Today’s PlanetJune Story comes from Diane Theriault from Boston, MA. Diane had the innovative idea to make needlepointed plastic canvas bases for my Succulent Collection crochet patterns, to make them into modular desk displays that can be arranged in multiple configurations, and combined into a giant window display.

This is such a clever concept, and I knew you’d love to see it too. Maybe you’ll be inspired to try it for yourself!

Over to Diane:

I first made an instance of the original succulent pattern (the 4 plants in the pot) for my advisor in 2013 and then I made a set of singles in little pots for my labmates in 2015. My main innovation is mounting the succulents on top of little rectangles of needlepointed plastic canvas, which has been working well for me for making modular rearrangeable desk displays.

I had an overuse injury in 2017 so I couldn’t crochet for a few years, and I started nine months of hand OT in mid-2021 because I wanted to be able to do it again! After a lot of physical therapy, the succulent pieces were a good reentry project because they had lots of natural stopping places, while something larger would be tempting to keep going even when I should stop.

I looked at a lot of pictures from companies selling succulents to decide what colors to use. I mostly used a variety of colors from the Vanna’s Choice line of Lion Brand yarn, with a couple of Red Heart colors. Sticking with mostly colors from the same line of yarn was useful because all the colors went together nicely.

Since the display I imagined was a lot larger than the little pots, I wanted some of the plants to be a little bigger. I improvised a couple of larger leaf sizes for some of the plants, and lots of strands – and longer strands – for the trailing plants.

I had done the plants in the crocheted pots before and it was more crochet than I thought my wrist would tolerate, so I decided to try plastic canvas. I was concerned about the plastic tearing, so I needlepointed it for structural support (and to make it a nicer color).

I chose the sizes for the bases by tacking the plants down and seeing if they fell over or not. They are in a variety of sizes between 2×2″ and 3×3″.

The trailing plants are mostly on 2″x3″ bases. If the stems are hanging down without support, the bases need to be oriented long-ways towards the edge of the surface, because otherwise, the weight of the stems will pull them over, even if they are sitting flat.

Each little base takes 30 – 60 minutes to needlepoint, depending on size.

I started this project in Feb 2022 and finished most of the plants and bases by May. When I tried to arrange the plants in the window, I found that the taller plants fell over because the ledge was too steep, so I decided that I needed to make a planter to get them up higher and reduce the angle.

Meanwhile, I started taking little selections of plants to work for displays on my desk.

Needlepointing the big pieces for the planter took quite a while, and was less fun than making the plants so it didn’t go as fast, but I think the final effect is pretty good. I used a piece of oak deck trim to provide structural stability – cheaper than a dowel and more sturdy. I declared victory on the planter in October.

It took a lot of volume to fill the planter so the plants would sit on top and be visible. I basically made a lot of pom poms from yarns I had laying around that I didn’t like, with a top layer of pom poms in the matching brown color.

Thank you June for all your beautiful patterns and meticulously executed instructions!

(Back to me, June, again!)

Aren’t these projects wonderful? The needlepointed bases are a clever and unique touch, the modular desk display looks like it’d be fun to play with and rearrange, and I’m sure you’ll agree that the finished succulent window planter is spectacular!

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

PS – As you can see, my crocheted succulent patterns are very versatile! You can use them individually or in a potted succulent garden as I show in the patterns, or you can keep making more and more of your favourites, to fill any space. You can find all the mix-and-match PlanetJune Cactus and Succulent Collection crochet patterns in my shop 🙂

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!

Each month in 2023 I’m sharing a Temperature Snake CAL roundup with a collage of some of our snakes’ progress – even if you aren’t joining in, I think you’ll enjoy seeing all the snakes growing throughout the year!

We’ve completed two months of the Temperature Snake CAL, and our snakes are starting to grow! It’s lovely to see so many variations, and I’m also enjoying spotting ‘family resemblances’ cropping up in snakes from similar areas, e.g. I see a lot of snakes with a bright stripe around mid-February from that unseasonably warm blip we had here in Ontario (and also in many other states and provinces by the look of it!)

Here’s the February collage from some of the latest photos that have been posted. These are taken from the CAL threads on Discord and Ravelry, plus some from people who’ve tagged me (@PlanetJune) on FB and IG:

Click to see the full-size collage

Wow! Aren’t they all amazing? The collage is getting huge already as the snakes grow longer – and these photos only represent 7% of all the Temperature Snakes being made all over the world! This CAL is truly amazing – it’s wonderful to have so many of us together, all enjoying the slow process of seeing our snakes forming as the year continues.

If you haven’t joined in with the community groups yet, please do come over, share your progress with us all, and join in the conversations!

And, if you’d like your snake to be included in the next monthly roundup, please post an up-to-date pic (or email it directly to me: june@planetjune.com) in the last couple of days of March, or by end of day April 1st. I’ll try to include as many as possible in each collage.

Feeling like you’re missing out on the fun? Don’t worry: you can still join us for this CAL! Grab the pattern and get caught up – we’d love for you to join us for the rest of 2023 🙂

Now, I wonder if our snakes are going to see some new colours developing in March, as the seasons begin to shift… Let’s keep crocheting and find out!

Just a heads-up: I need to take a few days away from PlanetJune due to health issues. I’ll be mostly offline for the next week, but don’t worry – if you have any questions that other members may be able to help you with, you can post them in one of our community groups. As for customer support, I’ll do my best to keep up, but please bear with me if it takes a little longer than usual for me to get back to you. Thanks for your understanding 🙂

I’ve just realised that with the flurry of excitement surrounding the start of the year-long Temperature Snake 2023 CAL, I never showed you the photos of my finished 2022 sample snakes. All my pre-release photos strategically omitted the tail-ends of my snakes, as, well, they didn’t have tails until I knew the final temperature for the year on December 31st and could crochet their last stripes!

So, please allow me to introduce my two beautiful crocheted Temperature Snakes that depict the daily high temperatures in Waterloo, ON throughout 2022…

Spectrum is a Large Daily Snake using the Rainbow colour scheme from the pattern:

Spectrum is named for her colour scheme – the colours of the rainbow.

Kelvin is a Small Every-Other-Day Snake using the Red-to-Blue colour scheme from the pattern:

Kelvin is named for the temperature scale used to measure the colour temperature of light, from warm red to cool blue.

All three of those options (size, length and color scheme) are mix-and-matchable within the pattern – I crocheted Spectrum and Kelvin throughout 2022 so you could see an example for each of the options.

If you’re making a Daily snake for the CAL, this is the approximate snake length you can look forward to by the end of the year:

Spectrum is by far the longest amigurumi I’ve ever made!

Temperature-wise, 2023 is shaping up to be quite different from 2022, so nobody else will ever have a snake that looks quite like these two… but then that’s part of the fun of the Temperature Snake pattern (or any temperature project): you don’t know in advance which colour you’ll be using for each day, and your final snake will truly be one-of-a-kind.

If you’d like to join the 2023 Temperature Snake CAL, there are well over 700 of us participating now, we’re sharing our progress and chatting in the PJ community online groups, and you’re very welcome to jump in now and catch up on all the daily temperature readings from the start of the year using the online resource included in the pattern. Plus, there are plenty of others who are just starting out or playing catch-up, so you won’t be alone!

I’m aiming to get back online and feeling better in a week or so. I look forward to seeing all your snake update pics and catching up on what I’ve missed!

✨ The Complete Essential Guide to Amigurumi: COMING LATE 2023 ✨

UPDATE: Since writing this post, the title of my book has now changed to The Essential Guide to Amigurumi. I’m keeping the old title in the remainder of this post, but ‘The Complete Guide to Amigurumi’ is now ‘The Essential Guide to Amigurumi’ 🙂

Sign up here to be the first to know when it’s available for pre-order!

Background

In 2010, I wrote a best-selling amigurumi reference book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Amigurumi, filled with tips and techniques for making and customizing amazing crocheted toys. Although now out of print, it was the definitive reference guide to amigurumi techniques. To this day, it’s the only book of its kind, but it’s now very dated:

• It was printed in black and white on lower quality paper (that’s what how-to books were like, back in the day!)
• It’s missing a dozen years of amigurumi innovations and recommendations that I’ve come up with since then.
• It was saddled with an unfortunate name (Idiot’s Guide) that made it sound like I believe you to be an idiot, when nothing could be further from the truth.
• It’s been out of print for a couple of years now, and as a result the price for the remaining copies, even used copies, is ridiculously high.

I’ve gone through the long process of getting the rights back for my content, and now that’s sorted, I can finally create the amigurumi reference book of my dreams!

ANNOUNCING: The Complete Guide to Amigurumi

The Complete Guide to Amigurumi will be crammed full of all my techniques and recommendations for making fantastic amigurumi, with close-up step-by-step photos, clear, concise instructions, and a variety of adorable and original amigurumi patterns to experiment with.

Here’s a mockup of a few pages – if you’re familiar with CIG to Amigurumi, you can see how completely different (and 100% better) this book will be, even before I add all the new and updated content:

I’m uniquely qualified to write this book:

• I’ve been a pioneer of amigurumi since the days it first emerged from the shores of Japan.
• I’m a prolific amigurumi designer at PlanetJune, with over 200 unique nature-inspired patterns to date.
• My background as a technical writer allows me to create exceptionally clear and accurate crochet patterns and tutorials.
• I’ve been developing and refining amigurumi techniques since 2007, and I continually come up with new tips and techniques to improve your amigurumi.
• I’m an expert in amigurumi instruction, with over 100k YouTube subscribers to my @PlanetJune amigurumi tutorial channel.
• I’m an experienced instructional craft book author with 4 previous titles published with Quirk Books, Alpha Books and DK.

So I know I have what it takes to make this book a reality. Even so, I have a lot of work ahead of me over the course of this year, to bring my concept to life. I’m one month in at this point, and things are progressing well, as I hope you can tell from the sample spreads above!

The Complete Guide to Amigurumi will be an essential companion for your amigurumi journey, whether you’re looking for a beginner’s guide, searching for tips to improve your results, or even considering getting into amigurumi design yourself! I’ll be compiling my expertise on all these topics into a high-quality reference book that you’ll refer back to again and again.

I can’t wait to bring this book to you, and I hope you’re as excited as I am to see it brought into the world!

Please sign up for updates now and I’ll send you quarterly(ish) updates on how the book is progressing, with sneak peeks and info on how you can be the first to pre-order The Complete Guide to Amigurumi – and maybe even join the book launch team this fall!

It’s been a long time since I’ve done CAL roundups on the blog, but I think the Temperature Snake CAL warrants a monthly roundup – even if you aren’t joining in, I think you’ll enjoy seeing all the snakes growing throughout the year!

We’re one month into the Temperature Snake CAL, and things are starting to get interesting! We now have close to 700 people participating (wow!) and as far as I can tell, about 10% of us will be making southern hemisphere snakes (hot-cold-hot instead of cold-hot-cold). We have some wonderful colour schemes developing, and lots of learning opportunities in the community discussions.

I’ve made a collage from some of the latest photos that have been posted. These are taken from the CAL threads on Discord and Ravelry, plus some from people who’ve tagged me (@PlanetJune) on FB and IG:

Click to see the collage larger!

If you’re not joining in with the community groups yet, please do come over, share your progress with us all, and join in the conversations!

And, if you’d like your snake to be included in the next monthly roundup, please post an up-to-date pic in the 2 or 3 days before the last day of the month. I’ll try to include as many as possible in each collage.

Several people have decided to make twin snakes – one for the daily high temperatures, and another for the daily lows. (You can see a few pairs in the collage above!) I wasn’t planning to, but, as my January temperatures were unexpectedly high, I decided to join in with that, and Jewel now has a fraternal twin, Gem:

Jewel (top) has the daily high temps, and Gem (bottom) has the daily lows

I’m using the same temperature scale for both my snakes, so I anticipate seeing a lot of my coldest colour (purple) in Gem and little or none of my hottest colour (dark red), and vice versa for Jewel. It’s going to be interesting to see how different or similar they are throughout the year!

If you’d like to join in with that too, catching up on a month isn’t too much work, so now’s the perfect time to start your snake’s twin, before it gets too far behind… You can add some more ‘low’ colours to the bottom of your temperature scale, or just accept that there may be a lot of your coldest colour in your lows snake, as I’m doing.

And the same applies if you want to join us for the CAL right now! Grab the pattern and get caught up – we’d love for you to join us for the rest of 2023 🙂

Roll on February! This is the first year I’ve actually been excited at the prospect of a polar vortex bringing some extra-cold temperatures in the coming days…

With the first week of the Temperature Snake CAL behind us, I’m absolutely thrilled with how well it’s going so far:

• We have over 500 participants, with more joining every day.
• Crocheted snakes are being made in at least 26 countries, across every continent (except Antarctica).
• The lowest temperature mentioned so far was -27°C/-17°F, in Russia.
• The highest temperature mentioned so far was 33°C/91°F, in Mexico.

I think it’s safe to say that Temperature Snake is truly a global phenomenon!

Here’s a sampling of the week 1 snake pics that have been shared in the Discord and Ravelry groups so far. If you aren’t part of either group, I highly recommend joining us in at least one of them – the CAL is so much more fun if you share your progress and see how everyone else is doing:

As you can see, each snake already has its unique style and character after just one week. It’s going to be so cool seeing them continue to grow and change throughout the year.

If you’d like to join the fun, please do – it’s such a fast project, you can catch up with crocheting the days you’ve missed in no time! You can grab the Temperature Snake pattern here and get started whenever you want 🙂

I’ve realised that I was so busy with the Temperature Snake CAL and starting to write The Essential Guide to Amigurumi at the start of 2023, that I forgot to share the roundup of the 2022 Reindeer Games! I’m rectifying that now, and backdating this post to when I should have posted it so it’ll make sense in the archives. Enjoy this delayed roundup!

The second annual PlanetJune Reindeer Games crochet-along built on the success of last year’s inaugural games, with an even bigger turnout and engagement.

Over the 2 month CAL, we had 22 pages of chat and an amazing 123 completed projects:

Wow! Click through to see the Reindeer Games gallery on Ravelry, including credit for all the participants and links to all the patterns they used!

Here’s the breakdown of all the medals awarded:

• 26 – Santa’s Toy Shop
• 42 – Rudolph’s Gingerbread House
• 02 – Dasher’s Scarf Stand
• 03 – Dancer’s Winter Wear
• 38 – Prancer’s WIP Wrapping
• 02 – Vixen’s Shawl Stall
• 02 – Comet’s Closet
• 03 – Cupid’s Cowl Corner
• 02 – Donner’s Blanket Bazaar
• 03 – Blitzen’s Bag Bonanza

Congratulations to everyone who participated in the Reindeer Games, and thank you to all of you who make the PlanetJune community such a friendly, welcoming environment for long-term fans and newbies alike!

The next Reindeer Games starts on November 1st, and I hope you’ll join us to close out the year with 2 months of crochet fun.

Look out for the announcement here on the blog (or sign up for my monthly newsletter so I can email you with a reminder!)

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.

This year has been bookended by accomplishments: I started 2022 by receiving my Silver Award from YouTube for passing 100,000 subscribers, and ended it with the publication of the crochet reference book I always wanted to create: Everyday Crochet.

As most of my work is in digital patterns, having these two physical, tangible items I can hold in my hands feels significant.

Also in 2022, I published half a dozen new patterns and added additional content to several older ones:

And I’ve just launched my ambitious year-long Temperature Snake CAL for 2023, which kept me busy throughout the year as I simultaneously worked on two samples – in secret!

I had no idea how the launch would go, but it’s been a huge success: we have hundreds of people signed up and preparing to start their snakes today (and there’s still time to join us, if you haven’t already!)

Also in 2022, I designed and launched new physical products (enamel pins and stuffing tool handles – sign up for the Crochet Tools list to be notified of the next flash sale!) and created always-available bookplates so I can ‘sign’ copies of my books for you.

I published some new crochet video tutorials, reviewed some new crochet hooks, and updated the worsted weight yarn comparison with additional samples.

In other crafting, I’ve enjoyed collaborating with my husband to make useful 3D printed objects, and I’m still enjoying diamond painting. I made a blanket by finger knitting with loop yarn – and I’m shocked to realise that was the only knitting I did all year! I have more hobbies than I have time and energy…

I crocheted and assembled my giant Christmas tree, and I spent many hours tweaking and editing a photo of Maui to make a portrait on canvas that would be a fitting tribute to him:

And I’ve reluctantly taken up gardening this year too – as our forever home is a new build, the garden was 100% plain lawn, so if I want to encourage wild visitors (which I definitely do!) I need to develop a nature garden. With that in mind I’ve started planting native shrubs and pollinator-friendly wildflowers that will hopefully take care of themselves once they’re established.

My little wild corner doesn’t look like much yet, but fingers crossed it’ll be beautiful in a few years’ time:

Gardening is not one of my natural talents (hence my huge collection of crocheted plant designs that I can’t kill…) and I’ve made some mistakes with my plants this year, but I’ve learnt a lot so I can do better next year. And 15 bird species visited my garden before they all disappeared for the winter, so something has been working!

Business Report

Behind the scenes, I’ve been making progress on a long-term project, making lots of little tweaks to improve and speed up the website and to improve PlanetJune’s visibility in search engines. I don’t have anything flashy to report here, but the incremental improvements all help.

I discovered that Google Analytics has some issues with privacy law compliance (unless you really know what you’re doing), so I’ve switched to a much simpler GDPR-compliant analytics package running on my own server so I can still track useful things like how people find me without accidentally storing any personal data.

On a whim, I ran a quick customer feedback survey through my newsletter, which proved to be very helpful. I’ve implemented some of the suggestions already (like increasing the font size of the newsletter itself), and I have a whole list of other things I can continue to improve in future.

And I’ve been taking courses and researching book design and self-publishing (more on that later…)

Personal Report

Saying goodbye to our precious cat Maui in early January was an awful start to 2022, and although I’ve tried to stay positive, his absence still hits me like a punch in the chest at unexpected moments, almost a year later. But this little bundle of love has really helped with that – Maggie is my constant companion, and keeps me on track.

Healthwise, I had a long-lasting respiratory infection this autumn, my bad knee has declined again (and I’ve been going to physio for that), and I’m still plagued by fatigue that’s crippling at times.

I’m trying to come to terms with the limitations my health puts on my work – there’s so much I want to create, but I’ve found that there’s a hard limit to the energy I can expend, and pushing myself too hard one day just makes me a zombie in the evening or ‘borrows energy’ from the next day so I’ll be too exhausted to do anything all day.

It feels like laziness if I don’t always work full time hours, but I need to remind myself that it isn’t: if I don’t push too hard or expect too much from myself, I can still accomplish the same amount while also enjoying every day instead of feeling shattered – and in the end, isn’t that what life is about?

I know I’m not alone in this, and if you also have a chronic health condition that limits your energy, I recommend reading up about Spoon Theory (google it!), and the book How to Keep House While Drowning is also very helpful if the daily tasks of life are overwhelming.

Looking Back

As of 2022, I’ve been blogging for 16 years (with over 1000 blog posts), I’ve been a published crochet designer for 15 years and self-employed full-time for 13. I’ve published 4 traditionally-published books and well over 250 self-published patterns and ebooks. I’ve worked for a long time to get to where I am today!

Although it may not seem like I’m super-productive these days, I’m juggling a lot of plates behind the scenes, managing life challenges as well as business ones, and I’ve set a high bar to keep making high quality innovative work and offer dependable support to all my customers.

And I’m still doing too much: I thought I’d allowed plenty of time to prepare the Temperature Snake CAL without a last-minute time crunch, but being sick for so long in the fall knocked all my plans off track and I’ve had to work far too hard – even over Christmas! – to get all the CAL pieces in place, two weeks later than I’d planned.

I can’t keep doing this to myself – it takes a huge toll on me, but there always seems to be just one more thing I have to do before I can rest. Speaking of which…

Looking Forward

I had a plan. A grand plan. A hope to leave a legacy in the form of two crochet reference books that I can really be proud of.

Revamping IG:Crochet into Everyday Crochet in 2022 was the first part of the plan, and the second part – replacing my old CIG to Amigurumi with an all-encompassing amigurumi reference book that includes all my tips, tricks and tutorials from my 15+ years as a trail-blazing amigurumi designer and looks and feels as gorgeous as Everyday Crochet does – will be my mountain to climb this year.

I’m not going into this unprepared: I’ve been in the craft book industry since 2009, I have the technical writing and editing qualifications, I’ve done a ton of research on book design, and I’m equipped with endless years of experience in producing patterns and and tutorials. But this will be my first solo climb – my first book where I’m wearing all the hats and aiming to produce a book that’s at least equal in quality to any other crochet book you own, as well as being full of the content you’d only get in a PlanetJune amigurumi book.

I’m ready for this challenge, but I anticipate it’s going to take most of the year to produce the amigurumi reference book of my dreams. I’ll probably have to postpone all my other patterns and tutorial ideas so I can bring this book to life – it needs all my energy and attention, and it’ll be worth the sacrifice.

If I’ve learnt anything this year, it’s that I need to allow even more buffer time than I think I could possibly need, to take account of my health, so I need to be strong and say no to everything else – even the most exciting new ideas and opportunities – if I’m going to bring this book to life.

So, a heads-up: I never post filler content just to keep to a fixed publishing schedule. Although I’m sure I’ll still have some crafty things to post about, it does mean my blog and social media may look a little quiet for much of 2023 – please know there’s a good reason for that!

Creating and publishing my amigurumi reference book will be my Everest, and once I’ve conquered it I’m hoping to settle into a more comfortable, less thrilling, sustainable lifestyle, and enjoy developing my future designs at my own pace. But first, I have an epic challenge ahead in 2023!

2023 Wishes

Last year, I wished for resilience (to keep going through the tough times), grace (to not beat myself up when reality falls short of expectation), and hope (to look forward to the better things to come). When I made those wishes, I didn’t know how much I’d need all those things in 2022.

For once, this coming year, I actually have a concrete tangible goal (and it’s dauntingly ambitious: to write, photograph, edit, design, publish and market a professional-quality book all by myself). So, in 2023, I wish to be grounded, steady, and focused: to move forwards, one step at a time, without getting overwhelmed, sidetracked or discouraged.

I wish those things for you too, no matter what your goals for the coming year may be, and I hope 2023 will bring you health, happiness and fun. Happy New Year!