After I completed my Orca pattern, my designing brain felt a bit tired – all those colour changes make for a fabulous-looking whale, but if you think it’s a bit fiddly crocheting the colour changes, try designing them at the same time – it’s 10 times more difficult, and quite a brain-bender to get size, shape and colour all working together at once! So, before I jumped into the next commission (Red Panda – awww!) I needed a little palate cleanser: a design with no colour changes, so I could concentrate on my favourite part: the shaping.

I wanted to make something truly original, and I’ve been watching Once Upon a Time so I had fairy tales on the brain. I thought a magic lamp would make a fun toy for kids wanting to play Aladdin and the Genie, and an elegant decorative piece for anyone else! So I set out to create a beautifully-shaped life-sized magic lamp, and here’s the result:

Fun Fact time: I’d always wondered why Aladdin’s magic lamp is called a ‘lamp’ when it really looks more like a metal teapot. In case you’re wondering too, this is an ancient type of oil lamp. The oil was poured in through the lid at the top, and a wick inserted through the nozzle (that’s the bit that’d be the spout if it were a teapot). The oil is drawn up through the wick and the flame burns at the tip of the nozzle when you light it. So there you go!

I’ve designed a decorative raised diamond pattern for the lid and base of the lamp (and I’ve developed a new technique for creating these details without leaving big spaces around the taller stitches that will gape when the pieces are stuffed). I think they add something special to the design; I hope you agree!

I spent a happy evening making the paper gemstones for these photos 🙂

These details are slightly trickier than your standard “all single crochet, all the time” amigurumi, but the additional crochet stitches are fully explained, and I’ve documented the entire process of creating the diamonds with step by step photos, for both right- and left-handers (in separate appendices, so you can save ink by printing only the page you need, or neither!)

But if you’re still daunted by the diamonds, I’ve also given an option in the pattern for a simplified lid and base. The undecorated pieces omit the diamonds, but still have exactly the same shaping as the standard lid and base, so your lamp will still look elegant and shapely.

I designed this lamp while I was stuck with no internet for 2 weeks last month. As I crocheted it, I wished that my internet connection would be restored, and lo! it was! Maybe your Magic Lamp will grant your wishes too… While I can’t promise that, it will, at the very least, be something interesting and different to crochet 😀

If you’d like to make a lamp of your own, you can find the Magic Lamp crochet pattern in my shop right now! If you’re not ready to get started, how about a little ravelry love? Click to favourite or queue my Magic Lamp design:

So tell me: do you like my magic lamp design? I really hope you do! It’s always nerve-wracking to come up with something so unusual – I really can’t predict ahead of time if it’ll be wildly successful or a massive flop…

You may remember this finger-crocheted infinity scarf I made as part of my ruffle yarn review:

Finger crocheted cowl (12 wraps of giant chain stitches)

Although I made it just for fun, I quite liked the result, and almost wanted to wear it. Wrapping an ultra-skinny scarf 12 times around my neck felt a bit stupid though, so I unravelled it and came up with another fun use for the yarn: I used my own crocheted i-cord tutorial (which, incidentally, was my first ever video tutorial!) to make a finger-crocheted i-cord scarf:

I-cord infinity scarf (4 chunky wraps of i-cord)

The great thing about i-cord is it makes a round braid instead of a flat chain – it’s thicker and stronger than a chain. For knitters, you can just knit i-cord on dpns, but, if you don’t knit, you might like to try crocheting an i-cord too. There are lots of things you can use i-cord for: in amigurumi-making, as a trim, to make drawstrings or tiebacks, as bag handles, to coil into a mat, etc, etc…

It was easy to make my i-cord scarf – I used my index finger as a giant crochet hook and otherwise followed my tutorial exactly. And the colour changes of the yarn worked out well: by coincidence, they matched up almost perfectly with the length of one row, so each row is a different colour:

My finger is the ‘hook’ – I’m left-handed, remember!

My finger was a bit tired after finger-crocheting the entire skein of yarn into i-cord, but I’m happy with the resulting scarf. As each row of i-cord is essentially 3 chains arranged together into a circle, it reduced the length of my scarf from 12 skinny wraps around my neck to 4 chunky ones. It was fun to make, and who knows, I may even wear this version out of the house…

It’s all go for me at the moment: we have to renew our visas so we can stay in South Africa, and we’re applying for permanent residency too. As much as I’d like PlanetJune to be my top priority at all times, I have to renew my passport from abroad, get police clearances from various countries, get X-rays and medical reports, liaise with a lawyer, and all the rest of the rigamarole that goes along with immigration stuff. That’s all quite stressful and time-consuming – bureaucracy here is never fast, cheap or easy – but I have to believe it will, eventually, all get sorted out.

As a result, you may notice I’m also a little quieter on social media at the moment – I don’t want to be that person who tweets about every trial and tribulation, so that means there may be days/weeks where I have nothing to say. If I’m quiet, just assume I’m still working hard, dividing my time between my business and all this other stuff, and inching closer to the point where this new stress is nothing more than a memory and I’m free to devote 100% of my attention to PlanetJune again!

Review and Win contest

March’s ‘Review and Win’ winner is Susan S, with her review of my Sea Otter:

Made the sea otter and his clam shells recently, and everyone who sees him is amazed. Has far more personality and is more “realistic” than other sea otter patterns I considered. The pattern is clear and easy to follow, and contains excellent tips.

Congrats Susan – I’ll email you to find out which pattern you’d like as your prize 🙂

Forgotten Gems CAL

Every month, in my monthly newsletter, I give a discount code for a ‘Forgotten Gem’ of a pattern – one that, for some reason, hasn’t enjoyed as much popularity as it deserves. All 17 of the previously featured Forgotten Gems patterns are included in the April crochet-along, so there’s a lot of variety including both amigurumi and accessories:

From the chatter in the CAL thread, it seems like the Chunky Elegance Rug Trio and Aardvark patterns are going to be popular CAL choices this month! If you’d like to join in too, we’d love to welcome you in the PlanetJune group on Ravelry.

When you unravel something you’ve crocheted, the yarn looks kinked up and squashed. Re-using this yarn can leave your crocheting looking noticeably different from starting over with fresh yarn. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to refresh the yarn and return it to its unused state so you don’t have to waste it or put up with the re-used appearance? Guess what: there is!

Can you turn ‘stressed’ yarn back into ‘relaxed’ yarn? Yes!

I first read about this technique at TECHknitting but I wasn’t really convinced it’d work on acrylic (although I really hoped it would), so I decided to put it to the test with the yarn recovered from one of my prototype pandas.

(You may be wondering ‘why bother?’ The nicer acrylic yarns are actually quite expensive, and, if you’re a crochet addict, the cost of yarn soon mounts up; if there’s an easy way to save money, why not take it? But, for me, the real reason is availability – now I have to import all my amigurumi acrylics from the US, they’re like gold dust to me, and I hoard every metre! Making 3 prototype pandas took a whole skein of white Red Heart Soft, and that’s not something I can easily replace. Reclaiming the yarn so I can use it to design another amigurumi would be ideal, but not if it’s going to look messy and obviously re-used.)

A 65m length of kinked up acrylic yarn reclaimed from a prototype panda.

Steam-relaxing

You can steam yarn with a clothes steamer or ordinary steam iron, and it will magically relax, de-kinking and fluffing itself back up! And yes, as I discovered, you can even do this with acrylic yarn – you can see my results in the photos below.

Note: to reclaim an entire skein of yarn, it’s probably easier if you wind it into a hank (a large loop), soak it, and let it dry (for more details on this method, see Webs’ article: How to Recycle Yarn). But for the yarn length recovered from frogging amigurumi or other small projects, steaming is simpler and faster.

Steam-relaxing yarn really is like magic: the yarn wriggles about as it relaxes and it looks quite eerie, like a pile of snakes – watch TECHknitter’s video to see exactly what I mean – but soon the yarn will turn from a kinked tangle into strands of fluffy yarn spaghetti.

My iron doesn’t have a ‘shot of steam’ feature, so it took a fair while to steam the entire 65m pile you see above, but the method really does work. I didn’t touch the yarn at all between these two photos – this is how it moved, by itself, in reaction to the steam:

Before (left) and after (right) comparison of a small section – you can see that the yarn has de-kinked and untwisted itself.

Pre-steamed (left) and post-steamed sections of my big pile of yarn.

Top Tips

Learn from my experience!

• It’s much more effective if you spread the yarn out so you’re only steaming one layer at once, and work over a small area.
• Watch to see when the yarn stops wriggling about when the steam touches it – that’s when it’s fully relaxed and time to move on.
• For acrylics in particular, it’s critical that you don’t ever let the iron touch the yarn. Sit so you’re at eye level with your ironing board, then you won’t have to bend to see what’s going on, and you’ll be able to keep an inch between your yarn and the iron (you do need to keep it close though, so the steam is most effective).
• If you have the option to avoid it, don’t start with a big tangle of yarn (as shown in my photos) – once it’s de-kinked, you’ll still have to untangle it and wind it. I’d recommend you wind the yarn into a ball as you unravel your work, then unwind a couple of metres at a time and lay it in rows along the ironing board. Steam-relax that length of yarn, then wind it immediately into a new ball before pulling out the next kinked length. (Once it’s all relaxed, you can re-wind the yarn into a neater ball if you like.)

The 65m pile of yarn, post-relaxation. (Don’t leave it in a pile like I did here!)

I’m almost tempted to buy a handheld clothes steamer now, after seeing how effective this method is. And, as an added bonus, the yarn goes from feeling quite hard when it’s kinked up and squashed, to lovely and soft and bouncy again – it really does seem as good as new!

After winding it into a centre-pull ball it’s practically indistinguishable from new yarn and ready to use for another amigurumi design!

Steam-relaxing is a bit of a niche technique, but if you frog a project and want to reclaim the yarn, I highly recommend it. You’ll save money, you can re-use the yarn so it’s not wasted, and I promise you’ll have fun watching the yarn wriggle about – what’s not to like?

This month we celebrated the return of spring, and Easter for those who observe it, with a special prize CAL featuring all my spring-themed designs. There were so many beautiful entries – looking through all these bunnies and flowers certainly make me feel springlike (even though it’s autumn here)! I participated myself with a new version of an old pattern (Fuzzy Chicks) and a brand new design (Shamrocks):

Now, roundup time! (And don’t forget to keep reading to the end for the April CAL details…)

It’s time to release another commissioned design!

The Orca, or Killer Whale, was a design challenge I was looking forward to – the distinctive black and white markings weren’t going to be easy to replicate. Biased (slanting) stitches just wouldn’t cut it with this design, and neither would zig-zag colour changes, so I’ve spent weeks swatching to refine and improve my colour changing techniques to give smooth, symmetrical colour changes over practically the entire length of the orca’s body. Here’s the result:

I have to state right now that this is definitely an intermediate-level pattern: although it is worked in pure amigurumi-style (it uses only single crochet stitches with increases and decreases), it includes a lot of colour changing to create the beautiful smooth killer whale markings down the entire underside of the body. So, while it isn’t difficult in terms of crochet stitches, it is vital that you pay close attention to the pattern in every round that includes a colour change, and make the increases and decreases in the correct places, otherwise the colour pattern will shift. This is a pattern that requires concentration!

While we’re looking at details, I’m also debuting a new technique that makes a perfect whale tail – this one is really quite magical, and took me 5 attempts to perfect, but, if you just follow the pattern carefully, it’s easy to replicate this amazing shape.

If you’re up for the challenge, I think you’ll find this pattern is worth it – the end result has a level of detail in colour and shaping that makes it a truly special amigurumi. Plus, I think this orca is really cute; she’s definitely one of the nice fish-eating killer whales, not the scary seal-eating kind…

I’d like to thank everyone who commissioned this design – thank you for trusting me to do justice to something so complex! I hope you’re happy with the result and you’ll enjoy making your own spectacular orcas.

How about a little ravelry love? Click to favourite or queue my Orca design:

And, if you didn’t get in on the commissioning action but you’re ready to get orca-making, you can pick up the orca (killer whale) crochet pattern from my shop right now!

(The next design that was commissioned is the Red Panda, and I’ll be collecting the pledge monies shortly. I can’t wait to get started on that one; red pandas are adorable…)

As I told you in my wet blocking tutorial, children’s play mats make an inexpensive and easy to find alternative to dedicated blocking mats. BUT, I’ve discovered a problem that you need to know about if you use these mats – please read this and learn from my experience!

I’ve blocked all kinds of lace with these mats before with no problems, but my crocheted bamboo cardigan was a different story. My laceweight items felt practically dry by the time I pinned them to the mats, but thicker yarn retains much more moisture, so, even after rolling my cardigan in a towel to squeeze out as much excess moisture as possible, it still felt heavy and noticeably damp to the touch. It was still damp 24 hours later, and when I flipped it over so the underside could dry better, I was horrified to find areas of my beautiful cream cardigan were now bright, shocking pink.

I don’t have a photo, as my priority was trying to fix the disaster, not documenting it. Luckily, my story ended well; I’m not sure if it was because the yarn was still damp when I spotted the problem, or if the pink dye isn’t permanent, but after a few soaks in Soak wash, with some delicate but persistent agitation by hand in the sink, all the pink colour came out of my cardigan (phew). But you don’t want to take a chance that your mats may permanently dye your handiwork!

Looking back, I should have suspected that there may be a problem with colour transfer from the pink blocks – if you look at this photo from my blocking tutorial, you can see that some of the bright pink colour from a different mat has transferred onto the lower yellow block, at the right-hand side:

My cream cardigan also had this pink colour transfer before I managed to soak it all out!

Foam Mat Colour Transfer Experiment

Although I assumed this colour came from the bright pink coloured blocks – the same colour as the pink stain – to be safe, I decided to conduct an experiment to figure out which of the blocks are the culprits. (I’m very glad I did, because the results surprised me!)

Method

1. Select enough blocks to have a sample of each foam colour: orange, yellow, green, blue-green, blue, purple, light pink, dark pink. (I also tested a solid purple mat I bought from a different source.)
2. Lay a piece of paper kitchen towel over each colour of foam. Spray all the blocks with water until the paper towel squares are completely saturated.
3. Leave overnight to dry.

The setup for my experiment – wet paper towel squares on a sample of every foam colour

When the paper towel was completely dry, I numbered each piece as I removed it, so I could compare them with my reference layout photo (top row L-R: samples 1-6; bottom row L-R: samples 7-10).

Results

• Samples 1 and 2 (orange and blue-green) were clear.
• Samples 3 and 4 (dark pink and green) were stained in only the dark pink areas.
• Samples 5 and 6 (blue and yellow) were clear.
• Samples 7 and 8 (light pink and orange) were stained in only the light pink areas.
• Sample 9 (purple and blue) was stained in only the purple areas.
• Sample 10 (all purple) was stained all over.

Example of my results:

Sample 8 (top right in this photo) is mostly over the light pink foam, except the lower left corner which is over the orange O.

Sample 8 clearly shows that colour has transferred from the background pink foam, but not from the orange O (dotted line added for clarity).

Conclusions
My samples clearly show that pink dye leaches out of light pink, dark pink, and purple foam when wet. The colour transfer seems to be equal between all these colours. All the other foam colours (orange, yellow, green, blue-green, and blue) appear to be colour-fast when wet.

This surprised me – I thought that only dark pink would be the problem, and possibly the light pink. I never even considered that purple foam might also leave pink stains, and equally badly as the over-saturated bright pink blocks! Note: My set didn’t include any red blocks, but I suspect they would suffer from the same problem. UPDATE: see the end of this post.

My Recommendations

If you haven’t bought foam mats yet, you may prefer to look for some that avoid the problem pinks and purples (and, probably, reds). I’ve seen all-grey sets sold as utility mats, and individual coloured blocks sold at dollar stores. Grey, blue, green, yellow and orange should all be safe.

If you already own foam mats, I’d recommend that you replicate my simple kitchen towel experiment – it’s easy to do, and then you’ll know for sure, one way or the other. If you do have the problem, you have some options to get around it:

Prevention Option 1: Only use the blocks with ‘safe’ colours that do not contain pink (safe: orange, yellow, blue, blue-green, green). Do not use light pink, dark pink or purple. Note: If your mats are different colours or types, test them to see which of your colours are affected.

Prevention Option 2: Lay out an old towel over your blocks, so any colour will transfer to the towel, not your precious handiwork. You can pin straight through the towel and into the foam.

If there was any colour transfer when I blocked this cardigan (below), it doesn’t show against the dark grey yarn. Look at all the blocks that could have stained my yarn pink!

Arrows mark ‘dangerous’ colours: light pink, dark pink, and purple.

Below, you can see the second blocking for my miraculously-unscathed bamboo cardigan – now safely protected from any pink transfer by the towel. The underside of the towel was stained pink after this, but it all came out in the wash. (And, in case you’re wondering, the plastic containers at the corners of the towel are filled with water – I used them as weights to stop the towel from blowing away while I dried the cardigan outside!)

Cardigan protected from colour transfer by a towel on top of the foam mats.

If you’re blocking lightweight yarn and you roll it in a towel before blocking so it feels almost dry when you lay it out to block, you shouldn’t have a problem with colour transfer, but you may wish to err on the side of caution – my results may not always apply. For anything that still feels damp/heavy after a towel squeeze, you should definitely be careful of potential colour transfer, and I’d recommend you test your mats and/or use one of the prevention options above, especially if you’re using light-coloured yarn. Why take the risk?

UPDATE: Thanks to Andrea Giattini (@SpringSplndr) for this update! Andrea has a set of 8 of the larger 2ft square foam mats that come in red, yellow, green and blue, and are sold for use in garages, playrooms etc. She has been using them for 3 years and had never noticed any transfer.

Photo courtesy of Andrea Giattini

Andrea kindly agreed to try my test on her mats. She saturated white paper towels with water and left them to dry in the sun, as you can see above. She reports no colour transfer from any of these mats (even the red one, which I was most concerned about).

It appears that these red/yellow/blue/green mats are more colourfast than the sets that include purples, pinks, etc, which can bleed pink dye. However, I still advise caution – different brands may use different dyes, and manufacturing processes may change with time, so, for your own peace of mind, I’d still suggest you try the test on your mats too, just to be safe.

(If you’re not interested in reading this whole review, let me just mention now that I’ve added lots of exciting new design options to the Commissions List, so please click through to the list if you’d like to see what’s new, and maybe pledge towards one or more!)

It’s been a whole year since I launched my commissions model. In that time, I’ve designed 7 new patterns through this process, with the 8th almost completed. My Orca would have also been finished by now if my internet cable hadn’t been severed two weeks ago, making my life infinitely more difficult – I’m very relieved to be back online and back in action again today!

The good news: I have so many ideas for new designs that I need some way to choose which to make first, and the commissions system is working as a useful tool to see which designs may be popular and which definitely aren’t worth my time to create at present. (It’s like a vote, except that you can pay for extra votes if you have a strong opinion.)

The current situation: Right now, I’m in the wonderful, if somewhat daunting, position of having 6 fully pledged designs in my commissions queue, waiting for me to make them. I haven’t bitten off more than I can chew there as I was careful to set the rules: designs are made sequentially, in the order they were commissioned, and each may take 6-8 weeks to complete.

The bad news: This long waiting list tells me that I’m still not even close to reaching the balance point with this commissions model – at the last review, I had 3 designs waiting to be created, and now I have twice that many stacked up. Something has to change so the queue doesn’t continue to grow by 3 designs every 6 months – I don’t want to have people pledging towards commissions that I won’t be able to start for a year or more!

Model Review

I really like that my model gives me the freedom to make changes incrementally, and to see what works and tweak what doesn’t. I’m hoping that within a year or two of further adjustments to the model, I’ll have a stable system where the commissions come in at a rate I can handle, and there are never more than a couple in the queue.

The way I see it, I have 4 drastic options to make that happen:

1. Close the list until I’ve caught up with the waiting list.
2. Raise the minimum pledge amount.
3. Raise the total commission price.
4. Raise both the minimum pledge amount and the total commission price.

I know I definitely don’t want to close the list, so option #1 is out, but I don’t want to raise the prices too much and make them too high for my average customer to participate in this process. I’m going to tweak the system again and monitor how that plays out before I consider a drastic price increase.

Design Review

I’ve had one idea that may help to slow the rush and allow me to bring down the numbers of designs in the waiting list, while still letting people have the fun of pledging and getting excited about new design ideas. I’m dramatically increasing the number of options available – hopefully this will spread the pledges so the designs get pledged more slowly, at a rate I can handle.

So, to kick this off with a bang, I haven’t taken down any of the existing options, and I’ve added a whopping 25 new options to the list!

A note about the new designs: to keep it easy to use, I’ve just put the main animal name in the list. However, if there are several varieties of that animal and you want to know what I have in mind, just click its name on the pledge chart – it’ll open the Wikipedia page to the variety of the animal I’m planning to make:

e.g. when the list says Coati, I’m actually talking about a South American (Ring-Tailed) Coati (there are also White-Nosed and Mountain Coati species, and they look very different). Putting all that info on the list would be a bit unwieldy, but if you click ‘Coati’, you’ll go to the South American Coati page on Wikipedia and get a better idea of what I have in mind for my coati design 🙂

I really don’t know what’s going to happen with this huge new list of options… My hope is that it’ll filter out the strongest candidates for patterns, but I could end up with an even longer waiting list of commissions. And the new list is very long – it could be so overwhelming that it puts people off and the pledging dries up altogether. But I have to try things and see what happens!

Pricing Review

As I’m a little concerned that my plan could backfire and I could have 25 more fully pledged designs by tomorrow(!), I’m also making a small tweak to the pricing: I’m raising the total commission cost from $120 to $150. The minimum pledge amount is still unchanged at $6, so it’ll take 25 $6 pledges (or fewer people with larger pledges) to get a design fully funded.

The price increase will take effect immediately, but, for all six designs that had already been fully pledged at $120, I’m making up the difference with pre-pledges, so Orca, Red Panda, Sloth, Meerkat, Camel, and Armadillo are still all fully pledged. And for the AmiDogs, a $30 price hike is too much, so I’m upping their pre-pledges to $78 (so you can commission an AmiDogs breed for $72).

Long term, I’d like to add $3 increments above the $6 minimum, so you don’t need to jump from $6 to $12 to $18 if you want to increase your pledge. I just don’t have the time to code that at the moment, and it’s probably best to not change too many things at once anyway (so I can figure out what’s working and what isn’t), but intermediate pledge values may well be a feature I add at the next review.

Timeframe Review

This is a tough one. When I increased the time to 6-8 weeks per design, I didn’t think I’d actually need anywhere near that time to create the majority of the designs. I keep getting blindsided by circumstances beyond my control (health problems, loss of internet, etc) and I’m only just managing to keep within the 8 weeks at the moment.

I’m not going to alter the promised timeframe (as I can’t promise shorter and I don’t want to take longer), but I really hope that these external complications will lessen so I’ll be able to start to catch up on the pledged designs and shorten the waiting list by creating the patterns more quickly. It’s very frustrating, but I can’t go faster than my availability allows without a loss of quality in my designs and/or patterns, and that’s not a compromise I’d ever be prepared to make.

I am sorry that if you pledge for a design today, it will be many months before you’re asked to pay and still longer until you receive your pattern, but I hope you don’t let that deter you from pledging, if there’s a design you really want – the longer you wait to pledge, the more other designs could be funded before it, and then you’ll have to wait even longer for your pattern!

Go Forth and Pledge!

Please click through to the list if you’d like to see the 25 new design options, and maybe pledge towards one or more, if there are any you’d particularly like me to make! (And if you love all the ideas equally, please don’t feel obliged to pledge for everything – you can still support me just as well by buying the finished patterns from my shop as and when they’re ready.)

I’m really excited by all the new options – I can’t wait to see which turn out to be popular and which designs I’ll get to create!