After my fun but challenging experiments with extreme amigurumi last year, I set out to see if there was a way to make super-sized amigurumi that was easy and fun to do, and develop instructions I could pass on to you. After lots of experimentation, I developed the technique of Giant Amigurumi. Look!

About Giant Amigurumi

Giant Amigurumi retains the joyous side of being able to scale up a small amigurumi pattern to an impressive and extra-cuddly scale, but it’s much, much simpler to crochet, and the materials you’ll need are far easier and less expensive to acquire.

Giant Amigurumi are big, squishy, and cuddly. You’ll be amazed how quickly you can crochet such a large toy! Giant amis are perfect as nursery decorations, super-snuggly toys, or decorations everyone will be talking about. Add a spark of life to your amigurumi animals with my giant dimensional crocheted eye patterns, or whip up a super-sized plant.

About The eBook

You can upsize almost any amigurumi pattern with the techniques in The Complete Guide to Giant Amigurumi and get an irresistibly cuddly, adorable result. You’ll learn how to take a normal amigurumi pattern and enlarge it by 3 to 4 times to make a giant huggable amigurumi! All you need is your favourite pattern, a 15mm hook, and a super-bulky yarn, and you’ll be ready to start.

As examples, I’ve crocheted up several PlanetJune classic patterns using the techniques from this book, so you can see how they compare with the standard-sized amis. 

Much bigger! Just as cute! And (you’ll have to take my word for this until you make your own…) exceptionally huggable.

With The Complete Guide to Giant Amigurumi, I’ll guide you through every step along the way, from choosing your materials and learning how to work giant stitches, to stuffing, assembly and embellishment, and more. Everything is explained in my usual detail, with clear, close-up photos and instructions.

I’ve discovered lots of tips and tricks that will make your giant amigurumi easy to make and assemble, and many of them will also be useful for non-giant amigurumi, such as:

• A better way to make a secure magic ring for bulky, textured or weak yarns
• How to add more stiffness to floppy/curling pieces

…Having these tools in your back pocket will improve your everyday amigurumi projects too!

You might think there’s nothing more to giant amigurumi crochet than choosing a large enough hook to go with your extra thick yarn, but every stage of making a giant amigurumi is slightly different from what you might expect, and I’ve designed this book as a comprehensive reference guide that covers everything from the absolute basics to tips for fixing problems and making complex amigurumi.

I encourage you to use the book as a reference – whenever you get stuck, or move onto a new stage of your pattern, check back with the book and see what I advise! (Check the full contents here.)

The Complete Guide to Giant Amigurumi also includes patterns and assembly instructions to make my realistic ‘shiny’ crocheted eyes in all sizes – the perfect finishing touch to your giant amigurumi. They look just as round, shiny and appealing as plastic eyes, but are child-friendly and easy to stitch into place.

And the ebook also includes my Tiny Whale pattern as a bonus, so you can get started right away with a simple introduction to giant amigurumi crochet. 

To keep it relevant to you, this ebook is available in two versions, for right-handers and left-handers. Choose your version knowing that all the photos will show you exactly what you need to do from your perspective for every technique! 

And, as with all PlanetJune patterns and ebooks, your licence includes access to any future updates if there’s a new edition of this book in the future. 

Links and Launch Discount

You can buy The Complete Guide to Giant Amigurumi right now from my shop, and download the ebook immediately as a PDF file. (It’s 50 pages long and about 9MB.)

Click here to buy The Complete Guide to Giant Amigurumi now >>

And, for this week only, use code GIANTAMI at checkout to save $2 on the purchase price. (Valid until next Tuesday: Feb 5th, 2019)

Ready to Get Started?

I’m sure you’ll find giant amigurumi-making just as fun and appealing as I do – I just love these big squishy amis 🙂

Don’t forget to share photos of your giant amigurumi projects using the #giantamigurumi hashtag, and please also tag me @planetjune so I can see what you’re making!

Usually in amigurumi, the goal is to join pieces with an invisible, seamless join, so you can barely tell where one part ends and the next begins. But sometimes, especially with a piece of a different colour, you can get a neater finish by not smoothing the join, and instead making invisible stitches so it looks like the pieces are magically holding themselves together without any stitching at all:

You can use this technique to attach something where you want there to be a clear defined edge between pieces, for example, attaching a beak to a face, or (as I’ll show in this demo) attaching a cactus to the soil of its pot.

Continue to the Amigurumi Clean Edge Join tutorial:

• Right-handed version >>
• Left-handed version >>

After ‘graduating’ from my long term project to teach myself to knit through designing and making 12 sweaters, I wasn’t at all bored with sweater knitting, so my next project was bound to be… yep, another sweater to add to the pile!

As soon as I arrived back in Canada I loaded up on Michael’s Loops & Threads brand Woolike yarn – it’s a super-soft super-fine non-wool yarn with amazing yardage for the price, and I wondered what it’d be like to make a whole sweater from such fine yarn.

The answer? An incredible amount of work, but the result is my favourite sweater to date!

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do for this sweater, so I started by knitting plain stockinette sleeves while I pondered. It was slow going with such fine yarn and small needles, but I was encouraged to continue because the knitted fabric felt so soft, and looked so smooth and fine when I draped it over my arm.

I was worried that the fine knit wouldn’t keep my torso warm enough, so I decided on a thermal stitch pattern for the body. This was the slowest thing ever to knit, but the pattern is neat and stretchy and snuggly, so it was a pleasure to watch it grow, however slowly.

The fine yarn and stretchy stitch pattern gives it a wonderful flattering drape, even with no shaping built in. Doesn’t it look good?

It was very fiddly to stitch the sleeves to the body neatly – with hindsight, I should have worked the last 2 stitches at the armhole edges in stockinette so I’d have a plain unpatterned edge for joining. My first seaming attempt ruined the whole look of the sweater, so I unpicked the join and tried again very slowly and carefully. I think it took the best part of an hour to seam each sleeve, but it was worth it.

After seaming, I finished my sweater with simple 1×1 rib cuffs and bands, which, again, took forever – switching between knit and purl for every single tiny stitch slows things down considerably – but now I could see that it was going to be a gorgeous sweater, I didn’t mind at all.

I love this sweater! The patterned body and smooth arms; the v-neck that isn’t too deep (for warmth); the fit that I intentionally made loose enough to wear with a long-sleeved t-shirt underneath to keep me warm, but still nicely fitted… I’d have cried at spending so much time on it if it hadn’t turned out well, but it’s exactly what I hoped it would be.

I’d have liked to switch to smaller needles for the ribbing for the cuffs and bands, but I was already using my smallest (3mm) needles, so the ribbing isn’t quite as neat as I’d like, although I don’t think you’d notice if I hadn’t pointed it out, right?

If I were making this sweater again I’d buy smaller needles for the ribbing, and maybe add a tiny bit of extra height to the shoulders, but overall I’m very pleased with how this one turned out, and it’s now my favourite sweater in my wardrobe!

What’s next in my knitting adventure? I’m trying something other than a sweater for once – I’m in need of a really warm hat…

I’ve just updated my sweet Heart Cactus Collection pattern to add a new cactus option, so now the collection includes three different heart-shaped cacti (plus matching large and small 3-dimensional hearts).

These cacti make a quick little crochet project, with their perfect heart shapes, rounded pots, pretty flowers, and minimal sewing required. If you haven’t picked up the pattern yet, now’s a great time – Valentine’s Day is only a month away, so now’s the time to start making your heart-themed gifts. And the best part is that a potted heart cactus looks cute all year round 🙂

(If you’ve already bought the Heart Cactus Collection pattern, your PlanetJune pattern licences always include all future pattern updates. I’ve updated the pattern now with the additional cactus pattern and new photos, so please feel free to download it again from your PlanetJune account!)

The cuddly hearts are also included in the pattern!

And here’s an extra bonus: did you know the heart cacti are sized to be part of my mix-and-match Cactus and Succulent collections? You can add a heart cactus to your next succulent garden, or mix and match the pots between any of the patterns!

Can you spot the 3 heart cacti?

Buy the Heart Cactus Collection pattern here in my shop. Or, if you’re not ready to buy just yet, please heart or queue it on Ravelry so you don’t forget about it:

I hope you’ll enjoy the updated Heart Cactus Collection! When you make one, please remember to tag me @planetjune if you share it on social media, so I can enjoy seeing your creation too 🙂

Today marks the first day of my second decade of full time self-employment! I’ve just read back over all my previous Year in Review posts and it’s been an epic journey so far. I sometimes forget how much time and heart I’ve put into PlanetJune to reach this point, but I’m pretty proud that here I am, 10 years later, doing exactly what I set out to do – making my living at the intersection of my passions for crafts and nature, through designing, creating and writing…

Over the years, these annual review posts have formed a clear record of what I’ve accomplished, and writing them each year helps me to think about what I’ve learnt each time and what I’ll do differently next year.

2018 Achievements

This year, I published a range of new crochet patterns that included something in each of my design categories – animals, plants, accessories and seasonal:

I’ve added to my tutorial library with a few new tutorials:

I rebranded my YouTube video tutorials with a fresh new look and created an animated logo that I’ll be using for my new crochet videos:

I also rephotographed all my PlanetJune Accessories shawl and wrap patterns, so now the photos all have a cohesive look and you can see the designs more clearly:

Behind the scenes, I’ve been improving the backend of the business, with new payment and processing systems, sales tax collection, and adding to my library of responses to common questions.

And I’ve made time for more making in 2018 – both crafting and cooking (although I don’t want to get into food blogging – my food always tastes better than it looks, anyway!) I’ve been enjoying experimenting with some new (to me) materials and ingredients and creating something useful or beautiful or delicious or just fun with them:

(And there’s a little sneak peek photo above for two projects I haven’t blogged about yet: my giant amigurumi gingerbread man and a new handknit sweater! I’ll tell you about those soon…)

For most of the year, I’ve also been working on a big project – a crochet ebook – that hasn’t launched yet, so between planning, writing, editing, making samples, photographing, editing photos, page layout, project managing and more, I’ve been pretty busy! I’m in the last stages (final edits and cover photos) now, so it’s coming soon.

Settling In

Although we arrived back in Canada at the end of 2017, the first half of 2018 was filled with moving into our new house, sleeping on the floor of an empty house until we finally got all our belongings back, selling our old house and jumping through hoops to try to get permission to move the money out of SA, and Dave changing careers. All of that took a lot more time and energy than I anticipated, and now it’s all over, I’m still feeling a little shell-shocked from the whirlwind of all the move-related stuff.

I also completely underestimated the way that mental health works. You may have noticed that I like to do everything myself (like running all aspects of PlanetJune), but that just wasn’t working in this case – although my panic attacks dropped off as soon as we reached Canada, I still didn’t feel right and I couldn’t snap myself out of it. I finally went to the doctor and was diagnosed with a general anxiety disorder as well as the PTSD.

Although there’s no magic cure, I feel so much better now that I’m getting professional help, so I want to put my experience out there in case it can help anyone else: mental health is at least as important as physical health, and there’s nothing weak about asking for help.

Looking Forward

I am so happy in my life now – I still don’t 100% believe it’s real. It’s been a long stressful road to get here, including receiving my Canadian citizenship in tears the day before leaving for Africa with no idea if I’d ever return. But this long journey has led to me being so grateful for everything I now have, and an appreciation of how fortunate we are.

I’m still struggling with my energy levels, and I have a host of relatively minor but inconvenient health issues, but I’m trying to give myself grace when these interfere with my business plans. I know I need to look after myself first, and PlanetJune second, so I have to plan carefully to make the best use of my time and energy.

I want to focus this year on designing amazing new patterns and creating high quality video tutorials. My biggest problem is deciding which of my many ideas to try: I’m trying to work out if there’s a way to balance being productive with following the flow of creativity and allowing the best ideas the time they need to blossom. (My bestselling patterns of 2018 were the new Succulent Collections, and they wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t given myself months to research, develop and prototype to build the collections.)

After closing my crochet tool shop last April, I’ve been investigating options to be able to offer limited runs of my Detail Stuffing Tools in future, and I think I’ve found a solution that will work – more on that later. And I have some ideas for really fun new products too, but we’ll have to wait and see if I have time to develop those any further in 2019 or if they’ll have to wait for the 2020s(!) – I’m determined not to let myself get spread too thin.

Last year, I wished for peace, calm and quiet strength, and re-reading those words now, that’s exactly what I’ve been building for myself all year, although I hadn’t realised it until just now! My attitude now is to take time to appreciate what I have and what I can accomplish, and not dwell on what I can’t.

My wish for this year is a continuance of that: focus, determination and acceptance. I wish all those things for you too, and a very, very Happy New Year!