I thought it was time for a little change of pace. My PocketAmi range is simpler than my usual designs, but they have that instant gratification factor – at only 3″ tall, they are super-fast to crochet and make excellent gifts for kids, or cute little ornaments.

I’ve already made 3 seasonal PocketAmi sets (Halloween, Christmas, and Easter) and I’ve seen how much you enjoy crocheting and modifying them from the Crochet-Alongs I’ve hosted with them! My new PocketAmi Set 6: Pets designs are along the same lines, but fun at any time of year. PocketAmi Pets includes a tiny but adorable puppy, kitten and parrot, all for one price.

• PocketAmi Puppy is cute little mixed-breed, with a brown patch over one eye. The pattern also includes a simpler version that omits the eye patch, for novice crocheters who aren’t comfortable with colour changes.
• PocketAmi Kitten has calico markings (but of course you can crochet her in any cat colours if you’d prefer!) and the tiniest little kitty nose.
• PocketAmi Parrot is surprisingly detailed for an amigurumi only 3″ tall – just look at his parrot eyes and beak shape.

I hope you’ll enjoy crocheting PocketAmi Set 6: Pets as much as I enjoyed creating the mini designs!

Before I do anything else, I want to thank you for all the comments on my amigurumi Columbo post – what an amazing reaction! I guess I’m not the only Columbo fan out there…

I was really nervous about showing him to you: I always get a bit nervous before publishing something new, but it’s so much more scary to publish an ‘art’ project that I’ve invested a huge amount of time and love into. I only have time to create one art piece per year, so I choose subjects that make me happy, and they feel very personal to me. I don’t kid myself that I’m the world’s most talented artist; there’s nothing deep and meaningful about my creations, but if my work brightens your day for just a moment, that’s good enough for me. So your lovely comments really do mean a lot to me – thank you 🙂

Okay, back to the pattern! If you like Columbo, or loveable hound dogs, you might want to crochet a Basset Hound of your own – and how could you resist those mournful eyes and long floppy ears? AmiDogs Basset Hound is the 19th breed in my AmiDogs pattern collection:

As you can see, my handpainted blue sky backdrop luckily survived the trip from Canada and is back in action, which means I’ve also finally been able to photograph AmiDogs Set 6 (Akita, Greyhound [or Whippet] and Border Collie).

(In case you’re wondering, there’s really nothing linking the three breeds of Set 6 together; they were all commissioned designs. I only make the numbered sets for my Etsy store these days – almost all of my PlanetJune customers take advantage of my AmiDogs Custom Set offer and mix and match any 3 of my AmiDogs breeds for the same price as the pre-selected sets.)

Here are the other 18 AmiDogs breeds:

So if you’d like to buy the new Basset Hound pattern, you might want to also pick up a couple more AmiDogs as a custom set of three and take advantage of the savings…

I’m very excited to finally be able to publish what will (probably) be my final set of Dinosaur crochet patterns! I crocheted them before I left Canada, but problems with editing on my netbook meant that I couldn’t do the patterns justice, so I made the frustrating decition to wait for my stuff to arrive so I could publish them to my usual standard with my desktop PC.

With each new set it gets harder to maintain the aesthetic of the previous patterns while coming up with totally new designs, but I think I’ve risen to that challenge – I’ve developed new shaping techniques for each of these dinos, that I haven’t used in any patterns before, to give them distinctive, unique shapes, but they still use the same yarn (Vanna’s Choice), eyes, and overall size as the previous dinos, so it’s pretty clear that they inhabit the same prehistoric amigurumi universe…

First we had Dinosaurs Set 1 (L-R: Brachiosaurus, Stegosaurus, Triceratops):

Then Dinosaurs Set 2 (L-R: Pteranodon, Plesiosaurus, Tyrannosaurus Rex):

And now, let me introduce you to Dinosaurs Set 3 (L-R: Dimetrodon, Parasaurolophus, Ankylosaurus):

Click to see them larger!

Meet The Dinosaurs

Parasaurolophus was a duck-billed dinosaur with a distinctive long crest on the back of his head. He was a 40 ft long herbivore and lived in the Cretaceous period. I think that Parasaurolophus may be my favourite dinosaur – I love that head shape!

Dimetrodon was a small, sail-backed carnivore with legs that sprawled out to the sides. He was only about 13 ft long, but was a top predator in his time (the Permian period) – and that huge spiny sail must have helped with scaring away potential threats! For the sake of scientific accuracy, I should mention here that, just like Plesiosaurs and Pterosaurs, Dimetrodon also wasn’t technically a dinosaur. In Dimetrodon’s case, he actually lived before the time of the true dinosaurs, and he’s properly called a pelycosaur. And that’s the end of today’s prehistory lesson 🙂

Ankylosaurus was probably the best-protected dinosaur ever to have lived: he had a heavily armoured back, a row of spikes along each side, and a club-like tail. Despite this fearsome appearance, he was a herbivore. He was about 30 ft long and lived in the Cretaceous period. Definitely a fun one to design with all those textural features!

My dinosaurs are consistent best-sellers in my shop, and I hope I’ll have continued the trend with this final set! As always, you can buy the three patterns individually in the shop, or enjoy the savings when you buy the complete Set 3.

Direct links to buy the patterns from my shop:

• Dinosaurs Set 3
• Parasaurolophus
• Dimetrodon
• Ankylosaurus

[Although I do intend this to be my final set of dino patterns, if I’ve missed your favourite and it doesn’t look too similar to one of my existing designs, let me know the name(s) of the dino(s) and I’ll keep a note of them. If this set is as popular as the other two and I receive requests for another 3 interesting-looking dinos, I’d consider creating a 4th set, but otherwise I’m content to leave it at this trio of trios.]

Dinos galore! RAWR!

This Plumeria is the first design that I’ve completed since my arrival in South Africa. I first encountered these beautiful flowers on holiday in Hawaii, so I was delighted to discover that they grow here too! Picking up fallen blossoms on my travels, I started to look at the intriguing spiral petal formation, and wondered if I could reproduce it in crochet… Turns out, the answer was yes 🙂

Here’s the resulting design:

I tried to take a photo of my inspiration for you, but by that time almost all the blossoms had fallen (it’s autumn here!) and all I could find were these two tiny specimens on a rainy day. But the lighting conditions gave my photos this lovely ethereal glow, so that’s okay:

And now you can use my pattern to make your own plumeria blooms, wherever in the world you happen to be. Crochet a touch of the tropics with these exotic plumeria blossoms. Use a plumeria flower to make a beautiful pin or hair accessory, or to embellish anything! My pattern includes three different petal designs – choose your own colours to make custom blooms.

The Plumeria crochet pattern is free for you to use. If you’d like to thank me with a donation, you’ll get a handy printable PDF version of the pattern as a thank you 🙂

Enjoy!

Go to Plumeria pattern >>

Today I get to restart working full-time at PlanetJune – I can’t tell you how much I’ve missed it!

I wasn’t sure what to do first – I feel like I’m months behind on everything – but then yesterday, we were lucky enough to glimpse a very special bird: a kingfisher. Please excuse the quality of these pics; it’s a tiny bird and we couldn’t get close without it flying away… I snapped these at full 18x zoom:

It seemed like a sign that my first order of business should be to publish my kingfisher pattern, don’t you agree? You may notice that the colours and markings in the photos above don’t quite match my design below: was saw a Malachite Kingfisher (common here in southern Africa) but the breed I designed is the Common Kingfisher (the UK variety) who’s more teal coloured than blue, and doesn’t have a red beak. And now onto my design…

I designed this Kingfisher pattern last year. It was first published in Inside Crochet magazine, but written in UK crochet terminology and missing all my step-by-step assembly photos. Now I’m publishing it in standard terms and PlanetJune format!

This bird can stand all by himself, without using any wires or internal armatures to strengthen him, so, if you omit the safety eyes, he’d be a kid-friendly toy as well as a decorative piece.

I’m particularly proud of this design because I incorporated a clever new method I developed to make the orange/blue stripe on the body match on both sides (as amigurumi-style stitches don’t stack on top of each other, if you crocheted both sides the same way, one side would slope up and the other would slope down).

The Kingfisher crochet pattern is now available to purchase in my shop. I hope it’ll be the first of many PlanetJune bird designs…

It’s been a while since I had a new pattern ready – all the move preparations are keeping me crazily busy. But a commission request came in a few weeks ago for a chinchilla crochet pattern, and I just couldn’t resist making such a cute ball of fluff!

(While I remember, if you’re interested in commissioning a pattern design from me, everything is on hold for the time being – I’m not accepting any new commissions until I’m settled in South Africa and ready to devote all my attention back to PlanetJune. Currently, I have no idea when that will be – I’ll let you know when I’ve reached that point…)

Okay, and now onto the chinchilla!

He’s an extra-large amigurumi, and close to life-sized at 8″ long, not including the tail (which adds another 5″). I wanted him to be fluffy, but without using any novelty yarns, so I brushed his body and tail to give more of a fluffy look. I’ve also included pattern options for only brushing the tail, or not brushing at all – even the smooth version looks pretty cute, I think!

A note about brushing: I like to brush just a little, to give a fluffy look but still make it very obvious that the ami is crocheted. If you preferred, you could keep brushing for a lot longer to make it look really fluffy and obscure the stitches much more than I have with my chinchilla, although this will also mask the shaping a bit more. But if mine isn’t fluffy enough for you, don’t let that stop you from buying the pattern and making an extra-fluffy one!

If you’d like to crochet your own chinchilla, the Chinchilla crochet pattern is now available for purchase in my shop.

Hope you like him!

In plenty of time for Valentine’s Day, I have a new crochet pattern to share today: Love Hearts! String them into a garland, add a pin back to make a cute brooch, or fill a bowl with pretty hearts for Valentine’s Day decorating.

This is a clever little pattern to make sweet hearts in three sizes – each heart builds on the pattern of the previous heart. You can also make a bonus puffy heart to give a total of 4 different designs in this one pattern:

A: Small Heart; B: Medium Heart; C: Large Heart; D: Puffy Heart

It’s a fun pattern; although it’s worked in the round, it’s the opposite of amigurumi, as you’ll use a variety of crochet stitches to form the heart shape. And unlike other hearts I’ve seen, this one has no chains between the stitches, so it forms a nice solid shape. Once you get the hang of the pattern you’ll be able to whip up dozens of hearts in no time at all!

The Love Hearts crochet pattern is free for you to use. If you’d like to thank me with a donation, you’ll get a handy printable PDF version of the pattern as a thank you 🙂

Enjoy!

Go to Love Hearts pattern >>

First pattern of 2011! Actually, this is a bit of a cheat – this was a commissioned pattern that I completed in December, but I haven’t found the time until now to list it in my shop.

AmiDogs Border Collie marks the 18th breed in my AmiDogs series:

You can vary the angle and height of the ear crease to make your ami collie match any special Border Collie in your life, and I also give pattern modifications if you’d like to make a Border Collie with fully erect ears.

Now, this should be the point where I say “and with this 18th design, that means AmiDogs Set 6 is now available to purchase…” but that’s not the case, because all my amigurumi (including the 3 dogs in question), my light tent, and my prop box including the grass and sky backdrop, are all packed away. So, there’ll be no Set 6 multipack for a while at least, until I can take the group photo of them all together!

BUT all is not lost! You can make a custom set including all the breeds who will make up Set 6 (American Akita, Greyhound or Whippet, and Border Collie), or any 3 other breeds of your choice, for the same price.

So you can grab the individual Border Collie pattern, or, to save money, buy him as part of a custom set of any 3 AmiDogs patterns.

Hope you like my collie!