PlanetJune Blog: Latest News, Patterns and Tutorials

Okay, so you know all the crochet basics, you’ve mastered the magic ring, you know how to change colours and how to join pieces together, you’re even down with the invisible decrease. What more do you need to know to create the perfect amigurumi?

It’s time for one more tutorial to join my Amigurumi Help resource: how to fasten off. I’m going to cover three different methods:

1. Closing up a piece
2. Finishing an open edge that will be joined to another piece
3. Finishing an open edge that will be visible (a neater finish)

You may think you know it all already, but #3 is another piece of magic that I bet you’ll find useful at some point in the future! Look all around the open edge on this piece – there’s no clunky join in sight:

How did I do it? Check it out here: Fastening Off tutorial.

I was just thinking, with all these crochet tutorials I’ve been writing, I almost have the makings of a book! A handy go-to techniques book. Wouldn’t that be a useful addition to your crochet library? Hmmm….

And, on a related note, if there are any more how-to topics you’d like me to cover, just let me know, and I’ll put some more tutorials together. I hope you’ve realised by now that I’m always happy to help and to share my knowledge 🙂

I have lots of little ornaments etc and nowhere to put them, so I made some basic shelves to display them. I had some wood cut at the hardware store to fit the space above my computer desk. I sanded and primed the wood:

Then I spray-painted the shelves this gorgeous greyish purple colour and mounted them on the wall with brackets:

I just threw some of my trinkets up quickly so I can see how the shelves look. In case you’re wondering, most of the little ornaments are made by me from crochet, origami, needlefelting, polymer clay, sewing, or beading. The rest are artwork, travel souvenirs, and a few other bits and pieces.

I’m really happy with how the shelves turned out – my favourite part was discovering that the wooden chickadee and flying piglet can hang from the brackets. Now I get all the fun of unearthing all my other favourite treasures and rearranging everything!

Hot on the heels of last week’s Folding Trees blogiversary, it’s now my own blogiversary (it was a total coincidence that both launched at the same time, 2 years apart).

It’s hard to believe another year has gone by so quickly! It’s now three years since I started the PlanetJune blog! Three years ago, I had never designed a crochet pattern; I thought that starting a craft blog was probably a silly idea and that nobody would ever read it – I really just started it as a record for myself of what I was making, and to push myself to keep creating things. I never dreamed it would evolve into the PlanetJune empire of today 🙂

Year in Review

Okay, let’s see the breakdown this year:

Patterns: 17 new crochet patterns in the PlanetJune store, plus 4 new free (donationware) patterns

Eyes: Added a line of animal (safety) eyes to the shop

Tutorials: New tutorials on Crochet Basics, Sizing Up (and Down) and the wonderful Invisible Decrease

Folding Trees: Started up Folding Trees with my lovely friend Eve

Book: Wrote a papercraft book, Paper Chains & Garlands (which should be out late summer or early autumn)

And of course, the biggie this year was making the decision at Christmas time to try self-employment and see what happens…

What’s Next?

I have about a million ideas for what to do in the coming year, ranging from small projects (e.g. redesign the website a bit – I think it could be a bit more user-friendly) to more ambitious ideas (e.g. my huge in-progress secret project – c’mon, you didn’t really think I’d leak my idea until it’s ready to go, did you?!).

I think my biggest challenge is going to be prioritizing and deciding which ideas to pursue and which to put on the “maybe, one day…” list. If I’m running this as a real business, I need to try to make good business decisions and balance the risks against the potential opportunities. It’s all a bit scary because of the financial side of things – much as I’d like to do whatever I want to do, creatively, I’m going to have to try to make choices that will help to support me financially.

Hey, where’s the contest?!

I do have a contest planned, but the prizes aren’t ready yet, so I’m going to hold off until they are. Watch this space…

Thank you!

I am so, so grateful to all the wonderful people who I’ve met on this journey so far… To everyone who reads my blog, who leaves a comment, e-mails me, or follows me on Twitter, thank you for your encouragement in this crazy adventure! And of course to everyone who has helped to support me by buying my patterns or sending me donations, I am more grateful than I can say.

Here’s to year 4!
June xxx

Folding Trees, the papercraft site that Eve and I co-founded, is a year old this week! It’s been a great first year; between the two of us, we’ve written over 400 posts, and published tons of paper-crafty inspiration and tutorials.

Here are a few of our most popular tutorials from the year:

clockwise from top left: 1) my Tissue Paper Carnations; 2) Eve’s Kusudama Ball (my updated tutorial here); 3) my Lucky Wishing Stars; 4) Eve’s Balloon Lights

Of course, it’s also through my work on Folding Trees that I got a book deal (yay!). My book, Paper Chains & Garlands, is at the printing stage, and should be released in late summer or early autumn – I’ll keep you posted as I hear more!

If you have any interest in crafting with paper, do check out Folding Trees for a daily dose of projects and inspiration 🙂

My Brachiosaurus, Stegosaurus and Triceratops crochet patterns are now available to purchase individually or as a value-priced multipack from the PlanetJune shop.

With no colour changes, they work up quickly, and at 9-11″ long and nice and chunky, they would make great children’s toys. Who doesn’t know a little boy or girl who’d be delighted with a set of these to play with?

Brachiosaurus

Stegosaurus

Triceratops

I’ve also been making some changes in the PlanetJune store:

Eyes: Now you can conveniently shop for the perfect eyes for your creations while you’re picking out your patterns, with my range of black animal eyes available in all sizes.

Custom AmiDogs sets: This feature has been requested a lot! Now you can mix and match to create your own AmiDogs set of three patterns for the same price as the standard sets.

New categories: I’ve recategorized my patterns so it’s easier to find what you’re looking for.

Donationware patterns: All the donationware patterns are now available in the shop, so, in future, if you’d like the printable PDF of any of my free patterns, you can send me your donation in the same way as a pattern order, and then download your pattern(s) immediately.

So please feel free to take a look around the shop and see if anything catches your eye!

UPDATE: The Dinos have been featured on One Pretty Thing, Carina’s Craftblog and Roman Sock – thanks so much, guys!

Thanks so much to everyone who commented on my ring-tailed lemur! It looks like there is demand for a pattern, so I’ll get started on that shortly.

In the meantime, I thought it was time to try something a bit different, so I’ve been making… Dinosaurs! I think a lot of my patterns are more appealing to girls than to boys, and I wanted to redress the balance a bit here:

Click for the full-size image

These dinosaurs are: Brachiosaurus (green), Stegosaurus (blue/grey), and Triceratops (orange). They are all herbivores – in fact, you might remember the brachiosaurus as the ‘veggiesaurus’ from Jurassic Park. They are nice and chunky so they would be good as toys to play with, and they are all between 9″ and 11″ long.

I’ve tried to make each species as distinct as possible, without adding too much detail that would be difficult to crochet. These will definitely not be advanced patterns! I’m especially pleased with the head and neck of the brachiosaurus – it’s all crocheted in one piece! And the body and tail of each are worked in one piece too, which helps to reduce the amount of sewing required.

I used Lion Brand Vanna’s Choice yarn for the first time in these designs. I love the muted colours in the range, and it’s nice and heavy for a worsted weight yarn, so it makes a good firm fabric (great for amigurumi!)

I’m hoping to have the dinosaur patterns up in the next few days. The lemur will take a bit longer. If you’d like to know when either are available, sign up for my mailing list and you’ll be among the first to know 🙂

There’s potential for quite a few more designs in this range, but I’ll see how popular these initial three are before I design any more. What do you think of them?

Time to reveal the design I was working on at the Creativ Festival. It’s a Ring-tailed Lemur:

Lemurs hail from the island of Madagascar, off the southeast coast of Africa. Madagascar’s geographical isolation has led to a unique ecosystem of unusual animals and plants, of which lemurs are probably the most well-known.

Lemurs are the Madagascan equivalent of monkeys, but they are prosimians – more primitive than the monkeys and apes found elsewhere in the world. There are over 90 species of lemurs in Madagascar!

Ring-tailed lemurs are characterized by their distinctive long black and white striped tail and a cat-like appearance. You may recognize them from the Madagascar animated movies or the Animal Planet show Lemur Street/Lemur Kingdom.

Would anyone be interested in a Ring-Tailed Lemur pattern? It would be slightly more advanced than my usual patterns. Specifically, the colour changes in the head (3 different colours) and the shaping of the back legs are a little more advanced than my other patterns. I’ve taken step-by-step photos to demonstrate the trickier parts, but I’d like to know if there’s any interest before I edit all the photos and write it up.

Please leave me a comment if you like my lemur, or if you’d like me to write up the pattern!

UPDATED: The pattern is now available in my shop 🙂

Okay, so I did a little test this weekend to establish what punchneedle is all about and whether it would be something I could design patterns for. This is my test piece – you may recognise the subjects as my Fuzzy Penguin and Fuzzy Seal 🙂 It’s approx 3.5″x 2.25″ and worked with 3 strands of DMC embroidery floss.

For this sample, I wanted to figure out what kind of designs would look best, so I designed the penguin to be not outlined, and the seal with an outline. I’ve learned a few things about designing for punchneedle:

• Not outlining looks best – the outline looks a bit uneven in places because it’s only 1 loop thick
• Tiny detail is difficult to replicate (e.g. the seal’s nose)
• Bold colours and patterns will look really good

But I can see a lot of potential here. I learnt that punchneedle is really easy to do, and it’s so fast compared with cross stitch! I punched the penguin and seal in under an hour and a half – and it was my first attempt, so that includes my slow start as I tried to learn how to punch correctly. The background took a bit longer, but it’s so relaxing and you don’t have to concentrate much, so it’s perfect to punch away while you watch TV.

UPDATE: By request, adding a close-up pic so you can see what the stitches look like:

L: Back of piece: looks like regular backstitched embroidery
R: Front of piece (edge on): lots of loops. Mine are 3mm tall but the tool lets you adjust the loop length to much longer

Now I’ve finished the experiment, I can visualize a whole series of designs… I think a range of dog breeds would be so cute, and also a wild animal range (giraffe, panda, etc). You could use them to make quilt squares (just add a fabric border), embellishments for bags etc, or just to frame.

Now my questions to you…

1. Are you intrigued by punchneedle? Would you like me to put up a basic tutorial so you can see how it works?
2. Might you be interested in PlanetJune punchneedle designs? (They would, of course, be better than my test piece above – I’m thinking more realistic and colourful)

I’m obviously still in the planning stages here, but I’d love some early feedback before I embark on a design range. I’m not asking for any kind of commitment; just your opinion. It’s a cheap craft to get into; once you’ve bought the actual needle, an embroidery hoop, and some woven fabric, then all you need to pick up for each project is the floss colours.

If there’s no interest, I’ll still make some for myself, just for fun, but I really think this is another craft that just needs a little updating with some fresh, cute patterns to be relevant to us. All the patterns I’ve seen are a bit too, um, country (is that the right word?) for my taste.

Please let me know what you think! Any comments welcome.