PlanetJune by June Gilbank

I’m so excited to launch my new product today! The Detail Stuffing Tool came about because it’s really difficult to stuff tiny things, or to get that last bit of stuffing in before you close up a hole. After making a million AmiDogs legs (that’s what it feels like, anyway!) and other tiny pieces that have to be stuffed firmly, I realised I needed a better way of doing it…

Dollmakers have a special forked metal stuffing tool, and that’s where I got the inspiration for my tool. The dollmaker’s tool costs around $15, and I wanted to produce something more affordable – if you’re anything like me, you lose tools far more often than you break them, so an inexpensive plastic tool is much more appealing!

Whether you crochet, knit, or sew stuffed toys or amigurumi, you need a Detail Stuffing Tool! Not convinced? I’ve made a short video to demonstrate the benefits of the tool, and techniques for using it:

More Details:

Get a grip on your stuffing: Fiberfill (especially the better quality ones) can be quite slippery, and if you try to use the end of your crochet hook or a chopstick to stuff, you’ll find that the fibres just slide around the edge of the stick, and you end up poking a hole in the stuffing instead of pushing the stuffing into the hole! The Detail Stuffing Tool has two prongs that catch the fibres of the stuffing so it can’t slip away as easily, and twisting the tool as you insert it spins the stuffing fibres into the piece with ease.

Stuff the tiniest pieces: The head of the Detail Stuffing Tool is small enough to fit inside the tiniest amigurumi part. The added bonus is that you can use it to add an extra bit of stuffing to a closed shape after you’ve finished crocheting (when you only have a 6 sc hole remaining to stitch closed) so you can stuff as firmly as you want without having to struggle to avoid catching the stuffing fibres while you crochet that last round.

Stuff right into the corners: The Detail Stuffing Tool also works really well to stuff tiny pieces for sewn plush toys. It can be really difficult to position the stuffing exactly where you want it to fill a tiny finger or arm or nose. By twirling the stuffing around the tool to make a firm blob of stuffing at the head of the tool, you can place the tool inside the tip of the piece, and then grip the stuffing from the outside as you withdraw the tool, so that the stuffing stays in place.

I’ve been using my prototype tool for a couple of months, and I couldn’t be without it now! It makes the pesky task of stuffing small pieces so much less frustrating, and I love that I can easily stuff all my pieces more firmly by adding additional stuffing into the tiny hole that remains after finishing the crocheting.

I hope you like my Detail Stuffing Tool – now available to purchase from the PlanetJune shop! I really think it’s a tool that’s been missing from the world of stuffed toymaking until now

Today is my furbaby Maui’s 6th birthday. (Well, we adopted him when he was a year old, so we don’t know his actual birthday, but we settled on this date for him so it wouldn’t be too close to Christmas.) If you don’t know my lovely boy, here he is:

Awww, handsome cat!

The actual subject of this post is making toys for your cat, and whether it’s worth the effort. I’d like to demonstrate with a couple of toys that I made for Maui three years ago (please excuse the photos - my photographic skills have clearly improved since 2007!)…

__(‘Read the rest of this entry »’)

I just received my contributor copy of the new sewing book, One Yard Wonders. I’ve been looking forward to getting my hands on it for months! It’s a lovely book, featuring 101 projects that can each be made from under 1yd of fabric – a great way to use up fabric that you may have lying around in your stash!

They’ve done a really nice job with the book – it’s spiral-bound, so it will lie flat at the page you open it to, and it has an envelope in the front containing full-sized pattern pieces for all the projects that need them.

The projects cover the full range from clothing, aprons, and quilts, to bags, pillows and toys. It looks like a great book, and I can’t wait until I have time to look through it properly and find ideas for things I could make with some of my stash fabric!

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Now, not to detract from the book at all (it really is great! you should definitely pick up a copy), but on a personal level, I am very disappointed.

I contributed a pincushion and matching needlebook to the book. I was given the cutest Japanese fabric covered in tiny hedgehogs, squirrels, chickies and mushrooms, and I spent ages making sure the print was centred nicely on my pieces, picking the perfect buttons to accessorize them, and making sure my sample pieces were as close to perfect as possible so they would photograph well (I still have several 99% perfect rejects sitting in my craft room!). These are my samples that I’ve been waiting for months to see in print:

Sorry for the pic quality – these were taken over a year ago (as a personal record for myself before I shipped them off), before I got the hang of my lightbox.

Luckily I thought to snap these quick photos before sending them off, because when I looked for my projects in the book, they had been bundled with this sewing machine cover, and my projects had been remade in the same huge graphic print as the cover, which doesn’t suit their size at all. Plus there is only this one picture in the book, in which my designs are practically invisible:

Can you spot my designs in this picture?

There they are! A tiny part of a busy picture.

It’s okay. I understand why they did it this way – I guess they wanted to use up the entire yard of fabric, and that makes sense. But mine were so cute! And so neat! It’s just sad when you look forward to something and then it turns out to be so very different from what you imagined it would be. I’m still happy the authors chose my projects for the book; I just think they will be overlooked by most readers because they aren’t shown in their best light. Let’s have another look at my version of my projects, as this will be the only time they’ll ever be seen:

Click to see them larger

They are cute, right? Please tell me they are. I need cheering up…

You may remember my Offset Square Wrist Pincushion tutorial from a year ago. I still use my pig pincushion every time I work on a sewing project, and it’s really made a difference to me (no more lost pins to be discovered on the floor or stuck in the sofa weeks later!). But now I have the pins under control, I notice all the more how often I lose a needle. I’ve luckily never found one the painful way (by standing/sitting on it), although I did once find a lost needle embedded in the sole of my shoe! That was a lucky escape for my foot, as I rarely wear shoes in my house; I don’t think I’d be that lucky a second time, so it’s high time I fix this problem…

I still have some of the same pig fabric in my stash, so I designed a little needlebook to match the pincushion. Those little piggies still make me smile!

This needlebook has a ribbon and button closure, and two felt pages inside to accommodate the needles. As well as a variety of sizes of regular sewing needles, I’ve put some self-threading needles in the needlebook. (I first heard about these needles from Kathy and they really come in handy for the most boring part of a sewing project: finishing off all those loose ends of thread. If you machine sew, I do suggest you pick up a packet – they really speed up that process!)

The needlebook is large enough not to get lost but small enough to be convenient, and the needles stay safely inside the book until they are needed. I was thinking of adding a pocket too (for a needle threader and/or mini sewing scissors), but I think I’d prefer to keep it as it is.

I do love these quick easy projects, especially when they cost nothing because I have all the materials already! Plus, having a matched set makes me very happy. Hopefully my new needlebook will be just as useful as the pincushion has proved to be…

One of the biggest frustrations with craft blogging can be to take decent photographs, as photography is so light-dependent. Using the camera flash is too harsh, and using your interior room lighting will give you dimly-lit, orange-tinted photos. The best solution is good natural light (out of direct sunlight, otherwise you will see dark shadows behind your object), but if you’re in the middle of one of those weeks where the sun never shows its face, what can you do?

The professional solution is to use a light tent (aka light box) for product photography. They are available to purchase commercially, but cost hundreds of dollars. If you google ‘light box’ or ‘light tent’ you will find people who have made their own light tents, including Bill Huber’s popular tutorial at PBase, made from PVC plumbing parts and a white bedsheet! In the comments following his tutorial, I noticed that someone had bought an IKEA Antonius laundry bag stand to save them from building their own frame for the light box, and woohoo, the frame is still available and only costs $7!

If you’d like to make your own light tent, the simplest form I have seen only requires a large cardboard box and some fabric, so don’t be put off by the idea of making a frame or finding a convenient IKEA!

Here is my prototype; I just draped the frame with a $1 white plastic tablecloth, and it works! I have attached a clamp lamp to each side of the frame so that the lights shine through the fabric and into the tent. I also used a desk lamp to add additional lighting through the top of the tent.

I was a bit worried that the plastic might melt under the lights, and the draped tablecloth didn’t look very tidy, so I bought some cheap white fabric, sewed 4 panels (two sides, a back and the top), and then sewed them together to form a fitted cover. I purposely left the final seams on the outside to leave a snug fit around the corners of the frame. You can also probably see a little silver blob on the left of this photo – I had some rare earth magnets lying around, so I used a few to keep the front edge of the fabric stretched out nicely over the metal frame:

I used a white bristol board inside the light tent to give a seamless backdrop, but of course I can easily swap in another backdrop to add more colour. And here’s the finished tent:

Now for a photo comparison. Firstly, some piggies in nice natural lighting. This is about as good as it gets under normal conditions. Looks pretty good; there is a little shadow in the middle between the pigs, but the picture is fine, really:

And now for the light box photo:

Huh? There’s not really any difference, you say? That’s the whole point… because I could take the exact same picture in the middle of a thunderstorm, or in the middle of the night! No sunlight required. And that is the beauty of the light tent.

A few notes:

• You can use any directional lamps for a light tent, but make sure you use the same light bulbs in each light source, otherwise your colour balance will change across the photo
• Unless you have very special bulbs (mine are GE Reveal – they are supposed to be natural daylight coloured, but for the purpose of photography they are nowhere near!), you will have to set the white balance on your camera if you have that option, or adjust the colour balance of your photos in your image editing software. But it’s a 1-click fix in most software, so it’s really not a big deal.
• You can easily adjust the amount of lighting coming from each direction by moving each lamp closer to, or further away from, the light tent. I find that using the side lights brightly and the top light a little further away works nicely.

UPDATED 18/11/09: I have since added a fourth light, pointing into the front of the box. It’s not filtered by the tent, so I keep it further away (behind the camera). As zabacorporation mentioned in the comments, my example pig picture would have been better with a light source illuminating them from the direction the camera sees (i.e. the front). The light tent then serves to reduce the shadows caused by that direct light. I’m still tweaking the exact configuration!