Just a heads-up: I need to take a few days away from PlanetJune due to health issues. I’ll be mostly offline for the next week, but don’t worry – if you have any questions that other members may be able to help you with, you can post them in one of our community groups. As for customer support, I’ll do my best to keep up, but please bear with me if it takes a little longer than usual for me to get back to you. Thanks for your understanding 🙂

I’ve just realised that with the flurry of excitement surrounding the start of the year-long Temperature Snake 2023 CAL, I never showed you the photos of my finished 2022 sample snakes. All my pre-release photos strategically omitted the tail-ends of my snakes, as, well, they didn’t have tails until I knew the final temperature for the year on December 31st and could crochet their last stripes!

So, please allow me to introduce my two beautiful crocheted Temperature Snakes that depict the daily high temperatures in Waterloo, ON throughout 2022…

Spectrum is a Large Daily Snake using the Rainbow colour scheme from the pattern:

Spectrum is named for her colour scheme – the colours of the rainbow.

Kelvin is a Small Every-Other-Day Snake using the Red-to-Blue colour scheme from the pattern:

Kelvin is named for the temperature scale used to measure the colour temperature of light, from warm red to cool blue.

All three of those options (size, length and color scheme) are mix-and-matchable within the pattern – I crocheted Spectrum and Kelvin throughout 2022 so you could see an example for each of the options.

If you’re making a Daily snake for the CAL, this is the approximate snake length you can look forward to by the end of the year:

Spectrum is by far the longest amigurumi I’ve ever made!

Temperature-wise, 2023 is shaping up to be quite different from 2022, so nobody else will ever have a snake that looks quite like these two… but then that’s part of the fun of the Temperature Snake pattern (or any temperature project): you don’t know in advance which colour you’ll be using for each day, and your final snake will truly be one-of-a-kind.

If you’d like to join the 2023 Temperature Snake CAL, there are well over 700 of us participating now, we’re sharing our progress and chatting in the PJ community online groups, and you’re very welcome to jump in now and catch up on all the daily temperature readings from the start of the year using the online resource included in the pattern. Plus, there are plenty of others who are just starting out or playing catch-up, so you won’t be alone!

I’m aiming to get back online and feeling better in a week or so. I look forward to seeing all your snake update pics and catching up on what I’ve missed!

✨ The Complete Essential Guide to Amigurumi: COMING LATE 2023 ✨

UPDATE: Since writing this post, the title of my book has now changed to The Essential Guide to Amigurumi. I’m keeping the old title in the remainder of this post, but ‘The Complete Guide to Amigurumi’ is now ‘The Essential Guide to Amigurumi’ 🙂

Sign up here to be the first to know when it’s available for pre-order!

Background

In 2010, I wrote a best-selling amigurumi reference book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Amigurumi, filled with tips and techniques for making and customizing amazing crocheted toys. Although now out of print, it was the definitive reference guide to amigurumi techniques. To this day, it’s the only book of its kind, but it’s now very dated:

• It was printed in black and white on lower quality paper (that’s what how-to books were like, back in the day!)
• It’s missing a dozen years of amigurumi innovations and recommendations that I’ve come up with since then.
• It was saddled with an unfortunate name (Idiot’s Guide) that made it sound like I believe you to be an idiot, when nothing could be further from the truth.
• It’s been out of print for a couple of years now, and as a result the price for the remaining copies, even used copies, is ridiculously high.

I’ve gone through the long process of getting the rights back for my content, and now that’s sorted, I can finally create the amigurumi reference book of my dreams!

ANNOUNCING: The Complete Guide to Amigurumi

The Complete Guide to Amigurumi will be crammed full of all my techniques and recommendations for making fantastic amigurumi, with close-up step-by-step photos, clear, concise instructions, and a variety of adorable and original amigurumi patterns to experiment with.

Here’s a mockup of a few pages – if you’re familiar with CIG to Amigurumi, you can see how completely different (and 100% better) this book will be, even before I add all the new and updated content:

I’m uniquely qualified to write this book:

• I’ve been a pioneer of amigurumi since the days it first emerged from the shores of Japan.
• I’m a prolific amigurumi designer at PlanetJune, with over 200 unique nature-inspired patterns to date.
• My background as a technical writer allows me to create exceptionally clear and accurate crochet patterns and tutorials.
• I’ve been developing and refining amigurumi techniques since 2007, and I continually come up with new tips and techniques to improve your amigurumi.
• I’m an expert in amigurumi instruction, with over 100k YouTube subscribers to my @PlanetJune amigurumi tutorial channel.
• I’m an experienced instructional craft book author with 4 previous titles published with Quirk Books, Alpha Books and DK.

So I know I have what it takes to make this book a reality. Even so, I have a lot of work ahead of me over the course of this year, to bring my concept to life. I’m one month in at this point, and things are progressing well, as I hope you can tell from the sample spreads above!

The Complete Guide to Amigurumi will be an essential companion for your amigurumi journey, whether you’re looking for a beginner’s guide, searching for tips to improve your results, or even considering getting into amigurumi design yourself! I’ll be compiling my expertise on all these topics into a high-quality reference book that you’ll refer back to again and again.

I can’t wait to bring this book to you, and I hope you’re as excited as I am to see it brought into the world!

Please sign up for updates now and I’ll send you quarterly(ish) updates on how the book is progressing, with sneak peeks and info on how you can be the first to pre-order The Complete Guide to Amigurumi – and maybe even join the book launch team this fall!