Today, I bought some yarn. Not just any yarn: lovely 100% alpaca yarn. And not just any alpaca yarn either: I met the very alpacas whose fleece had been spun into my yarn! This was my special (belated) birthday treat, and it was worth the wait. Alpaca Acres is a small local alpaca farm, and they had an Open House this afternoon. It was a glorious day for it – the sun was shining and it was perfect autumn weather.

The owners were very welcoming and answered all my hundreds of questions. We saw the breeding male (front) strutting for the benefit of the lady alpacas (the females were already pregnant, so they rejected his advances by spitting at him – apparently the alpaca version of a pregnancy test!):

This year’s babies were so adorably soft and had beautiful big dark eyes – this little guy was only 6 weeks old:

And as for the yarn, I bought some light brown yarn courtesy of Vixen:

We also got to hand-feed her and some of the others! Their mouths are very delicate and feel velvety when they touch your hand to take the food. Here she is in close-up:

And here I am with Harvey, my other yarn donor:

What a cutie, with his lovely dark brown fleece:

I don’t know what I’m going to make with the yarn yet (I only have 50g of each colour so it won’t be anything big), but when I do crochet it into something I’ll be able to think of Vixen and Harvey whenever I use it. What an amazing experience to have met the actual animals who produced my yarn!

It’s nearly here! The Creativ Festival begins tomorrow (Friday), and I’ll be there on Saturday. I’ve been really busy assembling my display and my class supply kits and I’m still not quite ready… but I will be!

The show now even has a video trailer (sorry, it takes a while to load, so be prepared to wait for a minute):

I think it’s fair to say that this show is going to be amazing. If you don’t live near Toronto, don’t you wish you did? If I wasn’t going as an instructor (or should I say ‘industry expert’ 🙂 ), I would definitely be there to check out all those craft supply booths. Maybe I’ll be able to steal a few minutes to peruse the aisles…

And if you are going on Saturday, this is your last reminder: don’t forget to come and see me at the A Needle Pulling Thread booth – that’s booth #1005.

I hope to see you there on Saturday!

…or at least, I’m going to be. The brochure for the Fall Creativ Festival in Toronto just arrived:

And let’s have a look at page 42. See anything familiar?

That’s right – I’ll be teaching a crochet class to make my PocketAmi Mouse and Bunny! Unfortunately for my marketing, the keyword PlanetJune is missing from my blurb (how did that happen?!), but luckily my name isn’t very common so I hope people reading the brochure will google me if they want to know more about me.

For anyone who might be in the area, the show runs October 17-19th 2008, so make a note in your diary to keep the weekend free – it’s going to be a great show! For more info on the show, see the Creativ Festival website.

My class is on Saturday 18th from 11am to 12.30pm, and I’ll be at the A Needle Pulling Thread booth all day on Saturday when I’m not teaching, so please remember to stop by and say hello to me. (I’ll be easy to spot: I’ll be the one surrounded by crocheted animals!)

Exciting changes are afoot at PlanetJune…

New Shop
As of next week, there will be an all-new PlanetJune crochet pattern store. It will be fully automated, so as soon as your PayPal payment has been completed, you’ll be able to log into your PlanetJune account and download all your patterns. That means no more waiting for me to process your order and e-mail your patterns to you! This change has been in the works for a few months, and should free up more of my time to come up with new designs 🙂

New Mailing List
My old mailing list can’t cope any more with the number of subscribers I have, so I’ve just set up an all-new mailing list. I am starting the list over from scratch, as a significant number of e-mail addresses on my old list aren’t valid any more. Even if you were signed up for the old mailing list, you will have to sign up again for the new list to continue to receive the updates.

New Navigation
I’ve added a new navigation menu to the very top of the page, to help you get around the main sections of PlanetJune – craft blog, crochet pattern store and mailing list. Hopefully it will all make sense – if you do encounter anything strange or unexpected, please let me know immediately so I can fix it up as soon as possible.

10% off your next order!
To celebrate the launch of the new shop and new mailing list, anyone who subscribes to the new list by the end of July 2008 will receive a discount code, valid in the new store, worth 10% off your next order from the new PlanetJune store! The 10% code will be valid for one single order, but you may purchase as many patterns as you wish within that order, including the upcoming AfricAmi patterns (Elephant, Hippo and Rhino)!

Please remember to sign up for the new mailing list, and look out for your 10% discount coupon to use in the new PlanetJune crochet pattern store!

I am honoured to have received several blog awards lately, but I haven’t passed them on yet because it’s so difficult to choose from so many amazing blogs that I follow.

I received the You Make My Day award from Alice and Carina. The Arte y Pico award came from Val, Clare, and Jessica, who also passed on the Brillante Weblogs Premio 2008 and 5 Blogs That Make My Day awards.

That’s quite a trophy cabinet! Thank you all very much for picking me, ladies. Now for the fun (and difficult) part – to spread the love to other bloggers. I’m going to keep it short by just picking 5 blogs each for two of the awards (as I couldn’t find the rules for the other two). I’m also not nominating the people who nominated me, although they all deserve the awards too, so please check out the above links to their blogs!

You Make my Day

Rules: Give the award to up to 10 people whose blogs bring you happiness and inspiration and make you feel so happy about blogland! Let them know by posting a comment on their blog so that they can pass it on. Beware! You may get the award several times!

Crafty Ginger
Posie Gets Cozy
Roman Sock
Sewing Stars
U-handblog

Arte y Pico

Rules:
1) You have to pick 5 blogs that you consider deserve this award, creativity, design, interesting material, and also contrubuites to the blogger community, no matter of language.
2) Each award has to have the name of the author and also a link to his or her blog to be visited by everyone.
3) Each award-winning, has to show the award and put the name and link to the blog thathas given her or him the ward itself.
4) Award-winning and the one who has given the prize have to show the link of “Arte y pico” blog, so everyone will know the origin of this award.
5) To show these rules.

A Little Hut
Christy DeKoning
How About Orange
Pink Chalk Studio
Shimandsons

Ooh, this is my 200th blog post! Yet another milestone reached – I can’t believe I’ve written 200 posts; it’s amazing how it all adds up…

Here’s a taster of my amigurumi polar bear. He’ll get a full post of his own with more photos, more details and some interesting polar bear facts, but here’s a pic to keep you going for tonight:

This polar bear is the latest design for my AquaAmi collection. I’ve never seen a toy polar bear in the standing position before, but to me this is the classic polar bear pose, so it was the obvious choice for my design.

Now back to the real subject for this post: I want to thank everyone who entered my 2nd blogiversary contest. Your comments were so kind and thoughtful – you really know how to make a girl feel special. Over the next week or so, I’ll go through all the comments and make a note of all your suggestions and check out all your blogs too – I’m sure I’ll discover some new (to me) gems this way 🙂

After sifting through an amazing 153 comments on the contest post, I’ve filtered them into 2 numbered lists in Word – one for the pattern entries and one for the mouse entries. As I’ve had 90 entries for the pattern and only 53 entries for the mouse, I’ve decided to commemorate this 200th post by drawing an extra winner for the pattern contest – yay!

I’m using the Random.org to select the lucky winners from my Word lists:

So without further ado, the two pattern winners are:

• #47 Barbara Liedtke
• #85 falwyn

Ladies, I will e-mail you both to notify you personally and to find out which pattern you’d each like to select for your prize.

And the PocketAmi mouse goes to:

• #12 Josefin

Josefin, I’ll be e-mailing you to get your mailing address so I can send your mousey out to you – I hope you’ll give him a good home in Sweden 🙂 Please post a picture of him on your blog after he gets to you!

Congratulations to all three winners! And thanks to all the other entrants too – you’ve given me some great ideas to take me into year 3 of PlanetJune.

Note: don’t forget to enter my contest at the end of this post!

Year in Review

Doesn’t time fly? I can’t believe I’ve been running this blog for 2 years! Looking back to last year’s blogiversary post, I see that I’ve added 19 more original designs to my crochet pattern store, plus I created 4 more free patterns.

This year’s tutorials included lots of Amigurumi Help, the Offset Square Wrist Pincushion and the amazingly popular Shrinkydinks Rings tutorial. If you’ve made anything from my tutorials, don’t forget to upload the pics to my new Flickr group, PlanetJune Tutorial Gallery – I’d love to see what you’ve made!

I tried some new crafts: felt toys, modular origami and needlefelting – all of which I hope to do more of in the future.

This year, PlanetJune also appeared in print for the first time:

• A pattern in the 2008 Crochet Pattern a Day calendar, and featured on the back cover of the box
• My Joining Amigurumi article in CROQ Zine
• A full page of photos of my designs in the design gallery section of Amigurumi Animals
• My ice cream bear pattern and a companion article I wrote in A Needle Pulling Thread magazine (Summer 2008 issue – should be out any day now, and I can’t wait to see it!)

And, on top of all that, we moved to a new city and bought our first house, which resulted in me driving back to my old job every day for 6 months (that’s almost 4 hours per day in the car) over a very long and snowy winter – I can’t remember how I even managed to get anything else done…

What’s Next?

It came as quite a shock to see how much crochet I’ve done this year, compared with other crafting. I suppose I’ve been concentrating so much on making patterns, everything else has come second. For the coming year, I’m hoping I’ll find more time to make more things, without neglecting my pattern designing either. It’s exhilarating to try new things, so I want to keep pushing myself out of my comfort zone.

I also have some new and exciting things in development, but they aren’t quite ready to share just yet…

Roll on year 3! I can’t wait to see what comes next in the PlanetJune story…

Thank you!

Of course the best part of all this is still getting to ‘meet’ so many wonderful people! I was going to namecheck some of my bestest online friends, but I don’t want to leave anyone out, so… well, I’m talking about YOU. Thank you for reading this, thank you for your comments and e-mails, thank you for buying my patterns.

Contest Time!

Now your reward for reading this far: it’s contest time! I’m running 2 contests this time:

1. Win any pattern (your choice) from the pattern store. FYI, each PocketAmi set counts as one pattern 🙂
2. Win a finished PocketAmi Mouse (shipped to you, anywhere in the world). I have crocheted an adorable little grey mouse especially for this contest… This is a rare opportunity to get your hands on a PlanetJune original!
   
   I have small hands – he is even smaller than he looks here!

To enter, leave me a comment on this post, including:

1. Your choice of prize – type MOUSE or PATTERN
2. Tell me something, e.g. your favourite thing I’ve made, a suggestion for a future design, something you’d like to see on PlanetJune. Anything goes – I just want to hear from you!

If you want to enter both contests, just leave me 2 comments!

On Friday 20th June at 5pm EST, I will draw one name from each set of MOUSE comments, and one from each set of PATTERN comments. (In the unlikely event that the same person ‘wins’ both, I will contact them to see which prize they would prefer, and then draw another name for the other contest winner). Good luck!

… well, virtual spring cleaning anyway! Changes are afoot at PlanetJune to make the site easier for you to use, and easier for me to maintain. What’s been done so far?

• Flickr
  My 3 Flickr groups (Fuzzy Friends, AmiDogs, AquaAmi) have been merged; now there is just one big PlanetJune Crochet Flickr group – please join and upload anything based on any of my crochet patterns (including the free patterns) to this group!

• Live Chat
  Unfortunately, I have had to remove the ‘Live Chat’ box from the site. Too many people were leaving me messages through it while I was offline, but not leaving an e-mail address, so I couldn’t reply to their messages.

  Please continue to contact me via e-mail with any questions, comments, suggestions etc: craft [at] planetjune [dot] com – I am always happy to hear from you!

• Lost Orders
  Unless you specify a different e-mail address in the comments box when you order, I will send your patterns to the e-mail address you have registered with PayPal. Please keep this e-mail address up to date! Sometimes my e-mails are returned and I have no other way to contact you to deliver your patterns 🙁 To this end, I have started a Lost Orders page in the sidebar with a list of orders I have been unable to deliver. If you haven’t received your patterns and it’s been over 24 hours since you ordered, please contact me or check this page.

That’s it for now. More improvements to follow!