PlanetJune Blog: Latest News, Patterns and Tutorials

I’ve been waiting for days for the clouds to clear so I have decent lighting for my photos, but it looks like that’s not going to happen any time soon – and can you believe we have a few inches of snow already?! Seems like winter has come early this year.

My giant sea turtle is finished – yay! He is waaay too big to fit inside my light tent, so it’s been quite a challenge to get these photos for you, but here he is in all his massive glory:

You can’t really tell from the pictures, but he’s seriously large: 18″ (46cm) long from nose to tail, with an immense 21″ (54cm) flipper-span! Here’s his pale belly, with subtle pale green hexagonal patterning:

And meeting the standard-sized sea turtle:

Yep, who’d have thought… this sea turtle makes Great A’tuin the world turtle look like a little baby!

He’s made with 2 strands of Bernat Softee Chunky yarn held together, and a size L (8mm!) hook, but aside from that and a few additional colour changes (5 colours instead of 2) he’s made following the AquaAmi Sea Turtle pattern instructions exactly.

Now my only problem is where to keep a giant turtle?! One thing’s for sure – he’s not going to fit on my toy shelves…

It may seem early to some, but I know for a fact that some of you are already preparing for the holiday season. So with that in mind, I’ve created another seasonal set of PocketAmi, with a Christmas theme!

This time around, we have a tiny Snowman, a Christmas Elf, and a Reindeer for your crocheting pleasure. As with all the PocketAmi patterns, they are all under 3″ tall and super quick to crochet. The added bonus of this set is that, by adding a loop of yarn to the back of their heads, you have instant cute tree decorations!

PocketAmi Set 4: Christmas is now available in the PlanetJune shop for the bargain price of $5, and includes the patterns for all 3 seasonal ami.

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!

Happy Halloween! I thought I’d celebrate by showing off some of the wonderful pumpkins that ravelry and flickr users have made from my free Pumpkin crochet pattern:

Aren’t they cute? Credit for these pumpkin pics go to the following ravelers: Yorpy, ines-chan, Calophi, Taya, dr-evi, joliet, Jain, craftygamergrl, ohthatashley, suzette100, Annkari, arpelia, LilGrape, salohlee, leelersinc, ShayeDKnits, BekahJan, sunnydaze, zsyrinx, mickeygurl2. Great job, all!

This post was originally published on my old papercraft site, Folding Trees.

Tea bag folding is a paper craft that originated in Holland, where many tea bags come wrapped individually in paper packets. By cutting each bag down to a square, the bags can be folded and then combined into a geometric shape, just like in 2D modular origami. But don’t let the name ‘tea bag folding’ put you off – you can perform this craft with any small squares of coloured paper. The resulting medallions can be used to decorate handmade greeting cards, embellish your wrapped gifts, or you could try adding a hanging loop (glue the units together first!) to make an unusual Christmas decoration.

In this tutorial, to give you an idea of the techniques, I’ll demonstrate a simple fold pattern and its assembly into a medallion. I’ll also show you an interesting variant on the basic fold, and two ways to combine the variant units to make different medallions.

Introduction

To give a more authentic result, your paper squares should be patterned, and each square should have the same pattern. There are many online resources that provide printable sheets of repeating patterns to cut into squares, and fold diagrams to produce different shapes; Google ‘tea bag folding’ to find more links.

Instructions

You will need 8 squares of paper per medallion. If you’re printing your tea bag papers, cut them into squares, otherwise assemble 8 squares of origami paper. You can use squares of any size; here I’ve used 1.5″ (3.8cm) squares:

Note: As with all origami, this works best if you strongly crease each fold. You can do this with a bone folder, or just by running your thumbnail along the crease of each fold before moving on to the next step.

Basic Unit

Glossary:

• A mountain fold is made by folding the edges away from you (creating a mountain shape).
• A valley fold is made by folding the edges towards you (creating a valley shape).

For each square, place it patterned side up (below, left). Mountain fold in half diagonally (below, right):

Open up and mountain fold along the other diagonal (below, left). Now valley fold the square in half (below, right):

Open up again and, by pushing the edges of paper towards each other at the points marked by the arrows below, you’ll start to fold the square down into a triangle along the creases you’ve just made.

The basic fold is now complete (below, left). Take 2 of your triangles and slot them together so the points are interleaved (below, right):

Continue to add triangles to assemble the shape. They won’t stay together unless you glue them down; you can glue them as you go, or assemble them very carefully and then glue them all together at the end.

Here’s the completed basic medallion:

Variant

For a more interesting variant, when you’ve completed the basic unit, mountain fold each of the two front points of the triangle up to meet the top point. This will leave you with the triangle shape with a diamond shape on top. Interleave the units as before:

By varying the order of assembly, you can create different patterns. In the photo below, the medallion on the left is formed by interleaving one unit above, one unit below, around the circle. The medallion on the right is formed so each unit is half over and half under the neighbouring units:

It’s as simple as that!

I wrote up these basic instructions as a teaching aid for my class last week. I’m sure there are others out there who would like to try crocheting some amigurumi but just don’t know the basic crochet stitches. Well, that’s no longer an obstacle with my clear step by step instructions to guide you through all the basics you need to get started.

Now you have no excuse not to try crochet… So find yourself a 3.5mm crochet hook and some worsted weight yarn, and you’ll soon see how simple and fun crocheting can be!

Continue to:

• Crochet Basics (right-handed)
• Crochet Basics (left-handed)

You probably get the idea by now from all my crochet designs that I’m an animal lover. This post isn’t crochet related, but it’s so lovely I had to share it.

A baby beluga whale has been born at the Vancouver Aquarium and the aquarium have installed a webcam pointed at the tank, so you can see the adorable sight of the mother beluga, Qila, and her baby swimming through the tank!

I’ve embedded the video feed below, but if it doesn’t work or you’d like more info, see the Vancouver Aquarium Beluga Cam.

UPDATED: The feed was slowing my site down to a crawl (oops!) so please click through to see the Vancouver Aquarium Beluga Cam. It’s worth a click!

Isn’t that a wonderful sight?!

If you see an adult beluga swimming past with no baby, don’t worry – that’s probably baby’s grandmother, Aurora. Keep watching, and Qila and her baby will come past shortly. (Oh, and Vancouver is on Pacific Time, so if the webcam is dark when you read this, it’s probably night time for the belugas, so please remember to take another look tomorrow – I promise it’s worth it!)

And don’t they look exactly like my AquaAmi Beluga Whales come to life? I’ve never had the opportunity to see a beluga whale in real life so this webcam is the next best thing for me. Thanks to the Vancouver Aquarium for making it possible for us to catch a rare glimpse of a baby beluga swimming with her mummy!

If I met you at the show yesterday, hello again, and welcome to PlanetJune.com! Don’t forget to check out my crochet tutorials if you need some help with techniques. I’ll be posting the Crochet Basics tutorials from my class notes up here in the next few days too.

I taught my crochet class yesterday at the Creativ Festival – my first experience of trying to teach more than one person at once. And it was a trial by fire: I had 20 students, and most had never crocheted before! Luckily I had prepared some step-by-step photo tutorials to show the basic crochet stitches, which helped a lot, as 20 people can’t all watch my hands at once as I demonstrate. My students were all lovely and very understanding as I ran around the room answering questions and helping where needed. It was a short class – only an hour and a half – so only a few students actually finished their toys in class, but I think by the end everyone understood the techniques well enough to complete their PocketAmi Bunny or Mouse toys (and they know to e-mail me if they have any difficulties)!

I spent the rest of the day at the A Needle Pulling Thread magazine booth (and Carla: thank you again for giving me this opportunity). My table looked similar to last time, but with some improvements (clipboard for mailing list sign-ups, business card holders, and cute postcard sets for sale). Here’s me at my display:

That white rectangle on my shirt is my super-large instructor’s badge

The seasonal corner (bottom left of pic) got a lot of attention. The pumpkins are the perfect size to fit in a hand, so everyone picked them up and gave them a squeeze! I’d sewn the three Halloween PocketAmi to a decorative cardboard base so they wouldn’t fall over or get lost, and that worked well.

Immediately after this photo was taken, just before the show opened to the public, my much-thicker-than-last-time portfolio/catalogue slid off its easel because it was too heavy to balance there. It turned out to be serendipitous though – laying the catalogue down flat on the table encouraged more people to flip through it. My new business card holders and signs did their job perfectly, and I gave out about 150 cards, so I’m hoping for some more business in the coming weeks.

In the (rare) downtime at the booth, I started a new project. I’m doubling my bulky weight yarn and using a huge L hook to make a giant version of my sea turtle. I got as far as making the shell top yesterday. For comparison, here’s a pic of the shell top next to the original sea turtle:

It’s already about 12″ long and that’s without the shell edging or the head and tail, so that’s at least half as large again as the original turtle. I can’t wait to see what the finished giant turtle will look like!

The one disappointment of the day was that I didn’t have a chance to check out all the other booths. There was a whole papercraft supplies area that I didn’t even see (missing out on some new inspiration for Folding Trees), and I’d hoped to get some more needlefelting supplies from the Bears and Bedtime booth. But I did get to meet some alpacas! They seemed unperturbed at spending a whole day in the busy convention centre:

And I treated myself to a set of ergonomic crochet hooks from Eleggant Hooks. Long-time readers will know of my hand pain problems, so I’ll be very interested to see how these work out for me – I’ll report back when I’ve tested them out!

All told, it was a huge success for me, although it was a veeery long day including the drive from Waterloo to Toronto and back. But I’m very happy I went and got to meet so many great people, and I’m already wondering if I should apply to teach again at next spring’s show…