Today’s PlanetJune Story comes from Dr Domino Joyce, an evolutionary biologist by day and crocheter by night, who found a novel way to use amigurumi to educate children (and adults) about evolution!

I’ll let Domino explain:

I’m an evolutionary biologist at the University of Hull, UK and I’ve wanted to learn to crochet for ages. Last year, when I was on maternity leave, I taught myself with YouTube videos, and I started making toys while my baby son slept on me. I became a little addicted to it and found some amazing patterns representing the diversity of life, but the PlanetJune site quickly became my favourite place because the animals are so much more realistic than many designs, and the patterns are amazingly clear and well designed.

Every year at Hull University, we have a Science Festival, and I began to formulate a way to combine science communication with my new crochet addiction. I thought I would make a poster containing a timeline of the history of earth, and use the toys to illustrate when particular things evolved. The PlanetJune dinosaur sets proved particularly inspiring for this!

I made a tabletop timeline poster, as well as backdrop posters with links to the patterns, and have made these available (here) for anyone who wants to download and print their own.

The key message I wanted to get across is that evolution has taken place over a timescale so long, it is hard to visualise. The earth is 4.5 billion years old, but most of the life we know about and see today evolved ‘only’ in the last 540 million years or so. There was a very long period of time when not much happened at all!

This weekend (after a lot of crocheting) the festival took place. It was a big success – we were expecting about 1500-2000 visitors, but received almost 5000. I asked the children who visited my stand to place the crochet dinosaurs on the timeline where they thought they should go, and nearly all of them put them right at the beginning of the line, and were amazed when I told them the correct place was much closer to “NOW” than they thought.

I was able to talk them through the history of (some!) life using the various organisms I had made, including a crochet Mary Anning and Charles Darwin representing Homo sapiens. My favourite part used the Emperor Penguin to convey the idea that birds are simply dinosaurs that survived and carried on evolving.

The toys worked really well to draw children and adults in to the stand to find out what it was about, and I think I convinced a few of the adults they should try crocheting, as well as inspiring a few who already crochet to try some of these patterns!

But most of all, I hope I helped both children and adults to understand the history of life on earth a little more clearly.

(Back to me, June, again!)

Based on your account and photos, I’m sure you accomplished that mission, Domino! Congratulations on such a successful event, and for coming up with such a great idea for a fun, interactive learning experience.

One of the things that makes me really proud as a designer of realistic animal and plant patterns is when professional scientists who study the organisms I reproduce in crochet are fans of my work – it’s high praise indeed whenever I hear from botanists, paleontologists, marine biologists (and now evolutionary biologists!) etc who appreciate my designs. And I’m so happy that my patterns could play a part in Domino’s Science Festival exhibit – it’s lovely to think that, even though I’m no longer working in the field of science, I’m still helping in some small way to educate the scientists of the future.

Thank you so much, Domino, for sharing your story with us today 🙂
Please leave Domino a comment if you’ve enjoyed this post!

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!

PS – If you’re feeling inspired to crochet some PlanetJune dinosaurs and penguins too, you can find all the patterns in my shop:

• PlanetJune Dinosaur crochet patterns
• PlanetJune Penguin crochet patterns

Since I published my Baby Sea Turtle pattern two years ago, several people have attached the turtles to afghan squares or blankets showing the babies hatching on a beach and making their way to the sea. It’s such a sweet idea, as the turtles are quite flat, so they work well as an appliquéd element on a blanket or square.

About a week ago, one of these blankets went viral on Facebook and I’ve consequently had dozens of requests for a beach blanket to attach my baby sea turtles to, so I thought I’d modify my eyelet ripple crochet pattern into a ribbed ripple, to depict wavelets moving towards a beach. And here it is: Turtle Beach!

Note: The Baby Sea Turtle pattern is sold separately, here!

You can stitch Baby Sea Turtles to it, or just use it as a play mat or display background for turtles and other small aquatic amigurumi (like my Baby Cephalopods, perhaps!)

This is a Donationware pattern – my ribbed ripple stitch pattern, the basic pattern for a 10″ Turtle Beach square, and general instructions for making a Turtle Beach blanket are free for you to view on my website (links at the end of this post), but the PDF version includes lots of bonuses:

• Full patterns to make 3ft x 4ft Turtle Beach blankets with either 4 or 5 shades of yarn (yellow, white, and 2 or 3 blues)
• The modifications required to turn my Hatching Turtle (from the Baby Sea Turtle Collection pattern) into a Swimming Turtle that looks like the back half of its shell is submerged. (Now included in the Baby Sea Turtle Collection pattern instead.)
• Optional edging instructions to square off the rippled top and bottom edges, so you can use this as a beach-themed square in a larger blanket, or turn it into the front of a cushion cover, for example – and there are lots more applications.
• Any-size modification instructions, so you can make any size afghan square, a baby blanket, or even a huge blanket to fit a king-sized bed!

Both versions include the written stitch pattern, a charted stitch diagram, and suggestions for how to make the beach and sea colouring (and how to arrange the turtles).

You can also use the Ribbed Ripple stitch pattern with any other colourway if you don’t want a beachy blanket – a 2-row repeat in 2 or 3 colours would look amazing too. Here’s a small sample showing an alternate colourway and the bonus edging you’ll get in the PDF version:

I hope you’ll enjoy this pattern and that you’ll share what you’ve made with me, on Ravelry and/or on your favourite social media (tag me @PlanetJune to make sure I see it!)

We’re also running a Turtlemania CAL in the PlanetJune group on Ravelry from now until the end of April, and we’d love it if you’d join in if you’re making PlanetJune turtles, a Turtle Beach blanket, and/or a Wavy Stripes blanket from the Ribbed Ripple pattern!

Go to the free Ribbed Ripple stitch pattern >>

Go to the free Turtle Beach pattern/instructions >>

Go straight to buy the PDF version! >>

Yesterday, I spent the entire day transcribing all my crochet video tutorials so I could add closed captioning to my videos. From now on, if you’re hard of hearing or have any problems understanding my accent, you can turn on the subtitles (it’s the ‘CC’ option on all YouTube videos) and read along as I talk.

An example screenshot of one of my tutorials with CC turned on.

An added bonus is that, now YouTube is owned by Google, non-English speakers can use Google’s auto-translate to get a (reasonable, if not perfect) translation of my videos, too:

‘anneau magique’ = ‘magic ring’ in French! (Note: as far as I can see, auto-translate only works on the non-mobile version of YouTube at time of writing.)

I think adding these captions is a valuable addition to my video tutorials, and I’ll be creating transcripts for all my new videos in future, too. But doing this wasn’t something I’d planned…

Auto-Captions: a Cautionary Tale

Did you know that YouTube now adds automatic closed captioning to most videos? That sounds like a great feature, but it turns out it’s appallingly (and hilariously) inaccurate.

Yesterday, I looked at the auto-captions for my videos for the first time and was truly horrified. They made no sense at all; almost every word was wrong (e.g. it’s ‘loop stitch’, not ‘lipstick’). But, worst of all, they also included some adult words and phrases that often made it sound like I was describing something very different from crochet..!

After working so hard to produce clear, comprehensible video tutorials, to find YouTube had added this comedy subtitling was a big disappointment – anyone who’s tried to watch my videos with the closed captioning turned on must think I’m a complete idiot. (But, this was also an opportunity for me to enhance my videos by adding this feature properly, so it’s not all bad.)

As I was replacing the auto-captions on each video with my new transcripts, I kept a list of the old captions for one phrase that I always say at the start of every video: “this is June from PlanetJune”. It’s a good indication of how poor (and inconsistent) the auto-captioning is. For my 30 video tutorials, YouTube mis-interpreted that same phrase in 15 different ways:

• this is Jen from Panaji
• this is Kim from Planet game
• this is Jim component to
• this is Jim from Planet came
• this is Kim from planet King
• this is Jin from panicking
• this is June from panicking
• this is Kim from panicking

…so I’m sure you can imagine how bad the captions for the remainder of the videos were (although “this is June from panicking” was a pretty accurate description of me when I first discovered the extent of this problem!)

I don’t know if my English accent caused extra problems for the auto-captioning, but, given the results I got with my fairly common/neutral accent I don’t have high hopes that auto-captioning is ever accurate enough to be useful.

Check your Video Captions

If you make YouTube videos, I’d recommend that you check the results of your auto-captions as soon as possible, and see if yours are any better than mine were!

• If there are only a few mistakes, it’s easy to edit the captions to fix them.
• If they’re as bad as mine were but you don’t have time to create proper transcripts at the moment, you can at least turn the auto-captions off for each video, so people won’t laugh at you!
• Or, you can do what I did and replace the auto-captioning on each video with a text file containing a complete and accurate transcript. (This takes time, but it’ll help people to find you in search as well as being useful to your viewers, so I’d say it’s well worth doing.)

How do you do these things? Here are some helpful links from YouTube to get you started:

• How to add subtitles & closed captions
• How to edit or remove captions

Closed captioning my videos wasn’t something I’d ever thought to do, but yet again (as with my mobile-friendly site redesign last year) Google has forced my hand in a way that’s made me improve my offerings. So, um, thanks, Google?

If you’d like to see my tutorials, I have playlists for them in my YouTube channel:

• PlanetJune crochet video tutorials for right-handers
• PlanetJune crochet video tutorials for left-handers

I’m very happy to have accurate and helpful subtitles on all my video tutorials now, and I hope they’ll make my videos an even more useful resource for crocheters. 🙂

I really hope you’ll enjoy my latest crochet design – it makes me smile to see these cheery colourful pansy faces, and I hope they’ll give you a happy boost too! Depending on your climate, pansies can be among the earliest flowering plants in spring, but you don’t even need to wait that long to add colour to your day…

My Pansies pattern includes large and small baskets of realistic pansy plants, together with 4 different styles of pansy flowers, each available to crochet in all the pansy colours, giving you dozens of options!

You can customize the basket contents to mix and match the pansy flowers however you wish. The small basket includes 2 pansy plants, and the large basket has 8, for a riot of glorious colour.

This pattern also includes bonus instructions for making any of the pansy styles into an individual leaf-backed pansy flower (as shown at the start of this post) – perfect as a decorative pin, appliqué, gift topper or ornament.

The word pansy is derived from the French pensée (‘thought’) and there’s no better way to show someone you’re thinking of them than with a cheerful crocheted pansy.

Pattern Details

Don’t be phased by the apparent complexity of this pattern – I’ve put a lot of thought into making it easy and enjoyable for you to make:

• Although the pansy flower is a little more complex than my other flowers, it’s explained with written instructions, stage-by-stage photos, and right- and left-handed stitch diagrams. And once you’ve made a couple, they work up pretty quickly.
• Yes, the baskets have quite a lot of leaves, but I’ve come up with a clever construction method for them so you won’t be crocheting each leaf individually. It’s a lot faster than you’d think from looking at the finished result (shh, don’t tell!)
• The complete pattern includes 16 pages and dozens of photos for constructing the flowers and assembling the pansies in both sizes of basket, so I’ll walk you step-by-step through the whole process – no need to be intimidated. 🙂
• The pages with the crochet instructions for each of the three options (large pansy basket, small pansy basket, pansy pin/appliqué) are listed within the pattern, so, if desired, you can save paper and ink by printing only the pages required for your option, and read the assembly instructions on-screen only.

Launch Discount

Although I always offer discounts for shopping directly from PlanetJune, to spread the joy even further, I’m offering an additional 10% discount for one week only. Just enter code HAPPY at checkout by next Monday, 22nd February 2016, and the extra discount will be applied.

Buy the pattern here in my shop. Or, if you’re not ready to buy just yet, please heart or queue it on Ravelry so you don’t forget about it:

Promise of Spring CAL

And finally, to brighten your cold February days (or possibly your hot and dry days for us southern hemispherers…), join us in the PlanetJune group on Ravelry to crochet pansies and other happy PlanetJune plants and flowers.

This CAL runs from now until the end of March, so you should have plenty of time to make even the most ambitious crocheted floral arrangement. I hope you’ll join us and share in the colourful botanical joy!

I’ve had a bit of a disaster this week: I just discovered that a big online reputation company flagged me as a potential spammer, which has led to lots of automated emails from @planetjune.com addresses being blocked by many email providers before they had a chance to reach your mailbox.

Unsubscribe vs Mark as Spam

I’m very careful with the email addresses entrusted to me and I’d never send unsolicited email or share your email address with anyone else.

The most likely reason I got into this situation is that people who no longer wanted my email newsletter marked it as Spam instead of unsubscribing. I get it – we’re all drowning in email these days! But if you’ve had enough emails from a business you subscribe to, please use the Unsubscribe link in the email. Don’t mark anything as Spam unless it’s email you never requested.

Are You Missing Email?

Now I know about this, I’ve contacted the company and they’ve fixed my reputation, so PlanetJune emails won’t be blocked any more. The remaining problem is that this has been in play since early December, so there are several types of email that may not have got through to you between then and now. These could be important emails, for example if:

• You ordered with PayPal Express Checkout and haven’t received your account password
• You asked my shop for a new password and it never arrived
• You signed up for my mailing list but haven’t received the confirmation email
• You pledged towards a commission but haven’t received the confirmation email

What to do…

If any of the above scenarios apply, here’s how to resolve your problem:

• If you need a password for your PlanetJune account, click here, enter your email address, and my shop will send you a new temporary password. Check your Spam if you don’t see the password within a minute or two. And, once you’ve logged in, go to ‘My Account’ and change your password to something you’ll remember.
• If you signed up for my mailing list but didn’t receive a confirmation email, please click here and sign up again. The confirmation should arrive almost immediately – check your Spam if you don’t see it within a minute or two.
• If you made a pledge towards a design commission but a) haven’t received the confirmation email or b) the pledge doesn’t show on your list of pledges, please make a new pledge here. Your confirmation email should arrive almost immediately – check your Spam if you don’t see it within a minute or two.

Problems?

If you still don’t receive the email you expect, or have any other problems with your interactions with PlanetJune, please feel free to email me directly at any time. If there’s a problem, I want to fix it, and I can’t do that if I don’t know about it!

Thanks for your understanding, and please know that I’m always ready and willing to help if you have any PlanetJune-related problems, now or in the future.

Changing Plans

I’ve spent most of January working on a beautiful new plant-in-a-pot design, which I’d intended to release by today. It’s a big pattern, with lots of options and tips, but when I looked at everything together, although the pattern was great, the design itself wasn’t quite as perfect as I’d like…

I try to spot these things before I’ve completed a 16-page pattern so I don’t have to redo too much work, but that just didn’t happen in this case. The design is very close, but it’ll take a lot of crocheting and re-writing to make the small tweak the design needs to be really special.

Rather than hurry to get the pattern finished, I decided to postpone the release date by 2 weeks, to take the pressure off myself and make sure I’m 100% satisfied with the design before it goes public and am making decisions about what’s best for the final pattern, not what I can manage in the available time.

It’s disappointing to have to change plans, but now I’ve had time to adjust I’m glad I made this decision. As I enter my 10th year(!) of crochet design, it’s becoming even clearer that each new design I add to my pattern catalogue has to be my best work. One standout new design adds far more value to my business in the course of time than I’d get from producing ten mediocre patterns – and there are no shortcuts if you want to end up with something extra-special.

PlanetJune on Instagram

For 2016, I’ve finally joined Instagram!

If you’re on Instagram too:

• See behind-the-scenes snippets of my work and life (like my first IG pics, above!) by following me @PlanetJune
• Show off your pics of the lovely things you’ve made from my patterns by tagging them with the hashtag #planetjune

Hearts & Flowers CAL

Postponing my new pattern release has left us with time to enjoy a quick pre-Valentine’s Day crochet-along – I hope you’ll join in by making beautiful hearts and roses from my free (donationware) patterns…

Love Hearts and Basic Rose are both fast to work up so I hope you’ll have time to join in – even if it’s just to make one tiny Love Heart (5 mins start to finish!)

Both the CAL patterns are available for free, but donations are always very much appreciated (and you’ll get the nicely-formatted PDF file as a thank you for your donation of any size).

Sounds good? Crochet-along with us between now and Feb 14th in the PlanetJune Ravelry group 🙂

Review and Win contest

You’re automatically entered in the next monthly draw every time you write a review for a PlanetJune pattern you’ve enjoyed – and you’ll also be helping future customers make an informed decision about patterns they are considering buying.

It’s time for a big catch-up today, as I didn’t post monthly updates in December or January, so I have 3 winners to draw!

November’s winner is Linda S‘s review of my Sea Otter pattern:

This is the sweetest little guy, and he was fun to make. Before I buying, I compared it to similar patterns and he came out way on top. I recommend this pattern.

December’s winner is Elizabeth L‘s review of my Cactus Collection 1 & 2 patterns:

Everything a pattern should be! Simple and easy to follow with beautiful results! I always had problems with French knots but June’s explanation took care of that.

And finally, January’s winner is Josh C‘s review of my AmiCats Tuxedo pattern (far right in the above pic):

All of June’s pattern’s I’ve tried so far have been well written and they all produce a realistic result, but this cat really impressed me. I’m not sure what amazed me more – the fact that the finished cat body actually includes contours and curves exactly where you’d expect them to be on a real cat (like the hind legs, or the arch in its back), or the method for joining the front legs to the body (no sewing required, you crochet them straight onto the body…and the tops of the legs just disappear into the body, leaving literally no seam at all)

It took me a while to complete but the finished product was 100% worth it.

Congratulations, Linda, Elizabeth and Josh – I’ve emailed you all to find out which pattern you’d each like as your prize!

What’s Next?

Full steam ahead with perfecting my new plant pattern and preparing the Promise of Spring CAL to begin on Feb 15th. After that, I’ll be able to make a start on my last fully-pledged commission – yay!

I’ve been thinking about the ‘perfect’ craft world that we usually see online – endless photos of beautiful finished projects – and how they rarely, if ever, show the whole story. I’m as guilty as anyone else: unless I’m planning a tutorial, I almost never take photos until I finish a project, so you never get to see how many times I re-knit and adjust until I end up with the sweater I had in mind (or something close to it, at least).

And yet, with everything I make, whether that’s a new crochet design or a personal craft project, nothing ever goes entirely to plan! I enjoy the process of making at least as much as I enjoy the finished item, so I don’t see spending some extra time with each project as a problem. But it’s important to remember that failure is a part of learning and growing, and you shouldn’t be upset when something creative doesn’t go as expected – just learn from it and move on.

Burnt Buttons

I thought I’d share a pretty hilarious example of one of my failures with you – remember this purple cardigan I finished knitting a few months ago?

The handmade polymer clay buttons were supposed to be the finishing touch, and I spent ages perfecting a set of 8 lovely 4-hole buttons. Then I put them in the toaster oven and waited. I have no idea what happened – I’ve baked polymer clay dozens of times before, I use an oven thermometer, and I monitor the temperature regularly, so I don’t know what could have gone so badly wrong. And yet, my poor buttons grew and swelled and darkened and turned into…

Chocolate brownies?! With their bubbled glossy surface and rich brown colouring, I seem to have accidentally discovered the formula for perfect replica brownies – but definitely not the formula for perfect buttons for my cardigan!

After this disaster, I almost gave up and abandoned polymer clay forever, but I thought I’d have one quick last try before making such a drastic decision. I quickly cut a new set of buttons, simplified to thinner circles (one sheet of clay, straight out of the pasta machine) with just 2 holes per button, and popped them in the toaster oven. And, this time, they baked exactly as expected:

It’s hard to believe that these two buttons were made from exactly the same materials – the only differences before going in the oven were the thickness (although the ‘brownie’ buttons were much thinner before they were baked/burnt!) and the number of holes. I still don’t know what I did to make such a difference between the two batches of buttons (although I have several theories as to what may have gone wrong the first time), but, luckily, the new buttons are fine, so I just quit while I was ahead and sewed them onto my cardigan!

Unexpected Inspiration

Failure can even be a good thing, provided you don’t let it defeat you. When it comes to my crochet designs, interesting discoveries often come from my failures in the form of techniques or shapes I can adapt for a future design…

One of my failed prototypes for my Meerkat‘s head (above, right) gave me the inspiration for what became my Aliens pattern (below)! I love my cute little alien, but that design would never have happened if I hadn’t seen the potential in the meerkat failure.

Fear of Failure

The fear of failure can be even worse when you’re trying something new. I’ve been wanting to take up painting again for a long time, and I’ve stocked up on paints, brushes, and canvases, but I’ve been too afraid of messing up to even make a start!

I think it’s time to take my own advice: it’s okay to fail. I know I won’t be any good at first – or maybe ever – but I should just paint something and see what happens, shouldn’t I?

Final Thoughts

It’s rare for anyone to show their failures, but we all have them. There’s no chance of success if you don’t even try – and then keep trying, and learning, and improving, until you end up with something you’re happy with.

Nobody is perfect, and (despite what you may think from viewing craft blogs, Pinterest boards and Instagram feeds) many projects don’t go as planned! Some things are beyond our control, but you should never let a crafting mishap stop you from having another go. 🙂

Just before Christmas, Dave spent a week working at one of the big telescopes at Sutherland, 400km from Cape Town. I decided to take a road trip to meet him out there and bring him home for Christmas. I thought you might like to see more of the South African landscape and wildlife, so I documented what I could for you to enjoy too!

The drive was lovely and I saw some amazing animals along the way – baboons, pelicans, blue cranes, lizards, and various birds of prey and brightly-coloured songbirds – but it’s not easy to take photos of moving targets while driving! By the time I’d stopped the car (when I could), the wildlife had run or flown away. In fact, the only animal I managed to photograph en route was a slow-moving baby tortoise…  But the scenery is pretty spectacular too, and I did get some nice wildlife pics once I reached the observatory.

This doesn’t look like a massive road trip on the scale of the size of the whole country, but it goes through farmland, mountains, and semi-desert, and both the scenery and weather change completely as you go.