) the auto-captioning is. For my 30 video tutorials, YouTube mis-interpreted that same phrase in 15 different ways:

• this is Jen from Panaji
• this is Kim from Planet game
• this is Jim component to
• this is Jim from Planet came
• this is Kim from planet King
• this is Jin from panicking
• this is June from panicking
• this is Kim from panicking

…so I’m sure you can imagine how bad the captions for the remainder of the videos were (although “this is June from panicking” was a pretty accurate description of me when I first discovered the extent of this problem!)

I don’t know if my English accent caused extra problems for the auto-captioning, but, given the results I got with my fairly common/neutral accent I don’t have high hopes that auto-captioning is ever accurate enough to be useful.

Check your Video Captions

If you make YouTube videos, I’d recommend that you check the results of your auto-captions as soon as possible, and see if yours are any better than mine were!

• If there are only a few mistakes, it’s easy to edit the captions to fix them.
• If they’re as bad as mine were but you don’t have time to create proper transcripts at the moment, you can at least turn the auto-captions off for each video, so people won’t laugh at you!
• Or, you can do what I did and replace the auto-captioning on each video with a text file containing a complete and accurate transcript. (This takes time, but it’ll help people to find you in search as well as being useful to your viewers, so I’d say it’s well worth doing.)

How do you do these things? Here are some helpful links from YouTube to get you started:

• How to add subtitles & closed captions
• How to edit or remove captions

Closed captioning my videos wasn’t something I’d ever thought to do, but yet again (as with my mobile-friendly site redesign last year) Google has forced my hand in a way that’s made me improve my offerings. So, um, thanks, Google?

If you’d like to see my tutorials, I have playlists for them in my YouTube channel:

• PlanetJune crochet video tutorials for right-handers
• PlanetJune crochet video tutorials for left-handers

I’m very happy to have accurate and helpful subtitles on all my video tutorials now, and I hope they’ll make my videos an even more useful resource for crocheters. 🙂