Writing my Year in Review post every year helps me to see what I’ve accomplished, think about what I’ve learnt, and decide what I’d like to do differently in the following year.

This is my 16th Year in Review blog post – one for every year of my full-time self-employment. Back then, I couldn’t have imagined what my life would look like today, but here I am, still loving the process of designing nature-inspired crochet patterns – and still in no danger of running out of ideas!

Although I only published 9 new patterns plus one re-release in 2024, almost all of them included multiple designs, so they represent a total of a respectable 21 new designs:

I’m adding a new section to these annual review posts: my top 10 best-selling patterns of the year! It’ll be interesting to see how the bestseller list changes from year to year…

2024’s Top 10 PlanetJune patterns:

1. Temperature Snake
2. Bearded Dragon
3. Polyhedral Balls & Gaming Dice
4. Tortoise & Simple-Shell Tortoise, Turtle & Terrapin
5. Baby Sea Turtle Applique & Hatchlings
6. Turtle Beach Blanket (Teal Ombre version)
7. Beaver
8. AmiCats Tuxedo
9. Emperor Penguin
10. Baby Sea Turtle Collection

Business Report

2024 has been filled with behind-the-scenes projects to improve PlanetJune and make it run more smoothly:

• Shop upgrade: I relaunched my shop with a complete upgrade and improvements to the photos.
• CAL automation: I automated the submission process for both the Team PlanetJune Ravellenic Games gallery and the Reindeer Games gallery, which removes my huge time commitment from running both of those CALs, making them much more sustainable (and fun for me!) going forward.
• Etsy app: I built a private app to semi-automate processing of my Etsy orders and customer service. (I keep my Etsy shop mainly for visibility, as many people only look for patterns there. I was spending more and more time answering messages, as Etsy prioritises their own messaging over the info customers actually need. My app helps me to send detailed customized messages to my Etsy customers in a timely fashion so they know what to expect, with a much reduced daily workload on my part.)

While each of those projects was a huge challenge that required weeks of my time (and far more than that for the new shop!), I’m already enjoying the results, and they should all continue to buy my time back for years to come.

And now I have a new business report to add here: my second business, the Turtle Beach Press publishing imprint! The first year of selling my masterpiece book, The Essential Guide to Amigurumi, has gone really well.

Even though I haven’t had the capacity to do any kind of marketing for it, word is spreading organically – thank you so much if you’re recommending it to new crocheters and amigurumi fans – and the reception has been fantastic! There are lots of amigurumi pattern books out there, but only EGA gives you all my tips and techniques to make the best amigurumi – from any pattern. And I’m especially happy that the left-handed edition is proving to be a treasure trove of dedicated help for new lefty crocheters. It’s so gratifying to see how much people are enjoying it! ❤️

Personal Report

2024 was a year of bucket list experiences right on my doorstep: an hour’s drive took us into the path of a spectacular total solar eclipse (and, more by luck than talent, I also managed to capture a beautiful photo!) and I finally saw my first (and second, and third…) aurora borealis. Amazing!

I made friends with a baby cow at a local cheese farm, and I finally achieved a long-term dream of having a pair of doves nest in my front porch. I’ll share the full story later, but my doves and their babies were a constant source of joy for me this year.

My health is an ongoing challenge: I’ve been dealing with chronic fatigue for many years now, and my energy is much more limited than my time. I also had my first run-in with COVID this summer, which has left me with some ongoing side-effects.

But we all have to play the hand we’re dealt, and I’m focusing on creating a simpler, happier life, and not beating myself up for the things I don’t have the energy to do. I’m learning that creative hobbies, enjoying nature and resting are all vital for giving me the capacity to do my best work while enjoying my life in the process.

In that spirit, I’ve been trying new things as well as enjoying my long-time favourite crafts and hobbies: crochet, gardening, baking, latch hooking, beading, dehydrating, machine knitting, candle making, yoga, diamond painting, birdwatching, reading, mushroom growing…

Top achievements for 2024 include growing 30kg (66lbs!) of vegetables (and fruits) in my garden, and making reading a priority – I surpassed my goal of reading 52 books in 2024, and feel so much better for making time to rest and read.

Looking Back

Going through this process is so valuable – I always feel like I haven’t accomplished much, but looking through all my photos and taking time to think about everything that has happened over the year puts that in perspective.

Last year, I wished for a simpler, more serene life: for making time for what really matters, and for leaving behind the things that don’t. And looking back through the year, I think I’ve mostly achieved that, and my first year of trying to respect my limits has gone pretty well.

There’s still a voice in the back of my head saying ‘Don’t waste time! Be more productive!’ but the most important parts of the PlanetJune magic – creativity and clear communication – are next-to impossible unless I have the energy to think clearly. I won’t compromise on my standards, and only I can do the work of bringing my ideas into the world, so the only option is patience for the process and accepting that everything I do will take a lot longer than I’d like.

Looking Forward

I feel like I’m on the right track with my goal of a simpler, more serene life. To bring my most creative self to my work, I need to prioritize looking after June the person first. Fewer hours of work and more time to refuel will not only help me manage my health but also make life more enjoyable.

I’ve realised that I’m much happier avoiding the noise of today’s social media (although I’ll always reply if you @ me!) Instead, I’m cultivating a quieter online community in the PJ Discord, that’s more like the old days of forums and early social media, where we can share thoughts and pics from our daily lives and build genuine connections and friendships. (You’re very welcome to join us there if that sounds good to you!)

I’m inching my way back into blogging, re-learning to share what interests me and trusting that there’s something there that you’ll also find interesting. I get deeply fascinated by the things I enjoy, whether that’s a new craft, the wonderful natural world all around us, learning how to grow delicious food, or developing new crochet designs and techniques. All those interests feed back into my crochet and give me the inspiration to create new work.

I’d also love to share some behind-the-scenes posts about the process of writing and independently publishing books, and compare that with traditional publishing. Going through the entire process has opened my eyes to what it takes to create beautiful, high-quality books, and I’d love to explore that with you.

Nerding out on what fascinates me in long blog posts doesn’t really mesh with the current fast, short-form, video-based trending content, and I think that’s okay! I don’t have the energy to create things that drain me, and writing slow, considered pieces is what I do best, so I’m going to lean into that.

In the end I’d much prefer to create a few richly detailed patterns, tutorials and blog posts in a year than hundreds of pieces of lightweight fluff. There’s a lot of noise and busy-ness out there – especially now with the rise of trashy AI-generated content, and constant ads – and not a lot that’s real. I don’t want to contribute to that noise; while I do need to earn a living, money isn’t my driving force. I’m looking for a simple, quiet, and valuable life, and that’s what I’m feeling my way into.

2025 Wishes

Re-reading what I’ve just written, I think the words that sum up my wishes for 2025 are calm, wholesome and honest. Wholesome isn’t a word I’ve related to in the past – my younger self would have equated it with being boring – but now I think it encompasses much of what I’m looking for: a healthy, positive and good-hearted life, both in my pastimes and outlook. I think the world could use more of that!

I wish the same for you too, no matter what your goals for the coming year may be, and I hope 2025 brings you health, happiness and fulfillment. Happy New Year!

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!

For the past few months, I’ve been working on a behind-the-scenes project to update the PlanetJune online store to improve your experience and to streamline future updates. This was a massive project: I first built the shop in 2009, and the software and plugins I use have been upgraded multiple times since then, leaving me with thousands of messy files of patched and re-patched code.

I decided that the only way to clean things up was to start again from scratch, so I’ve rebuilt the entire shop using the latest codebase, and incorporated all the hundreds of customizations I’ve coded and built in over the years, from pay-what-you-want donationware to the complete list of all the patterns you’ve ever purchased (so you never accidentally buy anything twice or have to hunt through old orders to find a particular pattern).

Most of the changes are technical so you won’t see any differences, but I’ve made a few upgrades that you’ll be able to appreciate:

Product Photos

This is the big change! Some of my pattern photos are older than some of my customers, and both my equipment and my photography and image-editing skills have improved in the past 18 years! Here’s a summary of the improvements you’ll see:

RE-EDITED PHOTOS: I’ve reprocessed my older photos to be brighter, clearer and better colour balanced.

The AmiDogs were the worst offenders – with my old monitor I couldn’t tell that the sky sometimes looked purple or grey! Now they all match 🙂

CLEARER CATEGORIES: All the categories on the main page are larger and clearer and now look like ‘cards’ with rounded borders.

Pick a card, any card…

SQUARE LISTINGS: All the main product photos are larger and now have matching square dimensions, so they’re easier to view and browse through.

Some images were wide and short, some were tall and narrow – it’s so much cleaner now they’re all squares!

For the full effect, click through to the All Products page – keep scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling…

Clearer Links

I’ve added friendly URLs so you know what you’re looking at, for example:

OLD: /index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=19&products_id=403

NEW: /temperature-snake-amigurumi-crochet-pattern-and-workbook-p-403.html

Having the pattern name in the link is much more helpful than the previous words-and-numbers soup. (And the old links all still work too, if you have any of them saved.)

Custom Gift Certificates

I’ve added a custom value PlanetJune gift certificate, so now you can send a gift certificate for any dollar (and cent!) amount you want.

This is an easier way to gift specific patterns to someone – you can just send them a custom gift certificate for the exact amount, with a note telling them what you’d like them to spend it on! (See the Gift Certificate FAQ for instructions.)

A Fresh Start

The internet is always changing, and it takes work to keep up with the latest coding standards and security updates. I’ve been patching and updating my old shop code since 2009, and starting from scratch for this update was the best way to make sure I didn’t carry any problems forward. This was a huge undertaking (with literally thousands of files of code to comb through) but it’s very satisfying to know that this project is complete. Now that my shop has been refreshed inside and out, it looks much cleaner, and it’ll be much easier to keep it maintained and to make more improvements in future.

And, you know what, seeing all my patterns displayed nicely together on the All Products page lets me see what I’ve accomplished in a way I haven’t really been able to before. I’ve designed hundreds of patterns over the past 18 years, and I’m happy to stand behind all of them – that’s quite an accomplishment, isn’t it? Seeing them all together gives me fresh inspiration to keep adding to the PlanetJune pattern collection.

Please take a look around the new and improved PlanetJune shop – I hope you’ll find more treasures to enjoy now they’re easier to see and appreciate! And I’d love to hear your thoughts on the updates and what else you’d like to see in future improvements, so feel free to leave a comment or send me a message.

Writing my Year in Review post every year helps me to see what I’ve accomplished, think about what I’ve learnt, and decide what I’d like to do differently in the following year.

2023 has been a unique year for me. I usually start these reports with a summary of all the new crochet patterns, tutorials and craft projects I’ve completed over the year, but I had two major achievements this year, and these basically tell the entire story of my year, with little time remaining for anything else.

My biggest accomplishment was to write and publish my comprehensive amigurumi reference book, The Essential Guide to Amigurumi, without sacrificing any of the quality you’d expect from the best traditionally-published crochet books. (As a bonus achievement, the right-handed version became the top new release in the Stuffed Animal Crafts and Crafts and Hobbies Reference categories on Amazon – yay!)

Secondly, I ran the hugely popular PlanetJune Temperature Snake crochet-along with over 800 participants, and collected all the CAL materials and tips together into a complete pattern and detailed accompanying workbook at the end of the year so everyone can make temperature snakes for 2024 and beyond.

Aside from those major goals, I published the Seafoam & Edging Expansion Pack for my Turtle Beach blanket, I managed to find time for one tiny (literally) new pattern with my Baby Snake design which I then adapted to add a rainbow ombre colourway, and made a couple of snake-related tutorials to accompany the CAL.

Business Report

This year I’ve been working on making the PlanetJune community more platform-agnostic, so I can meet you wherever you are. The Temperature Snake CAL was a good example of this, with participants on Discord, Ravelry, Facebook, Instagram, and email.

I built and coded custom galleries for both the Temperature Snake CAL and the annual end-of-year Reindeer Games CAL, to streamline and automate the back-end processes and make the galleries available to everyone, no matter where they participate in the crochet-alongs.

I updated the My Patterns page in your PlanetJune account, so you can see all your past PJ pattern purchases at a glance, and review and re-download them directly without clicking back into the order.

And I made some progress on other behind-the-scenes tech updates to PlanetJune, but that’s always an ongoing process. One of the downsides of being my own web developer and tech support team is that there’s only so much time I can devote to the tech side of things, but I anticipate that will be easier in future now I have an AI assistant to speed up my coding. 😉

Personal Report

We’ve been dealing with an unexpected change in family circumstances this year. And my sweet pup Maggie had dental surgery and then a bigger surgery for removal of a tumour. She needed my constant supervision while she recuperated, to keep her from tearing her stitches – you can’t explain to a dog that all stairs are off-limits! – but it was worth it, as she’s bounced back and is now as happy and active as ever.

Good news for my own health too: I may have avoided another knee surgery! Ten months of physiotherapy has strengthened the muscles around my unstable knee to compensate for the damaged ligament, and my knee feels stronger than it has in many years.

Crafting

I didn’t have any energy or brainspace left for much other crafting this year – definitely not a situation I’d like to repeat in future – but I did get to use my crafting superpower for good. Maggie’s massive surgical incision (from neck to knee, poor pup!) needed to be loosely covered while she healed, but her leg couldn’t be bent enough to get it into a normal T-shirt, so I made her a ‘hospital gown’: a custom t-shirt with ribbon ties down the back.

And I surprised myself by discovering an unexpected creative outlet: vegetable gardening. I’ve never been successful with growing plants (there’s a reason all my houseplants are crocheted!) but I cultivated a new experimental attitude with low expectations and it paid off.

We ate delicious garden-fresh vegetables every day for over 3 months, and, while not everything I tried was a resounding success, it was a joy to spend time in the garden every day enjoying the fresh air, watching the birds and butterflies, and observing how my plants were growing.

And the vegetables led to another new ‘craft’: canning! Now I have enough pickles, chutneys, preserves and relishes to last me until the next growing season.

There’s nothing like eating a burger in a fresh-from-the-oven bun, topped with homemade relish and home-grown lettuce and tomato, with just-picked green beans on the side. It’s a different kind of crafting, but baking bread and growing food have now become part of the crafty life that I love.

Looking Back

When I made the decision to devote this year to writing and publishing my magnum opus on amigurumi, I knew it would be an epic challenge to produce a top-quality book from scratch with no assistance, but it proved to be an even larger task than I’d anticipated.

I’d originally planned so much more for the year – new seasonal PlanetJune patterns for fall and winter, and a crochet beginner’s video tutorial series and fun stop-motion video trailer to accompany the book release. But life had other ideas: between Maggie’s surgery and recovery, the physical limitations from my chronic fatigue condition, and personal challenges, by the end of summer I was three months behind the schedule I’d set myself for the book at the start of the year.

If I was going to bring my book into the world, I had to keep my eyes on the prize and drop all the non-essential side projects from this year, leaving me with just three projects:

• Keeping PlanetJune running (customer support takes the majority of my time there)
• Managing the unexpectedly large CAL for my Temperature Snake design (customer and community support, creating the monthly roundup collages, plus my own participation with two crocheted snakes to keep up to date)
• Creating the book of my dreams (no small task: writing, editing, designing, photographing, layout, publishing, and more, with no compromises on quality anywhere in the entire process)

And, although I may have pushed myself beyond my limits to do this, I ended up making up two of the three lost months and publishing the book only a month later than I’d originally hoped, and within my overall goal of publishing in time for Christmas. I’m trying not to shame myself for having to drop all my other plans for the year – I couldn’t possibly have worked any harder than I did, my priority was to put everything I had into making this book the best it could be, and that’s exactly what I did. That’s a real and long-lasting achievement, and I’d say it was a year well spent.

Looking Forward

For 2023, one of my more nebulous goals for PlanetJune was to imagine “what would it look like if it was easy?” I’ve spent a lot of my time over the years pushing through and struggling with my energy limitations, and I don’t want to live my life like that any more.

I’ve been attempting to move in this direction for several years, but there’s always been just one more thing I need to get through before I can slow down… And then there’s the next one more thing, and the next… I’ve been determined that bringing my legacy book into the world would be the last of these, and now it’s time to find an actual balance where I can enjoy my life, and have PlanetJune be a part of that.

Writing this book has shown me a) what not-easy can look like, and b) that my business is at such a mature stage that it can survive for essentially a whole year without me doing anything except customer support. And if that’s true, imagine how well things could go in future if I add to that baseline by concentrating on following my curiosity and bringing the things I want to make into the world, and giving myself permission to minimise the things that drain me…

For 2024, I’m looking forward to striking out in this new direction. After a year with very little pattern designing, I’m itching to get back into it – I’ve been keeping lists of ideas that I didn’t have time to work on, so I have no shortage of inspiration. I love bringing nature to life in amigurumi, and I’m so excited to get back into it!

But first, rest. 2023 was too much for too long, but I really needed to complete The Essential Guide to Amigurumi and not have it be one of those passion projects that goes on for years and is never quite ready to go out into the world. And now, it’s published! I’ve done what I set out to do. I can finally hit pause after a year-long push, so I’m going to take a month off to reset and try to find a healthy rhythm and remember how to relax (I seem to have forgotten how, after pushing through for so long…)

I’ve been thinking of this point in time as a semi-retirement, where I’m retiring from the mentality of hustle and business growth, but not from creating new designs and allowing PlanetJune to support me financially. I think this could be my answer to “what would it look like if it was easy?”

I don’t have the energy or desire to reach for capitalist goals or to craft persuasive social media marketing campaigns, and I don’t want to waste my energy on those things. I need to trust that the people who enjoy my work will continue to find, enjoy and share it, genuinely and authentically, and that will be enough. I can imagine the simpler life I want, filled with creative projects, rest, nature, family, friends and online community, and peace.

(If that sounds good to you too, I warmly invite you to join the PlanetJune community on Discord. It’s a cozy online space where we chat about topics like pets, food, gardening and books as well as crochet and crafting!)

2024 Wishes

Last year, as I worked towards my ambitious publishing goal, I wished to be grounded, steady, and focused: to move forwards, one step at a time, without getting overwhelmed, sidetracked or discouraged. I really needed all those things in 2023 to keep me going all year long, but now that era has ended and it’s time to begin a new one. I don’t know exactly what that will look like yet, but I’m looking forward to finding out!

For 2024, I wish for a simpler, more serene life: for making time for what really matters, and for leaving behind the things that don’t.

I wish the same for you, and for a happy, healthy and harmonious 2024. Happy New Year!

Dear Blog Subscribers,

I’m so sorry that you just received 50+ emails from me!

Last week, I decided to do a spring clean of my website and get rid of some of the older posts that didn’t have any ongoing value. And then today, I changed my mind and decided to reinstate them – they’re a log of the progress of my business over the years, and sometimes people like going back and seeing the evolution of PlanetJune.

What I didn’t realise was that, in reinstating them, WordPress would publish them as ‘new’ posts and send notification emails to all my subscribers – one for each post. And what’s even worse is that they are all the least-interesting posts I’ve ever written, dating from many years ago – if I was going to send you a bunch of blog posts, those wouldn’t be the ones I’d choose!

So, please delete all the emails from PlanetJune by June Gilbank: Blog <donotreply@wordpress.com> that you received today, and please don’t unsubscribe – I promise this won’t happen again!

What a disaster – I’m incredibly sorry.

Please forgive me…

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!

Writing my Year in Review post every year helps me to see what I’ve accomplished, think about what I’ve learnt, and decide what I’d like to do differently in the following year.

This year has been bookended by accomplishments: I started 2022 by receiving my Silver Award from YouTube for passing 100,000 subscribers, and ended it with the publication of the crochet reference book I always wanted to create: Everyday Crochet.

As most of my work is in digital patterns, having these two physical, tangible items I can hold in my hands feels significant.

Also in 2022, I published half a dozen new patterns and added additional content to several older ones:

And I’ve just launched my ambitious year-long Temperature Snake CAL for 2023, which kept me busy throughout the year as I simultaneously worked on two samples – in secret!

I had no idea how the launch would go, but it’s been a huge success: we have hundreds of people signed up and preparing to start their snakes today (and there’s still time to join us, if you haven’t already!)

Also in 2022, I designed and launched new physical products (enamel pins and stuffing tool handles – sign up for the Crochet Tools list to be notified of the next flash sale!) and created always-available bookplates so I can ‘sign’ copies of my books for you.

I published some new crochet video tutorials, reviewed some new crochet hooks, and updated the worsted weight yarn comparison with additional samples.

In other crafting, I’ve enjoyed collaborating with my husband to make useful 3D printed objects, and I’m still enjoying diamond painting. I made a blanket by finger knitting with loop yarn – and I’m shocked to realise that was the only knitting I did all year! I have more hobbies than I have time and energy…

I crocheted and assembled my giant Christmas tree, and I spent many hours tweaking and editing a photo of Maui to make a portrait on canvas that would be a fitting tribute to him:

And I’ve reluctantly taken up gardening this year too – as our forever home is a new build, the garden was 100% plain lawn, so if I want to encourage wild visitors (which I definitely do!) I need to develop a nature garden. With that in mind I’ve started planting native shrubs and pollinator-friendly wildflowers that will hopefully take care of themselves once they’re established.

My little wild corner doesn’t look like much yet, but fingers crossed it’ll be beautiful in a few years’ time:

Gardening is not one of my natural talents (hence my huge collection of crocheted plant designs that I can’t kill…) and I’ve made some mistakes with my plants this year, but I’ve learnt a lot so I can do better next year. And 15 bird species visited my garden before they all disappeared for the winter, so something has been working!

Business Report

Behind the scenes, I’ve been making progress on a long-term project, making lots of little tweaks to improve and speed up the website and to improve PlanetJune’s visibility in search engines. I don’t have anything flashy to report here, but the incremental improvements all help.

I discovered that Google Analytics has some issues with privacy law compliance (unless you really know what you’re doing), so I’ve switched to a much simpler GDPR-compliant analytics package running on my own server so I can still track useful things like how people find me without accidentally storing any personal data.

On a whim, I ran a quick customer feedback survey through my newsletter, which proved to be very helpful. I’ve implemented some of the suggestions already (like increasing the font size of the newsletter itself), and I have a whole list of other things I can continue to improve in future.

And I’ve been taking courses and researching book design and self-publishing (more on that later…)

Personal Report

Saying goodbye to our precious cat Maui in early January was an awful start to 2022, and although I’ve tried to stay positive, his absence still hits me like a punch in the chest at unexpected moments, almost a year later. But this little bundle of love has really helped with that – Maggie is my constant companion, and keeps me on track.

Healthwise, I had a long-lasting respiratory infection this autumn, my bad knee has declined again (and I’ve been going to physio for that), and I’m still plagued by fatigue that’s crippling at times.

I’m trying to come to terms with the limitations my health puts on my work – there’s so much I want to create, but I’ve found that there’s a hard limit to the energy I can expend, and pushing myself too hard one day just makes me a zombie in the evening or ‘borrows energy’ from the next day so I’ll be too exhausted to do anything all day.

It feels like laziness if I don’t always work full time hours, but I need to remind myself that it isn’t: if I don’t push too hard or expect too much from myself, I can still accomplish the same amount while also enjoying every day instead of feeling shattered – and in the end, isn’t that what life is about?

I know I’m not alone in this, and if you also have a chronic health condition that limits your energy, I recommend reading up about Spoon Theory (google it!), and the book How to Keep House While Drowning is also very helpful if the daily tasks of life are overwhelming.

Looking Back

As of 2022, I’ve been blogging for 16 years (with over 1000 blog posts), I’ve been a published crochet designer for 15 years and self-employed full-time for 13. I’ve published 4 traditionally-published books and well over 250 self-published patterns and ebooks. I’ve worked for a long time to get to where I am today!

Although it may not seem like I’m super-productive these days, I’m juggling a lot of plates behind the scenes, managing life challenges as well as business ones, and I’ve set a high bar to keep making high quality innovative work and offer dependable support to all my customers.

And I’m still doing too much: I thought I’d allowed plenty of time to prepare the Temperature Snake CAL without a last-minute time crunch, but being sick for so long in the fall knocked all my plans off track and I’ve had to work far too hard – even over Christmas! – to get all the CAL pieces in place, two weeks later than I’d planned.

I can’t keep doing this to myself – it takes a huge toll on me, but there always seems to be just one more thing I have to do before I can rest. Speaking of which…

Looking Forward

I had a plan. A grand plan. A hope to leave a legacy in the form of two crochet reference books that I can really be proud of.

Revamping IG:Crochet into Everyday Crochet in 2022 was the first part of the plan, and the second part – replacing my old CIG to Amigurumi with an all-encompassing amigurumi reference book that includes all my tips, tricks and tutorials from my 15+ years as a trail-blazing amigurumi designer and looks and feels as gorgeous as Everyday Crochet does – will be my mountain to climb this year.

I’m not going into this unprepared: I’ve been in the craft book industry since 2009, I have the technical writing and editing qualifications, I’ve done a ton of research on book design, and I’m equipped with endless years of experience in producing patterns and and tutorials. But this will be my first solo climb – my first book where I’m wearing all the hats and aiming to produce a book that’s at least equal in quality to any other crochet book you own, as well as being full of the content you’d only get in a PlanetJune amigurumi book.

I’m ready for this challenge, but I anticipate it’s going to take most of the year to produce the amigurumi reference book of my dreams. I’ll probably have to postpone all my other patterns and tutorial ideas so I can bring this book to life – it needs all my energy and attention, and it’ll be worth the sacrifice.

If I’ve learnt anything this year, it’s that I need to allow even more buffer time than I think I could possibly need, to take account of my health, so I need to be strong and say no to everything else – even the most exciting new ideas and opportunities – if I’m going to bring this book to life.

So, a heads-up: I never post filler content just to keep to a fixed publishing schedule. Although I’m sure I’ll still have some crafty things to post about, it does mean my blog and social media may look a little quiet for much of 2023 – please know there’s a good reason for that!

Creating and publishing my amigurumi reference book will be my Everest, and once I’ve conquered it I’m hoping to settle into a more comfortable, less thrilling, sustainable lifestyle, and enjoy developing my future designs at my own pace. But first, I have an epic challenge ahead in 2023!

2023 Wishes

Last year, I wished for resilience (to keep going through the tough times), grace (to not beat myself up when reality falls short of expectation), and hope (to look forward to the better things to come). When I made those wishes, I didn’t know how much I’d need all those things in 2022.

For once, this coming year, I actually have a concrete tangible goal (and it’s dauntingly ambitious: to write, photograph, edit, design, publish and market a professional-quality book all by myself). So, in 2023, I wish to be grounded, steady, and focused: to move forwards, one step at a time, without getting overwhelmed, sidetracked or discouraged.

I wish those things for you too, no matter what your goals for the coming year may be, and I hope 2023 will bring you health, happiness and fun. Happy New Year!