When I was coming up with my basic egg shape, I looked around at other crocheted egg patterns, and I couldn’t find a single one that was the shape of a real egg: some were too pointy, some were too long, some weren’t round enough. I’ve tried to make my design closer to a real egg shape, but a little larger so there’s more room to add the pattern! My eggs are just under 3″ long made with Vanna’s Choice yarn, so they would probably be about 2.5″ long if you used a different worsted weight yarn (Vanna’s is, confusingly, much thicker than most other worsteds!)

I found it really addictive to make my eggs – they are so quick and satisfying, with no sewing required. I loved my colour scheme too – it reminds me of really fancy chocolate eggs, but without the calories! Of course, if you’d like to use more traditional pastel colours, or make a multi-coloured set, that would look lovely too

If you’d like to make some crocheted Easter Eggs too, my pattern includes 4 egg designs, so that, using only 2 colours of yarn, you can make 8 different eggs. This pattern is a great way to practice crochet colourwork and maybe learn a new stitch. The four egg designs are arranged in order of difficulty, so that novice crocheters can start with the basic plain egg, and move up through the designs, learning something new about colourwork with each one.

If you’re put off by the thought of colourwork and all those ends to weave in, please don’t be: I’ve designed the patterns so that the colours are swapped either every stitch or every row, so that you can just drop the unused yarn to the inside of the egg, and pick it back up again when you work back around to it! Maximum effect for minimum effort – just the way I like it!

You can pick up the Easter Eggs pattern from the PlanetJune store. I’d love to see your finished eggs (and anything else you’ve made from any of my patterns!) so please keep posting your photos to the PlanetJune Crochet Flickr pool!

PS: If you’d like to do some more Easter-themed crocheting, here are my other Easter-y patterns:

PocketAmi Easter

Fuzzy Bunny & Chick

Fuzzy Lamb

Daffodils

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

When we were in Hawaii, the geckos we saw could climb straight up vertical walls, thanks to their special toe pads. We always saw them climbing around window frames, or running around the walls inside the front porch, right up by the roof. That image was always in my mind when I made my gecko, so I thought it would be cool to let my gecko do a little wall-climbing too.

Also in this photo: my computer desk, the purple trinket shelves I made last year and my new magnetic white board (it’s actually silver-coloured, which is why it looks glaringly white here – reflected light from the window!)

How does he do it? It’s actually very simple – I knocked a couple of tiny nails into the wall and his stitches just hook onto them! The effect is very good – you only see the nails if you put your head right against the wall:

And here’s my Hawaiian inspiration (awww!):

A pretty close match, I think

This adorable tiny tropical frog from the jungles of Central and South America is only about 1″ long in real life, but the crocheted version is poison-free and a much more manageable size (about 6.5″ long).

Here she is with her inspiration, my original FIMO sculpture – there’s quite a size difference!

And, just for fun, I thought you might be interested to see my original notebook sketch I made after watching the Amphibians episode of David Attenborough’s Life, which set this whole thing into motion! A little glimpse into my process:

If you’d like to make your own tropical froggy, the Poison Dart Frog amigurumi crochet pattern is now available in the PlanetJune shop. I hope you like her!

Just noticed that this photo makes it look like a fabric store with a bit of yarn! In every other direction, the store is floor to ceiling yarn

Everyone else in the store was literally filling black garbage bags with yarn! They probably make sweaters and afghans and other bulky items. My typical crocheted item takes less than 1 skein of yarn, so how could I justify that kind of buying? One lady stepped away from her bag of goodies for a moment (to pick up some more yarn), so I took the opportunity to snap this photo as evidence:

No, that’s not rubbish – it’s a bin bag full of yarn!

I was actually prepared to leave empty-handed, and then I saw the bin filled with mill ends of novelty yarns and other oddments, priced at 20c/oz. That’s practically free! I combed through the entire bin (and it was a big bin!) and managed to find some treaures. I ended up with 21 balls of various yarns for around $8:

My meagre haul

I also picked up this handy pair of snips with a cap that will be perfect to keep safely in an on-the-go project bag:

So, even though I didn’t really take advantage of the sale, I don’t feel too bad – I’m actually quite proud that I only spent $10!

(I certainly want to celebrate after being involved in a minor car crash yesterday: it could have been so much worse, but luckily nobody was injured. I wasn’t at fault, so my insurance premiums won’t be affected; I just need to take the car in to be fixed soon.)

I’ve created 2 different amigurumi balloon patterns for you: the standard round balloon, and the extra-fun long balloon. Each balloon only take a few minutes to crochet, so you can whip up a bunch in no time!

The balloons pattern is free for you to use. If you’d like to thank me with a donation, you’ll get a handy printable PDF version of the pattern as a thank you

Enjoy!

Go to Amigurumi Balloons pattern >>

I’m posting this now in the hope that I’ll finally be able to show you pics of my craft room next week (something I’ve been planning for a long time but it’s always too embarrassingly disorganised to photograph). I hope you’ll forgive a little mess – it’s a working room and I have a lot of craft supplies, so it’s just not possible to ever get it completely tidy!

For now, here’s a little sneak peek of the top of the cubbies that sit on one of my desks. One of the nicest things about making pretty things is getting to look at them: here’s my orang utan and my tissue paper carnations. In a crazy ‘night before the deadline’ moment, I decided my orang utan looked a little hungry and freeform crocheted a little amigurumi banana for him (that’s not weird, is it?!). I think he looks much happier now – what do you think?

This is the big secret project I’ve been alluding to for months, and the reason why I haven’t been blogging as much as I’d like to for a long time – so now I have some catching up to do! I’ve been making lists of things I’d like to do ‘when I finish the book’ – new patterns, new products for the shop, and a lot of improvements I’d like to make to the website. And my craft room/office is in serious need of organisation…

As I’m the photographer as well as the author of my book, I had to develop some novel methods for taking print-quality photos with only two hands at my disposal! I thought I’d share the method I came up with for taking step-by-step photos that include my hands – you’ll see the benefit of this when I next make a tutorial, as the pictures should be much improved with this new setup.

(By the way, in case you’re wondering how I took this shot of myself at work, I used a 2nd camera on a 2nd tripod with a 10-second self-timer!)

A: White bristol board used as a seamless backdrop

B: 2 very bright lamps aimed at the backdrop to make it as white as possible in the photos

C: 2 less bright lamps aimed at my hands (one on each side of the camera) to light them without shadows

D: This is where the camera is pointing – at my hands

E: My DSLR camera on a tripod, angled so that I can comfortably look through the viewfinder as I sit

F: (Out of shot) Remote detonator control for my camera so that I can operate it with my toe when I have the perfect shot set up

I bought the remote control on eBay and it’s literally changed my photo-taking life. I’ve always had to take my tutorial photos by setting up the shot, moving my right hand to press the shutter release while keeping my left hand hand still, then scrambling to get my right hand back into position before the 10-second timer ran down and the picture was taken… Now I can just press the remote button with my toe (minimal dexterity required) at the appropriate time and I don’t need to use the camera’s timer at all. Huge, huge improvement.

Of course, this isn’t the only way, or even the best way, to light for this kind of photography, but it works for me and only cost me 2 cheap IKEA work lamps, 2 clip-on spotlights, and a sheet of bristol board, all of which I already had from my light box (shown below, click through if you’d like details of that too):

So, when you see the clear and helpful pictures in my new book, you’ll know exactly how I managed to take them – I hope this hasn’t ruined the magic! But seriously, if you make tutorials, I hope this little glimpse into my lighting setup has been helpful

I worked so hard all day yesterday (on the secret project) that I was begging myself to do something relaxing and unrelated to work last night, so I got out the polymer clay and started mixing colours to make a Strawberry Poison-Dart Frog like the one that captured my imagination on Life. While we watched a movie on TV, I played with the FIMO and, 2 hours later, this is what I ended up with:

Strawberry poison-dart frogs (Dendrobates pumilio) are found in several colour morphs, but the most common (the one I made) is called Blue Jeans for its blue legs – isn’t that adorable?!

I was aiming for a life-sized sculpture – David Attenborough had said that they are only 1 inch long and I’d written that down in my ‘ideas’ notebook along with my sketch – but I didn’t quite manage that. My frog’s body is 1 1/4″ long and including the legs sticking out to front and back, the finished sculpture is 1 3/4″ long (I have small hands, so it’s probably smaller than these photos make it look).

I’ve surprised myself – I didn’t know I could do this! Yes, it did take me 2 hours, but most of that was spent on the legs. I hadn’t really considered that I’d have to make 16 teeny tiny frog toes until I got to them – not an easy task! I’m happiest with the shaping of the red clay around the eyes – it turned out exactly how I’d hoped.

I think my crafting ’style’ may be to make things so cleanly that they look like they’d be really easy to make, even though they aren’t. I see it in my crochet designs too – I simplify the shapes and colours to make my patterns easy to follow, but it’s finding a way to simplify them but to keep the most important features of whatever I’m trying to make where this ’style’ comes into play.

There seems to be a crossover between the different crafts that I do: I don’t think I could have made this frog without my years of examining the shapes of animals for my crochet patterns. I suppose you could call it an “artist’s eye”, although that sounds a bit pretentious so I won’t do that! But it’s definitely interesting how my experience in one medium is indirectly improving my skill and confidence in a completely different medium.

Maybe I should make a matching frog in crochet and compare the two! What do you think?

My Airedale pattern comes with instructions to give it a fluffy beard, and instructions to make one with just the square muzzle shape and no additional beard (it looks more like an adorable Airedale puppy this way!) so you can take your pick and choose the look you prefer. The AmiDogs Airedale Terrier amigurumi crochet pattern is now available in the PlanetJune shop!

If you're tempted by my AmiDogs patterns (the Airedale is the 14th in the series!) don't forget that when you pick a custom set of your favourite three breeds, you get the third pattern for half price! To take advantage of this, choose the AmiDogs Custom Set listing in the shop (you won’t get the discount if you add three patterns individually to your cart).

Have I missed your favourite breed(s)? I’ll be designing more AmiDogs patterns this year, and I’d love to know in advance which breeds might be popular (although I have a few on my ‘must do’ list already!). If you don’t see your favourites in the little pics above, please leave me a comment with your suggestions and I’ll take them into account when I’m picking new breeds to add to my kennel