PlanetJune Blog: Latest News, Patterns and Tutorials

I have to admit I’ve been a bit slow to appreciate the appeal of buying handmade, mostly because I’m usually guilty of seeing something and thinking “I could make that!” Well, yes, I probably could, given many hours/weeks/months of time, learning a new skill, and investing in new equipment and tools to do it properly… Now I’ve started to actually buy beautiful things that have been individually made by talented people, I can appreciate them for the lovely treat they are, instead of feeling like I have to challenge myself to make everything.

Of course, receiving a handmade gift is even more of a pleasure! I’ve been absolutely spoiled recently by some of my best crafty-blogger friends. Just look at this gorgeous grey-blue shrug that Kari (Crafty Ginger) made for me. It’s so beautifully knitted – a skill I have never picked up – fits me perfectly, and I just love the colour:

Kari also spoiled me with lots of other treats too, but they were dispersed before I thought to take a picture. Thank you, Kari – I love everything!

Alice (futuregirl) sent me a huge pile of lovely origami papers to use – I can definitely make good use of those for Folding Trees! But, even better, she sent me a handmade by futuregirl Birdcage Handbag! It is just beautiful. Alice is currently in the process of writing up the patterns for some of her bags, so head over to the futuregirl craft blog soon if you’d like to make one for yourself. In the meantime, take a look at mine:

Sorry for the strange angle of this pic – I was trying to show the embroidered birdcage on the front AND the bird fabric lining on the inside!

Thank you, Alice – I shall treasure my bag!

I’ve also been doing a bit of shopping on Etsy and ArtFire. As a buyer, both were easy to use, although if a seller has a store at both venues, I’m choosing ArtFire, because I know the artisan won’t be paying commission fees on my purchase that way! I thought I’d put together a little showcase of things I’ve bought and would recommend if you’re looking for gifts or to treat yourself. In no particular order:

I have been intending to commission a portrait of Maui from ArtFire seller Christy DeKoning for a year, but I was having difficulty selecting the perfect source photos (difficult choice with such a photogenic cat… yes, I know I’m biased!). I’m so glad I finally made my mind up… Christy has painted the most adorable little watercolour for me, and she also e-mailed me a proof and was happy to correct the one little line that originally didn’t look quite like my boy (now it’s perfect). Christy also documented the process on her own blog (update: no longer online) – wow! The result is a beautiful work of art:

This adorable carved wooden chickadee comes from Etsy seller and talented artist Sandra Healy. Sandra has a huge range of over 270 species of wild animals and birds, and she individually carves and paints each one. If you like animals, you really must check out her store. Here’s my darling chickadee:

I bought this beautiful polymer clay covered crochet hook from Etsy seller Jenn Edwards, aka The Fanciful Feline. Jenn also sells polymer clay beads and more in her store. Jenn has taken my favourite type of hook (Susan Bates) and added a comfortable smooth handle complete with floating flowers and intricately caned butterflies. It’s my new favourite hook:

Lip balm is one of my vices – I never wear lipstick, but you’ll never find me without my trusty lip balm. ArtFire seller Bohemian Rose (update: now Barefoot Hippie) makes handmade soaps and sugar scrubs, and also has a lovely range of deliciously scented lip balms. If you feel in need of a delicious little treat to pamper yourself, check out her store. I picked up her Pele lip balm, which is a yummy fruity pineapple flavour, and a steal at only $5 for two balms (I also chose the Cuticle Balm – much more convenient than a bottle of moisturiser for those emergency dry cuticle situations):

I hope I’ve inspired you to look into buying handmade items for yourself and your friends and family. You can find beautiful, original, high quality handcrafted merchandise from forums such as ArtFire.com and Etsy.com, and the knowledge that you are directly helping to support the artist/artisan will give you that warm glow that you just don’t get from a trip to the mall. Long live handmade!

Wow. What a response! Thank you all for your comments – it means so much to me that you like my most personal work to date 🙂

Okay, so now you’ve seen the finished product, but I think I need to share a little of the insane amount of effort that went into making my orang utan! I would guess we’re looking at about 100 hours of June time, of which the actual crocheting that you see is less than half of that. Aside from that, highlights include:

• sculpting the hands and feet from pipe cleaners
• snapping and unsnapping armature parts to get the skeleton proportions right (literally hours of struggle, one pinched fingertip and one hugely bruised knuckle to show for that)
• sewing cushioned sleeves to cushion the skeleton and keep them in the right place inside the body
• the previous 2 heads that went wrong wrong wrong
• creating a wire base for the head so it wouldn’t sag

Here’s a glimpse into a little bit of the work that you don’t see in the finished orang:

left: pipe cleaners formed into shape of hand
middle: beginning to crochet over the form
right: finished hand with arm attached

left: a finished arm and leg
middle: the spine (this is the plastic segmented poseable armature I used)
right: quilted covers for the armature limbs so he wouldn’t feel too bony

I didn’t take any pics of the inside of the body or head, but that should give you an idea – there’s more than meets the eye to this little guy! But the result is that he is infinitely poseable and feels very realistic, thanks to the weight of the armature and the ‘backbone’ bumps you can just feel when you stroke him.

I’m so flattered that some of you would like a pattern, but, as you can see from the above, this wouldn’t be a crochet pattern – it would be ‘how to make a plush art sculpture (oh yeah, and you’ll need to crochet too)’. And that’s one reason why my orang utan is art, not craft – it’s not something that can be reproduced. So definitely no pattern (sorry!).

But there may be a way you can own a little piece of him, even though you can never make/buy an original: I’m thinking of selling high quality prints of a really good photograph of him. I tweeted the idea yesterday and had some good responses – I still need to investigate the logistics but I think it would be doable.

So now I’d like to ask you: would you buy a print if they were for sale? Would you prefer something more ‘useful’ like a blank notecard or postcard, or an art print that you could frame? Or something else again – I’m open to all ideas. If there’s enough interest I’ll get some printed and put them in the shop.

You probably all know the story by now: I’ve had a pet project for the past year – to crochet a life-size realistic baby orang utan as a freeform art project (no pattern!). It’s been a long time coming, but I have finally finished him!

I have a lot of detail I could share, but I think I’ll save that for another time, and let the pics speak for themselves today. Please, please leave me comments! This is the most important (to me) piece I’ve ever made and I really really want to know what you think of him…

And finally, with a wink to the fellow Pratchett fans: OOK!

For some reason I am very nervous about showing him to you – I feel like my soul is on display! I hope you can tell that I have poured my heart into him. Please let me know what you think in the comments…

Thank you all so much for participating in my survey! I had over 100 responses, and every design was voted in both first and last place at least once, which makes it a little difficult to interpret the results… The clear winner, with over 40% first place votes, is the Discworld. After that, the results are a bit ambiguous. But what was even more useful than the numbers is the comments that over half of you included to tell me why you voted the way you did!

For instance, you (mostly) love the Discworld. But it also got a fair few last place votes, with reasons like:

• Not a PlanetJune original concept
• Most people won’t understand the Pratchett reference
• Background too dark
• Perceived complexity may put people off

And for the monkeys, the pros include:

• Natural setting
• Realistic
• Eye-catching vertical format

And the cons:

• Too busy for a small card
• Background too distracting
• Text doesn’t stand out

See how useful these comments are? I can see that the Guinea Pigs card is probably a better design than the Monkeys, as it shares most of the pros of the Monkeys comments, but avoids the cons. Your comments will also be really useful when I’m trying to take future product photos, to give me ideas of pitfalls to avoid falling into.

The reason I wanted to make 3 different cards is so that there’d be something for everyone. But, when I came to order the cards, I discovered that the prices were more than I was expecting – e.g. an extra $11.50 per design just to print the text on the back… Given that, and the survey responses, I’ve decided to just get the Discworld and Guinea Pigs cards printed. It’ll be interesting to see which is the most popular at the show! 58% of you chose one of these two designs as their first choice, and 88% chose one of them as either their first or second choice, so I’m hoping that almost everyone will like at least one of them!

Here’s the back of the cards

Now for the draw. 82% of the respondents opted into the draw, and the winner is: Johanna Jennings! Congratulations, Johanna! (I will contact you directly to ask for your mailing address, and I’ll throw in some bonus postcards as you’re only getting 2 cards in your prize instead of the promised 3).

Thanks again to all who entered. If you have any other comments, suggestions or feedback about any aspect of PlanetJune, please feel free to e-mail me at any time – all advice gratefully received!

I just realised there’s only a week and a half to go until Easter! If you’re still looking for some ideas for things to make for Easter, how about crocheting some PlanetJune designs? I thought I’d save you some time and look through my own catalogue to see what Easter-y patterns I have:

New for 2009:

PocketAmi Easter

Oldies but goodies:

Fuzzy Bunny & Chick

Fuzzy Lamb

And don’t forget my free patterns:

Daffodils

Have a PlanetJune Easter this year, with all the sweetness of a chocolate egg, but much better for you 🙂

I’ve been thinking about what kind of promotional items I can give away at next month’s Creativ Festival. I was debating buying some Moo cards, but they are so small I’m not sure that my photos would be clear enough. So, I thought I would get my own business card-sized Moo-type cards printed. I hope that they will be cute enough for people to want to keep them and not throw them away as soon as they get home!

I’ve made 5 designs and I’d like to get 3 of them printed. Could you help me choose between the 5 designs below? I’ll draw a random entrant from my survey who will win a set of the 3 winning choices! (One entry per person, please, and I’ll draw the winner on Sunday April 5th at 6pm EST)

Thank you! Click through to the one-question survey

Hi guys, I’m back from the UK – did you miss me? If you want to keep up with more of my day-to-day life (both crafty and more personal), you can follow me on Twitter. Send me a direct message if you do, so I know who you are and can follow you back!

Now I’m back home, I can show you the little presents I made for my parents. For Mum (a pianist) a music-inspired needlebook with blue (her favourite colour) felt pages:

And for Dad (always hard to buy for), a set of marble magnets featuring pics of his dog (they look better in person; the glass was tricky to photograph without reflections):

While I was sorting through all my old stuff at my Dad’s house, I found a bag containing 4 skeins of beautifully soft kid mohair yarn, in this pretty purple shade. I’m absolutely at a loss as to how I acquired this – I didn’t even crochet while I lived in the UK! Anyway, I’m not complaining – free yarn is always a good thing, especially when it’s quality yarn like this:

I whiled away my hours on the plane by crocheting fuzzy orange tubes to be the legs for my orang utan. Just the body and feet to go now…

I managed to bring back my mammoth Animal reference book in my carry-on backpack (and I have a bruise on my tailbone to prove it – the book is seriously large and weighs over 5kg!) – no worries that I will run out of animal inspiration now I have over 600 beautifully-photographed pages to pore through!

I also brought back some gardening books, as inspiration for some new plant designs. I have a lovely idea for a new plant-themed series of patterns, but I don’t want to jinx it by revealing it just yet…

And I’m expecting to see the initial layouts for my papercraft book this week – so exciting! I’ll post some pics when it’s all been finalised.

Now, time to get back to work! I’ll post again when I have something new to show you, and in the meantime you can see me on Twitter, or check out my latest tweets in the little widget in the right sidebar –>

I thought I’d try writing a different kind of post today: an insight into my design process, and what happens when things don’t work out as planned.

Remember this picture? This is the orang utan I started crocheting at last spring’s Creativ Festival. My goal was to make a life-sized, realistic baby orang. After the show, I finished both arms and then moved onto the head, and that’s where things started to go wrong…

My first attempt looked like a silly smiling cartoon monkey. My second attempt was much more realistic, but hideously ugly. The more I tried to fix them, the less confidence I had that I would ever be able to complete my orang. Maybe it’s because it was so important to me – I love all the animals that inspire my designs, but the orang utan is one of my all-time favourites. When I conceived this project, I wanted to make something really special just for me – not a simple replicable design, but a real one-of-a-kind art piece.

There didn’t seem to be any point in making the body or legs for my orang project when it didn’t seem like there would ever be a head to go with it, so the pieces have sat in a zip-lock bag in my ‘in progress’ drawer for months, untouched. I often thought about the project, but couldn’t see any way forward.

Yesterday, I went back to basics. I sat down with a sketch book and a dozen reference photos of baby orangs, and spent an hour drawing, redrawing, refining. Looking for the ‘essence of orang utan’ that I had failed to capture to date, instead of thinking of it as a crochet problem. I think I have it: my final sketch crystallized what I needed to do, and then it was almost an afterthought to crochet and sculpt the head. (I won’t share any pics yet… I want it to have a big reveal, after all the work that has gone into this!)

At the Creativ Festival this spring (April 24-26, in Mississauga Ontario), I’ll be giving a talk about my work, called Who’s Who in the Crochet Zoo. Now I’m confident that I will be able to bring my orang utan along – nicely circular when you consider where the project was ‘born’, exactly one year earlier.