Today’s PlanetJune Story comes from Susan McCarthy from Norfolk MA. I always love to see people using my potted plant crochet patterns in new and creative ways, and Susan’s fabulous multi-tier succulent display definitely fits that bill!

I’ll let Susan explain:

I belong to the Garden Club of Norfolk (Massachusetts) and each month someone signs up to do a display for our town’s library. I decided to crochet a succulent display for the month of June. And for a week in June 2023, the Garden Club and Library cohosted Books in Bloom, where a dozen designers from the Club made floral displays inspired by a book…so my crocheted succulent display got to do double-duty and be part of the show as well.

I crocheted 46 plants for the three-tiered display. The top tier used June’s pattern for the large pot. I then expanded on the pattern to make the two larger pots for the middle and base. I inserted a circle of plastic canvas and a couple of stockings filled with plastic pellets to the bottom pot to keep the piece stable.

Well over a hundred hours of work done here and there over months (with, of course, some power crocheting two weeks before it was due for display!) I got so many compliments on the final piece. And I credited June on the card that sat with the display.

Thank you June for creating such wonderful patterns!

(Back to me, June, again!)

I love this display so much, and that it was part of the Books in Bloom Library show! You can see how much work Susan put into this, and it was definitely worth it to create such an amazing eye-catching project. Isn’t it wonderful?

Susan, I’m not surprised you’ve been showered with compliments about this piece! And thank you so much for sharing your story with us today 🙂

Please leave Susan a comment if you’ve enjoyed this post!

PS – If you’d like to crochet your own succulent display, Susan used the patterns from Succulent Collections 1, 2, 3 and 4 in her display, and you can find all those patterns (and more!) at www.planetjune.com/cacti!

Do you have a PlanetJune Story you’d like to share? I’d love to hear it! Please email your story to june@planetjune.com, together with one or more high quality photos showing what you’ve made from PlanetJune patterns. If I choose your story to feature here on the blog, I’ll send you your choice of pattern from my shop to say thank you!

After finishing my Duck and Goose pattern, I couldn’t resist a little seasonally-appropriate addition to the families, so here’s my new pattern: Ducklings and Goslings!

About the Pattern

My goal for this design was the simplicity of a rubber ducky combined with the realistic shape and markings of real baby ducks and geese. As a result, the assembly is super-simple – you only need to stitch the bill to the head, and the head to the body, and your adorable palm-sized baby bird is finished!

This pattern includes three mix-and-match options. By swapping the duckling and gosling bill shapes and the three different head and body marking options and changing the colours, you can make a wide variety of ducks and geese.

The single colour option is easy to crochet, and if you’re pressed for time you could make a whole flock of ducklings in yellow, brown, grey, black, white etc – fast and totally cute! Or, add in the lifelike markings to make even more adorably realistic babies.

Tip: You can also brush your finished birds (before adding the bills) if you’d like to make fluffy ducklings! (See my Brushed Amigurumi tutorial for full instructions and examples.)

Meet the Ducklings and Goslings!

First up, we have the classic single-colour duckling (or gosling, if you swap the bill!):

Next, the duckling markings, inspired by adorable baby Mallards with their distinctive eye stripe:

And, last but not least, the gosling markings, with a simpler colour pattern inspired by baby Canada Geese:

(While these colourways can also apply to other types of baby ducks and geese, I have an ulterior motive for naming them Mallard and Canada Goose: once I have enough sales of the Duck and Goose crochet pattern to justify making adult Mallard and Canada Goose Expansion Packs for it, these babies will be ready and waiting to greet their parents!)

Links to Buy and Deals

You can buy the Ducklings and Goslings pattern alone, or bundled with the Duck and Goose pattern for a special price.

Note: If you’ve already bought the Duck and Goose pattern, you don’t have to miss out on this deal! Just buy Ducklings and Goslings, then email me with 1) your Ducklings and Goslings order number and 2) the order number (or date) from when you bought Ducks and Geese, and I’ll send you a coupon for $2 off your next order of $5 or more. (You can find your order numbers in ‘My Account’, and the coupon will remain valid for a whole year, so don’t worry if there’s nothing else you want to buy right now!)

Handy Links:

• Duck and Goose Families multipack
• Ducklings and Goslings pattern
• Duck and Goose pattern
• Ducklings and Goslings on Ravelry:
• Duck and Goose on Ravelry:

We’re also just about to start a spring-themed CAL in the PlanetJune groups on Discord and Ravelry, and these ducklings and goslings will fit right in!

Find these spring-themed PlanetJune crochet patterns here >>

Please come and join us and crochet anything PlanetJune that fits the theme: baby animals, spring flowers, Easter eggs, an accessory or home decor in fresh spring colours, etc…

If there are other crochet techniques you’d like me to cover in future videos, please leave a comment below, or email me (june@planetjune.com) with your suggestions!

If you’ve ever struggled to find the perfect eyes for your smaller amigurumi, you’ll love my technique for making tiny yarn eyes. In my latest video, I’ll show you my foolproof method for making a pair of perfectly matched tiny child-safe yarn eyes with a lifelike sparkle.

This technique is an embroidery-free foolproof method for making tiny yarn eyes, spots and dots for amigurumi. It works especially well for amigurumi that are too small for safety eyes. Yarn eyes are a child- and pet-safe alternative to plastic eyes, and this method gives you more control than embroidering French knots, so you can make sure you have a perfectly matched pair of eyes.

L: tiny yarn eyes, R: plastic eyes

My Baby Snake pattern is a perfect use for these tiny eyes – it’s not easy to fit the shafts and backs of plastic eyes into such a tiny head, and the yarn eyes look so bright and lifelike!

Although there’s no actual crocheting in this video, I’ve made right- and left-handed versions anyway, so you can see how I use the needle exactly as you’ll see it when you do it yourself. (I’ve also added text instructions with photos for those of you who prefer to read written instructions.)

Go to the Tiny Yarn Eyes for Amigurumi video tutorial >>

I’m so excited to have a new design to share with you today! I was a little worried that my amigurumi design mojo would be gone forever after pouring everything I had into The Essential Guide to Amigurumi, but, after a little time off after Christmas, it all came flooding back and I’m so happy to be able to present the first new PlanetJune pattern of 2024: Duck and Goose!

Duck and Goose Fun Facts

Ducks and geese are both members of the family Anatidae (together with swans). They have a similar appearance and features, including webbed feet for swimming and waterproof feathers. But look closely and you can see the differences:

• Ducks feed mostly in the water, and have a broad flattened bill adapted for dabbling in the water to find and filter their food (primarily aquatic plants and small invertebrates).
• Geese feed mostly on land and have a strong pointed beak with sharp edges that are used for tearing their food (primarily grass and other vegetation).
• Geese have a much longer, more slender neck than ducks, which lets them easily reach down to the ground to eat grass.
• In real life, you can also tell ducks and geese apart by their relative sizes, as most geese are much larger than most ducks. (But that doesn’t apply to the amigurumi versions!)

About the Pattern

For this design, I concentrated on the distinctive shapes of real ducks and geese, paying close attention to what the two birds have in common and what makes them different, to create a pair of perfectly proportioned waterfowl.

The end result is a lovely low-sew pattern, with very little assembly needed – apart from the beak and feet, there are only two pieces to crochet! The realistic shaping is built right in, so all you need to do is follow the pattern and a beautiful Duck or Goose will magically appear beneath your fingers as you crochet.

Both the duck (pictured above) and goose (pictured below) options are included in the same pattern. You’ll start by choosing whether to make the duck or goose head, neck and bill, and then continue to the body and feet. As always, every step is clearly explained, with photos wherever needed to aid in the assembly.

Buy Now

Ready to get started? Pick up the Duck and Goose crochet pattern from my shop right now.

Or, if you’re not ready to make one just yet, add them to your Ravelry queue or favourites so you don’t forget:

More Ducks and Geese..?

There’s lots of scope for me to design Expansion Packs for this pattern that would let you make specific varieties of distinctly coloured ducks and geese… Would you like a Mallard pattern? Or maybe a Canada Goose? If this pattern sells well I’d love to expand the collection with some expansion packs for different ducks and geese. (Please leave your requests in the comments so I’ll know what you want me to make next!)

I can’t wait to see your ducks and geese – please share them in the PlanetJune Community groups (it’ll be like a waterfowl CAL!)

I’m so happy with these sweet and shapely birds, and I hope you’ll love this pattern as much as I do. 🙂

Throughout 2023, over 800 people from all over the world crocheted along with me to create vibrantly striped Temperature Snakes, with one round of the body crocheted per day in a colour that represented the day’s temperature wherever they live. We’ve waited and watched all year long as the snakes grew in length and became more and more colourful, and now they’re finally finished!

Enter the Temperature Snake Gallery >>

I’ve set up this CAL gallery to showcase and celebrate our year-long crochet journey. You can view all the snakes together, or click into each project to see more about the snake and where it came from.

You’ll see snakes that represent daily highs and daily lows, southern hemisphere snakes whose colours run hot-cold-hot instead of cold-hot-cold, birth year snakes, monthly short snakes, book log snakes, and more – and each one is totally unique, using custom colour palettes and localized data.

Every snake is a gloriously colourful personal record of the year, and I do recommend you immerse yourself in the gallery by looking through all the full-size photos. With so many colours in each project, you can’t get the full effect by looking at a tiny thumbnail!

At the time I write this, 53 snakes have been submitted to the gallery already (congratulations to those who managed to stick with it all year long and complete their snake on time!) and I’m sure we’ll see dozens more snakes being added to the gallery over the coming weeks and months. I’m looking forward to watching the gallery grow and the number of snakes and countries represented continuing to increase.

• If you participated in the CAL and haven’t submitted your snake to the gallery yet, please do (look for the ‘Submit Your Snake!’ section at the top of the gallery page).
• If life got in the way last year and you haven’t completed your snake yet, that’s okay! The gallery will remain open for submissions indefinitely, so there’s no hurry – we’ll welcome your snake into the gallery whenever you complete it. 🙂
• And, if you didn’t make a snake last year, how about making one for 2024? The complete Temperature Snake crochet pattern and workbook are now available, so you can start crocheting at any time!

Enjoy the Temperature Snake Gallery – it’s the beautiful and impressive culmination of a super-fun and engaged year-long CAL. Thank you to everyone who participated, and I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did!

The third annual PlanetJune Reindeer Games crochet-along has just wrapped up, and it was a huge success! (The Reindeer Games is a relaxed end-of-year CAL where you can participate by crocheting projects from any PlanetJune patterns or any of my books.)

For 2023, I changed the way the CAL runs so it’s not limited to Ravelry any more. Over the 2 month CAL, we had 60 projects submitted through the PJ Ravelry group and an additional 50 projects from the PJ Discord group, making a total of 110 completed projects:

Aren’t they great? All the projects, together with the CAL statistics, are on display in the brand new Reindeer Games 2023 Gallery, including credits for all the participants and all the (virtual) medals they won for their achievements!

The next Reindeer Games will start on November 1, 2024, so look out for my announcement next October if you’d like to take part in the 2024 CAL (or sign up for my monthly newsletter now so I can send you a reminder!)

I’m really happy with this new more inclusive direction for the Reindeer Games, and I’m already planning more improvements for next year, including a submission form so you can submit your projects to the gallery even if you’re not part of our Rav/Discord groups. (Do let me know if you have any other suggestions – I’m always happy to make things better for all of us!)

Congratulations to everyone who participated in the 2023 Reindeer Games, and a huge thanks to all of you who make the PlanetJune community such a friendly, welcoming environment. It’s a pleasure to be a part of it and to get to know you all – and to see the beautiful creations you make from my patterns 🙂

Writing my Year in Review post every year helps me to see what I’ve accomplished, think about what I’ve learnt, and decide what I’d like to do differently in the following year.

2023 has been a unique year for me. I usually start these reports with a summary of all the new crochet patterns, tutorials and craft projects I’ve completed over the year, but I had two major achievements this year, and these basically tell the entire story of my year, with little time remaining for anything else.

My biggest accomplishment was to write and publish my comprehensive amigurumi reference book, The Essential Guide to Amigurumi, without sacrificing any of the quality you’d expect from the best traditionally-published crochet books. (As a bonus achievement, the right-handed version became the top new release in the Stuffed Animal Crafts and Crafts and Hobbies Reference categories on Amazon – yay!)

Secondly, I ran the hugely popular PlanetJune Temperature Snake crochet-along with over 800 participants, and collected all the CAL materials and tips together into a complete pattern and detailed accompanying workbook at the end of the year so everyone can make temperature snakes for 2024 and beyond.

Aside from those major goals, I published the Seafoam & Edging Expansion Pack for my Turtle Beach blanket, I managed to find time for one tiny (literally) new pattern with my Baby Snake design which I then adapted to add a rainbow ombre colourway, and made a couple of snake-related tutorials to accompany the CAL.

Business Report

This year I’ve been working on making the PlanetJune community more platform-agnostic, so I can meet you wherever you are. The Temperature Snake CAL was a good example of this, with participants on Discord, Ravelry, Facebook, Instagram, and email.

I built and coded custom galleries for both the Temperature Snake CAL and the annual end-of-year Reindeer Games CAL, to streamline and automate the back-end processes and make the galleries available to everyone, no matter where they participate in the crochet-alongs.

I updated the My Patterns page in your PlanetJune account, so you can see all your past PJ pattern purchases at a glance, and review and re-download them directly without clicking back into the order.

And I made some progress on other behind-the-scenes tech updates to PlanetJune, but that’s always an ongoing process. One of the downsides of being my own web developer and tech support team is that there’s only so much time I can devote to the tech side of things, but I anticipate that will be easier in future now I have an AI assistant to speed up my coding. 😉

Personal Report

We’ve been dealing with an unexpected change in family circumstances this year. And my sweet pup Maggie had dental surgery and then a bigger surgery for removal of a tumour. She needed my constant supervision while she recuperated, to keep her from tearing her stitches – you can’t explain to a dog that all stairs are off-limits! – but it was worth it, as she’s bounced back and is now as happy and active as ever.

Good news for my own health too: I may have avoided another knee surgery! Ten months of physiotherapy has strengthened the muscles around my unstable knee to compensate for the damaged ligament, and my knee feels stronger than it has in many years.

Crafting

I didn’t have any energy or brainspace left for much other crafting this year – definitely not a situation I’d like to repeat in future – but I did get to use my crafting superpower for good. Maggie’s massive surgical incision (from neck to knee, poor pup!) needed to be loosely covered while she healed, but her leg couldn’t be bent enough to get it into a normal T-shirt, so I made her a ‘hospital gown’: a custom t-shirt with ribbon ties down the back.

And I surprised myself by discovering an unexpected creative outlet: vegetable gardening. I’ve never been successful with growing plants (there’s a reason all my houseplants are crocheted!) but I cultivated a new experimental attitude with low expectations and it paid off.

We ate delicious garden-fresh vegetables every day for over 3 months, and, while not everything I tried was a resounding success, it was a joy to spend time in the garden every day enjoying the fresh air, watching the birds and butterflies, and observing how my plants were growing.

And the vegetables led to another new ‘craft’: canning! Now I have enough pickles, chutneys, preserves and relishes to last me until the next growing season.

There’s nothing like eating a burger in a fresh-from-the-oven bun, topped with homemade relish and home-grown lettuce and tomato, with just-picked green beans on the side. It’s a different kind of crafting, but baking bread and growing food have now become part of the crafty life that I love.

Looking Back

When I made the decision to devote this year to writing and publishing my magnum opus on amigurumi, I knew it would be an epic challenge to produce a top-quality book from scratch with no assistance, but it proved to be an even larger task than I’d anticipated.

I’d originally planned so much more for the year – new seasonal PlanetJune patterns for fall and winter, and a crochet beginner’s video tutorial series and fun stop-motion video trailer to accompany the book release. But life had other ideas: between Maggie’s surgery and recovery, the physical limitations from my chronic fatigue condition, and personal challenges, by the end of summer I was three months behind the schedule I’d set myself for the book at the start of the year.

If I was going to bring my book into the world, I had to keep my eyes on the prize and drop all the non-essential side projects from this year, leaving me with just three projects:

• Keeping PlanetJune running (customer support takes the majority of my time there)
• Managing the unexpectedly large CAL for my Temperature Snake design (customer and community support, creating the monthly roundup collages, plus my own participation with two crocheted snakes to keep up to date)
• Creating the book of my dreams (no small task: writing, editing, designing, photographing, layout, publishing, and more, with no compromises on quality anywhere in the entire process)

And, although I may have pushed myself beyond my limits to do this, I ended up making up two of the three lost months and publishing the book only a month later than I’d originally hoped, and within my overall goal of publishing in time for Christmas. I’m trying not to shame myself for having to drop all my other plans for the year – I couldn’t possibly have worked any harder than I did, my priority was to put everything I had into making this book the best it could be, and that’s exactly what I did. That’s a real and long-lasting achievement, and I’d say it was a year well spent.

Looking Forward

For 2023, one of my more nebulous goals for PlanetJune was to imagine “what would it look like if it was easy?” I’ve spent a lot of my time over the years pushing through and struggling with my energy limitations, and I don’t want to live my life like that any more.

I’ve been attempting to move in this direction for several years, but there’s always been just one more thing I need to get through before I can slow down… And then there’s the next one more thing, and the next… I’ve been determined that bringing my legacy book into the world would be the last of these, and now it’s time to find an actual balance where I can enjoy my life, and have PlanetJune be a part of that.

Writing this book has shown me a) what not-easy can look like, and b) that my business is at such a mature stage that it can survive for essentially a whole year without me doing anything except customer support. And if that’s true, imagine how well things could go in future if I add to that baseline by concentrating on following my curiosity and bringing the things I want to make into the world, and giving myself permission to minimise the things that drain me…

For 2024, I’m looking forward to striking out in this new direction. After a year with very little pattern designing, I’m itching to get back into it – I’ve been keeping lists of ideas that I didn’t have time to work on, so I have no shortage of inspiration. I love bringing nature to life in amigurumi, and I’m so excited to get back into it!

But first, rest. 2023 was too much for too long, but I really needed to complete The Essential Guide to Amigurumi and not have it be one of those passion projects that goes on for years and is never quite ready to go out into the world. And now, it’s published! I’ve done what I set out to do. I can finally hit pause after a year-long push, so I’m going to take a month off to reset and try to find a healthy rhythm and remember how to relax (I seem to have forgotten how, after pushing through for so long…)

I’ve been thinking of this point in time as a semi-retirement, where I’m retiring from the mentality of hustle and business growth, but not from creating new designs and allowing PlanetJune to support me financially. I think this could be my answer to “what would it look like if it was easy?”

I don’t have the energy or desire to reach for capitalist goals or to craft persuasive social media marketing campaigns, and I don’t want to waste my energy on those things. I need to trust that the people who enjoy my work will continue to find, enjoy and share it, genuinely and authentically, and that will be enough. I can imagine the simpler life I want, filled with creative projects, rest, nature, family, friends and online community, and peace.

(If that sounds good to you too, I warmly invite you to join the PlanetJune community on Discord. It’s a cozy online space where we chat about topics like pets, food, gardening and books as well as crochet and crafting!)

2024 Wishes

Last year, as I worked towards my ambitious publishing goal, I wished to be grounded, steady, and focused: to move forwards, one step at a time, without getting overwhelmed, sidetracked or discouraged. I really needed all those things in 2023 to keep me going all year long, but now that era has ended and it’s time to begin a new one. I don’t know exactly what that will look like yet, but I’m looking forward to finding out!

For 2024, I wish for a simpler, more serene life: for making time for what really matters, and for leaving behind the things that don’t.

I wish the same for you, and for a happy, healthy and harmonious 2024. Happy New Year!

After an amazing year-long CAL, with colourful snakes being crocheted all over the world, I’m delighted to announce that the Temperature Snake instructions are now available as a stand-alone crochet pattern and workbook. Pick up the pattern now, and crochet your own Temperature Snake in 2024!

Temperature Snake is an amigurumi-style riff on the temperature blanket/scarf, where you crochet one row per day to represent the maximum temperature that day. The Temperature Snake crochet pattern includes all the crochet instructions needed to crochet a snake in your choice of two sizes (Large and Small) and three different lengths (Daily, Every-Other-Day and Weekly).

The accompanying Temperature Snake workbook is included at no extra cost. This 25-page ebook includes all the information you need to figure out your colours and calculate the temperature range for your location, suggestions for colour palettes, and printable worksheets (that are also fillable digital forms, if you prefer) so you can log your temperatures and colours over the year.

Work at your own pace, mark the progress of the coming year or commemorate a special year from the past (birth year snakes for children have proven very popular, and kids adore playing with these fantastically long snakes). With just a single round of stitches per day, Temperature Snakes have a much lower time commitment than temperature blankets, so you’ll be much more likely to complete your daily project!

Here are just a few examples of the snakes that have been made during the CAL this year, so you can see how easy it is to customize your snake to any colour palette you prefer. Details for all these variations are included in the workbook:

Credits, clockwise from top left: Dot, PsychoGryphon, CrochetChrisie, jukatca, Mouzly

(Temperature Snake CALers: your multi-part CAL pattern and worksheets have been replaced by the final version of the pattern and workbook, and you can download them at any time from your PlanetJune account!)

And, although the official CAL is wrapping up now, we’ll keep the Temperature Snake threads going in the PlanetJune groups on Discord and Ravelry indefinitely, so please come and join us in either group if you want to show off your progress on your 2024 (and beyond…) snake, ask for advice on temperature or colour selections, and get some encouragement from the friendly PJ community.

So, what do you think: are you in for crocheting a unique and gloriously colourful snake throughout 2024? Now is the perfect time to grab the Temperature Snake pattern, so you can start choosing your colours and be ready to crochet your first stripe on January 1st!