PlanetJune Blog: Latest News, Patterns and Tutorials

Last night I recorded an episode of Mary Beth Temple’s crochet podcast, Getting Loopy. Mary Beth and I chatted about me and my designs, amigurumi in general, and all sorts of other things, including life-size crocheted giraffes! You can listen to the podcast here – and as incentive to listen there’s a contest in there to win 2 of my patterns of your choice!

Getting Loopy listeners, here are some of the links I mentioned:

• My amigurumi help pages
• My free crochet patterns
• Folding Trees (my papercraft site)
• Follow me on Twitter
• Please email me with your suggestions for new patterns!

In other news, I’m teaching another online class at Crochetville, starting this Friday, September 11th. This time I’ll be showing you step by step how to make my amigurumi Alpacas:

Registration is now open, if you’d like to sign up and get the benefit of my expertise – it’s going to be fun!

Remember my Red Fox from last week? I decided to make him a cousin in a white brushed yarn, to be an Arctic Fox, and now I’ve completed both patterns. Two different foxes with very different appearances – which is your favourite?

Arctic Fox is a great project to try if you’re intrigued by the idea of brushed crochet. Brushing the finished crocheted pieces gives a realistic fur effect, and because it’s all done in one colour, that’s one less thing to worry about 🙂 Full instructions are given in the pattern – all you need is a wire pet brush or a mohair brush, and you’re guaranteed to get a cute fluffy result! And the pattern also works with regular yarn, if you don’t want to try the brushing technique.

Red Fox has a totally different appeal, combining 3 colours with that distinctive shape to make a realistic amigurumi fox with a cunning glint in his eye!

It’s amazing that you can achieve such different effects with just a crochet hook, some yarn and the single crochet stitch! I really do love crochet…

The patterns are for sale in the shop for $4.50 each. If you’d like to try both types of fox, I’ve made a fox multipack including both patterns for only $7.

Happy crocheting!

My lemmings pattern continues to take over the world 🙂 Here’s another commission I just finished, (currently on their way to Italy):

And this is just too cool not to share: JS left me a comment on my original lemmings post to tell me about a project planned and executed to perfection by the craft club at the Helsinki University of Technology. The girls in the club spent five months secretly crocheting about 200 (yes! two hundred!) lemmings based on my pattern, and then strategically arranged them – walking, building, climbing, floating, etc – all around the IT building.

Here are some waiting to be arranged:

(image source)

And some action shots:

(image source)

Isn’t that the coolest thing ever?! Congratulations to everyone involved in the epic project – it looks amazing. I’d love to walk through a building and see tiny lemmings popping up everywhere I looked!

If you’d like to make your own lemmings, the basic Mop Top Mascots pattern is free (donationware). If you leave a donation, the PDF version also includes hints for how to adapt the Mop Tops into the various lemmings 🙂 Thank you to those who have donated already – I really appreciate your support!

I got 4lbs of blueberries free as a special offer with my groceries – yum! I’ve munched my way through over 2lbs of them so far(!), but thought it might be good to try some blueberry recipes.

Blueberry syrup

Ingredients
1 cup fresh blueberries
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup water

Directions

1. Bring ingredients to a boil in a saucepan.
2. Simmer for a few minutes until the berries are soft.
3. Squash the berries with a potato masher or the back of a spoon.
4. Either serve as is, or push the syrup through a sieve with the back of a spoon to filter out the skins.

After straining, I was left with just under 2/3 cup of fresh blueberry syrup. Simple, and delicious served over pancakes!

I saved a tweet from @craft_tips:

Warm water, baking soda, aluminum foil. Insert tarnished silver, remove after 10 minutes. Clean!

The idea of a quick and easy method to clean it without any effort was too good to pass up – I have a lot of silver jewellery (because I only wear silver or white gold jewellery) and some is horribly tarnished. I googled to try to find more details and the consensus seems to be that foil, baking soda, a little salt, and boiling water are the magic formula.

Let’s see it in action!

Before (I chose the blackest, most tarnished pieces for this photo. Note also the green tarnish on the two earrings next to the horseshoe charm – I’ll refer to this later!)

Aluminium foil in the bottom of a glass bowl, with baking soda and a little salt

Boiling water added – bubbles!

I added the jewellery – the trick is to make sure that each piece is in direct contact with the foil. Here comes the science part (I probably haven’t mentioned this before, but I used to be a Materials Scientist in a past life): the black tarnish on your silver is silver sulphide. An electrochemical reaction causes the sulphur to transfer from the silver to the aluminium foil, and the tarnish disappears! You can tell it’s working when you smell the sulphur (bad eggs)…

Look how dirty the water becomes (I’d taken out most of the jewellery by this point)

Most of my jewellery came out clean and shiny. Some had a whitish powdery residue (probably from the salt etc) but after rinsing them in clean water, they were fine. Some still looked black, but the black came off easily when I dried it on some paper towel:

The remaining black tarnish rubbed off easily on a paper towel

Now here’s something interesting: the silver that started with green tarnish to begin with didn’t get clean – it turned orangey/black. This makes sense – pure silver is very soft, so the standard 925 silver (sterling silver) is made from 92.5% silver, and the remaining 7.5% is often copper. It would have been the copper content in the silver that produced the green tarnish in the first place.

Look at the result of the ‘cleaning’ of the green-tarnished pieces:

Yuck – discolouration from the copper content in the silver

The good news – this isn’t permanent. I used silver polish on these pieces and they turned back to shiny silver (phew!). But I recommend that if you have any silver with green tarnish, don’t use the baking soda method – it won’t help!

After rinsing (and polishing the copper from the surface of the above earrings), here’s all my jewellery:

And here’s the final proof that it does (mostly) work – remember my blackened flower ring from the first picture? Look at it now!

Clean and shiny!

Yay! I can wear it again! And I didn’t have to polish into all those little crevices by hand 🙂

If you’d like to try this technique yourself, you just need aluminium (that’s aluminum to the Americans) foil, baking soda, salt, and boiling water to make most of your silver look like new again with zero effort! Just don’t forget to rinse the pieces after cleaning (if you leave the salt residue, it’ll corrode the silver).

I hope you found my review interesting – just tell me if I get too science-geeky and I’ll scale it back in future 🙂

Edited to add:

Several people have asked about silver jewellery that includes gems or other stones. I’ve mentioned a few important tips about those in the comments, so I thought I should add them here too:

• Pearls are NOT stones and must be treated very carefully with only a damp cloth or a very mild soap solution. NEVER put pearls into a baking soda solution!
• The finish of some gems may be damaged by hot water or salt, so do Google for cleaning instructions for your particular gemstone to make sure it’s safe before you try this or any other cleaning method.
• If your stones are glued in place, there’s also a chance that the glue will react with the solution, or even melt in the boiling water.

So, if in doubt, save this technique for your silver jewellery that’s all. silver and doesn’t have any gems, stones, crystals etc.

I have a new item available in my shop today: stitch markers for crocheters. The regular ring-shaped stitch markers used by knitters are no good for crochet, as there’s no way to remove the marker from the stitch without cutting it off! Stitch markers for crochet need an opening so they can be slipped off the stitch when you have finished with them.

I’ve been using Susan Bates aluminum stitch markers, but they are expensive (a couple of dollars each) and I keep losing them! Using a scrap of contrasting yarn can leave fibres of the wrong colour on your work. I’ve used coilless safety pins too, but the point of the pin is so sharp that it’s easy to split the yarn by mistake.

Now I’ve managed to source these wonderful plastic stitch markers for you! They look like a cuter version of a coilless safety pin and come in 5 translucent colours.

Aren’t they adorable?

These 3cm (1.2″) long stitch markers open and close like a real safety pin, so you can be sure that your marker won’t fall out in transit. The plastic tip is rounded so it won’t split your yarn. And, best of all, I’ve managed to get a great price for you – they are so inexpensive that if you do lose one, it won’t be the end of the world!

Crochet stitch markers are now available from my shop for $0.50 each, with big discounts if you buy in bulk:

• Save 30% when you buy 3 or more
• Save 40% when you buy 10 or more

It’s always useful to have a few spare stitch markers on hand to stop your UFOs (UnFinished Objects) from unravelling, until you get around to working on them again! And these markers would make great mini gifts for your crocheter friends too, so why not stock up and save?

After the comment discussion yesterday about brushed crochet, whether I should have brushed the tail of my fox, and which kind of yarns you can brush, I realised that I didn’t actually have a definitive answer to give for that…

The technique of brushed crochet originated with is apparently an old long-forgotten technique that was reinvented by my good friend Brie aka Wibit/Roman Sock with her wonderful brushed animals and brushed crochet tutorial. Since then, brushed crochet has been popping up here and there, but there is no actual ‘yes/no’ list for which yarns can be brushed!

I made this Miniature Schnauzer puppy with the brushed crochet technique

I already know that wool, mohair and bamboo yarns work for brushed crochet, but I’ve read that acrylic and cotton yarns should not be used (why is that?). So, time for an experiment…

Hunting through my box of crocheted scraps and rejected pieces, I found an 100% acrylic grey piece, and a failed prototype made from black acrylic and green 100% cotton – perfect test candidates for the ‘do not use’ yarns. Here are the results after a little brushing with a pet slicker brush:

Acrylic yarn after brushing (right side is unbrushed for comparison)

Black: acrylic yarn. Green: cotton yarn.

Guess what? They both fluffed up, and the yarns didn’t break! It was more difficult to generate fluff with the cotton and acrylic yarns than with the mohair blends I’ve used previously – you need to brush for longer to get the fluff to appear (especially with the cotton, which I suspect would never give a fully furry effect). The acrylic also made a sort of crinkly looking fluff, so wouldn’t be as good for a natural fur effect.

But, in general, I say brush away! Based on this experiment, I think any kind of yarn would work to some extent – if in doubt, crochet a small swatch first and brush it out to make sure the yarn doesn’t break and your work unravel before you achieve your desired level of fluffiness! All you need to get started is a wire pet slicker brush and a little patience.

Be aware that this is a destructive technique – the brush yanks fibres out of the yarn, and in the process some fibres come out completely and are left on the brush (as you can see in the above photo). So please do use caution, and test-brush a swatch before risking something you’ve spent a long time creating.

I still won’t be brushing out the tail on my red fox. Brushing masks the shape of the underlying crocheted piece and I don’t want that for my fox. But if you buy the pattern (coming soon!) then feel free to try brushing out the tail of your foxes – no matter which type of yarn you choose to crochet it from 🙂

I was going to wait until the pattern was ready before posting, but I just can’t resist giving you a teaser – sometimes a design just magically comes together, and this was one of those times. The pieces all looked okay, but it was only when I stitched it all together that his personality popped out and I knew I had a real cunning fox on my hands:

“I’m ready for my close-up now”

Foxy tail!

I’m making a variant now, and then I’ll write up the pattern. If you’d like to be notified when it’s available, sign up for my mailing list.

I’m really happy with his colouring. I’d love to know what you think of him though – please leave me a comment and let me know!