I keep getting asked which side is the ‘right side’, so I thought I’d put this side-by-side comparison together to show you the differences between the two sides.

The ‘Right’ Side

• Each stitch looks like a V shape (I’ve highlighted one in white for you).
• Note also that you can see the sideways V shapes around the edge that you will crochet into to form the next round.

The ‘Wrong’ Side

• Each stitch looks (to me, at least) like a pi symbol (π) – but maybe that’s just my geek side coming out again! Otherwise, you could say it looks like a little table – an upside down V with a bar on the top – again, I’ve highlighted one stitch in white for you. You won’t see any of those horizontal bars if you look at the right side – that’s a big clue.
• Also, the sideways V shapes around the edge of your piece will be facing to the other side, so you won’t be able to see them.

Also, if you’re working ‘inside out’, you’ll be working around the inside rim of the piece – see my Worked inside out section for an illustration of what I mean by that. You’ll probably find that when you start crocheting an amigurumi piece, this is the way the piece will naturally want to curve. You can just flip it inside out so it faces the ‘right’ way after you’ve crocheted a few rounds, and then continue to work around the outside rim after that.

I hope this has helped you to be able to tell the difference between the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ sides – and once again I’d like to stress that I’m only calling them ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ by convention: there is nothing wrong in having the ‘wrong’ side face out if you prefer the look of the stitches that way, or it’s just what you’re used to. Just remember, if you want to use invisible decreases (which I do recommend; they’ll make your pieces look soo much neater!) you’ll have to crochet with the ‘right’ side facing out

And here it is: you can make them with regular yarn and brush them to make a fluffy animal like the sweet yellow Fuzzy Bear below!

And if that, by itself, isn’t enough information for you, I’ve written a whole tutorial on how to convert Fuzzy patterns to Brushed Crochet patterns. The tutorial also features a discussion on back loops only vs crocheting into both loops, and which side is the ‘right’ side when making amigurumi, so it’s worth checking out!

Continue to the Fuzzy to Brushed Crochet tutorial >>

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

It’s time for one more tutorial to join my Amigurumi Help resource: how to fasten off. I’m going to cover three different methods:

1. Closing up a piece
2. Finishing an open edge that will be joined to another piece
3. Finishing an open edge that will be visible (a neater finish)

You may think you know it all already, but #3 is another piece of magic that I bet you’ll find useful at some point in the future! Look all around the open edge on this piece – there’s no clunky join in sight:

How did I do it? Check it out here: Fastening Off tutorial.

I was just thinking, with all these crochet tutorials I’ve been writing, I almost have the makings of a book! A handy go-to techniques book. Wouldn’t that be a useful addition to your crochet library? Hmmm….

And, on a related note, if there are any more how-to topics you’d like me to cover, just let me know, and I’ll put some more tutorials together. I hope you’ve realised by now that I’m always happy to help and to share my knowledge

Today I have what I think will be the next aha! moment for amigurumi makers: the invisible decrease. I’m showing it here because nobody I have spoken to knows how to do it (or even that it exists!), and it really does make a difference to the finish of your pieces.

Let’s briefly look at other options for decreasing in single crochet:

• skipping stitches: leaves gaps in your work where the stuffing can show through
• sc2tog (sc decrease): leaves a slight bump and a longer bar visible in the stitch

L: skipped stitches (arrow marks hole);
R: sc2tog (arrow marks obtrusive ‘line’ made by bar of stitch)

The invisible decrease (invdec) method is different; as good as its name, it’s practically invisible, even if you know what you’re looking for! The reason for this is that it groups the previous stitches together at its base, so the stitch itself looks identical to a regular single crochet.

L: the invdec (marked with arrow) looks just like the other stitches in the row;
R: the result is smooth and even

See? It’s like magic! Now click through to the Invisible Decrease tutorial…

In 2006, I made a kanzashi poinsettia:

In 2007, I designed the famous crocheted poinsettia:

Who am I to break with tradition, even if it’s one I invented myself? So allow me to present the 2008 PlanetJune Poinsettia. This year I’ve gone for a polymer clay (FIMO) variety! It’s just over 2″ (5cm) in diameter, and would make a lovely pin or fridge magnet, or just a pretty decoration.

If you’d like to try making one, I’ve put together a tutorial for you so you can give it a go. The good news is that it’s much easier than it looks! There’s no precision involved; in fact, the leaves actually look better if they aren’t all exactly the same size and shape. As the instructions are quite long (I’ve included lots of pictures to make it easy to follow), I’ve given the tutorial a page of its own: Polymer Clay Poinsettia Tutorial.

This is my first polymer clay tutorial, so I hope it’ll all be clear. Please leave me a comment if you like it! And would you like to see more PC tutorials in future? Let me know in the comments!

There are a few of ways I can think of to adjust a pattern, so here are my thoughts on this…

METHOD 1: Double everything. By this I mean, every time the pattern calls for 1 stitch, you make 2 (so e.g. if Rnd 1 is 6 sc, you will do 12 sc) AND double the number of Rnds (so you would repeat your new Rnd 1 with a second Rnd of 12 sc). This isn’t my recommended method! It would be hard to keep track of your rounds and stitch counts, when you are turning each stitch into four stitches.

If you do want to attempt it, it should work fairly well, as sc is a square stitch (same height and width) so by doubling the length and width you are essentially making each stitch into a 2×2 square of stitches, but it’s not perfect – if I was designing a double sized animal I would even up the rounds – e.g. this method will give you stitch counts like this at the end of the rounds: 12 st, 12 st, 24 st, 24 st, 36 st, 36 st… If I was designing it I would even it up to something like 6 st, 12 st, 18 st, 24 st, 30 st, 36 st so the increases are made evenly and not stepped every 2 rounds.

METHOD 2: Use thicker yarn and a larger hook. If you compare the blue and grey elephants below, the greys are made with worsted weight yarn and an E hook and the blue is made with bulky weight yarn and a G hook. You can see this has made the blue elephant quite a bit larger.

METHOD 3: Double your yarn (use 2 strands held together) and use a larger hook. You can see the effect of this here:

The two turtles use the same pattern, but one uses doubled yarn and a correspondingly larger hook (L instead of G). The result is a turtle that’s about 1.5 times the size.

Now you could combine methods 2 and 3 to make an ami that’s about double the size of the original, by using 2 strands of a bulkier weight yarn (than the pattern calls for) held together, and a much larger hook. This would be much quicker to make and easier to calculate than method 1, as you would follow the pattern stitches exactly as written.

The downside of using methods 2+3 is that, because each stitch is much larger, the space between the stitches is more noticeable because it’s correspondingly larger. The stitches are also more chunky, so it doesn’t give as smooth a finish as using the finer yarn and smaller hook.

You could also apply Method 2 in reverse to size down a pattern, by using a finer yarn than the pattern calls for, and a correspondingly smaller hook. You can go right down to crochet thread and a steel hook, as shown by bettika67, who turned my life sized guinea pigs:

into the most adorable 1-inch piggies, just by using very fine thread and a tiny hook:

So there you go, 3 ways you could increase the size of a pattern, plus one easy method for reducing the size. This advice isn’t limited to amigurumi (although Method 1 is limited to patterns worked in single crochet). For example, you could turn a pattern for something like a baby hat into a child-sized or even or adult-sized hat, or reduce a full-size pattern down to child-sized, by using some of these methods. Hopefully this will give some of you more confidence to attempt some resizing of your own!

Now you have no excuse not to try crochet… So find yourself a 3.5mm crochet hook and some worsted weight yarn, and you’ll soon see how simple and fun crocheting can be!

Continue to:

• Crochet Basics (right-handed)
• Crochet Basics (left-handed)

I bought a carved soapstone egg while in England, but I want to stand it up for display purposes, and of course it won’t stand without assistance. FIMO to the rescue…

Take a blob of polymer clay in a colour that coordinates with your egg. The size depends on the size of your egg – it has to be large enough to support the egg. Play with the clay until it is soft, then roll it into a ball. Place it on your baking surface (I use a ceramic tile, but you could use a cookie sheet with a piece of aluminium/aluminum foil on top).

Push the clay down onto your baking surface so it has a flat base and a flattish top (if you use a hard flat surface to push gently down on the clay, you’ll avoid fingerprints – I don’t bother and just smooth the prints away later with my finger). Now take your egg and centre it upright over the clay, then push it down into the clay to make a deep depression in the top of the clay that is the same size and shape as the base of the egg. Remove the egg from the clay. Gently smooth any uneven patches with your finger. Decorate if desired.

Do not lift the clay from the baking surface – you want the base of the stand to stay flat. Transfer the baking surface to the oven and bake according to manufacturer’s instructions. When it has cooled, you can pop the clay egg stand off the baking surface if it has stuck – it won’t be baked onto the surface.

Paint, finish, varnish etc, if desired – I left mine plain black so as not to detract from the egg. Place your egg in its stand and admire!

*5 minutes does not include the baking time, obviously!

I went to the fabric store and managed to find some fabric in the exact colour scheme I used to crochet the throw for my other chair!

Holly’s method involved removing the old fabric from the chair, and then stapling the new fabric over the chair padding. I don’t have a staple gun, and after reading about Holly’s stapling difficulties, I decided to try a different method to attach the new fabric. I removed the backing fabric from the seat, and the plastic backing from the back rest, but left the original fabric stapled to both parts.

I stretched the new fabric over each piece and pinned it roughly in place so the dots pattern would be straight. Using a curved upholstery needle and strong thread, I stitched around the underside of the seat, sewing the new fabric to the old fabric.

I used a combination of running stitch for speed and backstitches for extra security every few stitches and around the corners. No need to be too neat – none of this is visible in the finished chair.

When I’d finished sewing, I trimmed the excess fabric, leaving about an inch beyond my stitches.

I reattached the plastic back to the back, and blanket stitched the original backing fabric to the seat, to hide the raw edges.

And the result? Better then new!

I love it!