Baby Elephant was bored. He wanted to play with his family, but he didn’t know where they were.

He walked through the jungle until he spotted someone. “Aha! Here’s one of my family!” he thought…

But it wasn’t an elephant at all! “I’ll help you find your family,” said Hippo, and they walked on through the jungle.

Soon, they spotted something. “I think I see my family,” called Baby Elephant…

But it wasn’t an elephant, either! Rhino had a big scary horn, but he was friendly and offered to help look for the elephant family.

They walked on until they spotted two more animals. “Are they your family?” asked Hippo and Rhino. But Baby Elephant wasn’t sure…

But, this time, it was his family! The elephants and their new friends celebrated together for the rest of the day.

THE END

In case you hadn’t guessed from the above, I’ve been working hard on some new designs, and now I can finally unveil big brother Elephant and pals, the Hippo and White Rhino:

Click for larger picture

The Elephant, Hippopotamus and Rhinoceros are all made with bulky weight yarn (like the AquaAmi), and are each about 6″ long. The three will form Set 1 of a new range, once I have written up the patterns. I’m going to call them AfricAmi, which gives me plenty of scope for future animal designs - there is a lot of interesting wildlife in Africa! Do you like the name?

I also painted a new backdrop to stage these guys. It took a lot of painting to get the background to stop looking like a big green board and starting to look a little bit like foliage, but I think the end result was worth it.

I hope you enjoyed the story! And look out for the AfricAmi patterns… coming soon to the PlanetJune store

My craft room really needs some decorative interest; it is still completely unaccessorized apart from my glass toy shelves and some origami in the window. So, I’ve decided that I should try to display some more of the things I’ve made, without making the room look too busy and cluttered. This is going to be a long-term project, and I’ll show you my progress as I come up with ideas.

Click for larger image

My supercute felt sea creatures have been homeless for months, so my first task was to find a way to show them off. I sewed up a quick pennant yesterday using the leftover lining fabric from my laptop sleeve, reinforced with some fusible interfacing on the inside back so it won’t stretch under the weight of the animals. I hung each animal on a simple loop of embroidery floss through the topmost blanket stitch, brought the floss ends through to the back of the pennant, and knotted the ends together. The long tall design means it fits perfectly down the side of my bookcase, so it looks good AND fills a space I hadn’t previously considered as useable.

I think having more of my work visible like this will add a lot more personality to the room. Stay tuned for more craft room progress posts

Just a quick post to notify you that the AquaAmi Polar Bear crochet pattern is now available for purchase in the PlanetJune shop. Go on, treat yourself and make your own amigurumi polar bear!

It was really easy - I just traced around an existing skirt, added seam allowance, cut the fabric (I used 100% cotton) on the bias, sewed the sides together, and then sewed a loop of elastic in at the top and hemmed the bottom. The elastic waist gathers the fabric around the top, and you can just pull the skirt on and off.

I decided that I wanted the gathers around the waist to be perfectly even, so I stretched the elastic to the same width as the fabric and then sewed them together. Then I had to stretch it all out again so I could sew down the waistband to hide the elastic. With hindsight, I’ve thought of a much simpler method that will look just about the same and take a fraction of the time.

I’m going to make another skirt with my simpler method - it’s a really cute simple summery skirt and it would work with pretty much any kind of fabric. Would anyone be interested in a tutorial?

I received the You Make My Day award from Alice and Carina. The Arte y Pico award came from Val, Clare, and Jessica, who also passed on the Brillante Weblogs Premio 2008 and 5 Blogs That Make My Day awards.

That’s quite a trophy cabinet! Thank you all very much for picking me, ladies. Now for the fun (and difficult) part - to spread the love to other bloggers. I’m going to keep it short by just picking 5 blogs each for two of the awards (as I couldn’t find the rules for the other two). I’m also not nominating the people who nominated me, although they all deserve the awards too, so please check out the above links to their blogs!

You Make my Day

Rules: Give the award to up to 10 people whose blogs bring you happiness and inspiration and make you feel so happy about blogland! Let them know by posting a comment on their blog so that they can pass it on. Beware! You may get the award several times!

Crafty Ginger
Posie Gets Cozy
Roman Sock
Sewing Stars
U-handblog

Arte y Pico

Rules:
1) You have to pick 5 blogs that you consider deserve this award, creativity, design, interesting material, and also contrubuites to the blogger community, no matter of language.
2) Each award has to have the name of the author and also a link to his or her blog to be visited by everyone.
3) Each award-winning, has to show the award and put the name and link to the blog thathas given her or him the ward itself.
4) Award-winning and the one who has given the prize have to show the link of “Arte y pico” blog, so everyone will know the origin of this award.
5) To show these rules.

A Little Hut
Christy DeKoning
How About Orange
Pink Chalk Studio
Shimandsons

I just finished this one made from an origami pattern that I downloaded and printed onto regular paper - I wanted to review the paper for Folding Trees, and when I coincidentally ended up with 30 squares of the paper, it seemed like a sign that I should make them into a stellated icosahedron (the exact number you need to make this shape):

And my Easter egg this year was a box of mini individually wrapped chocolates. The wrappers were such pretty colours, I decided to trim them into squares and make them into something… It took me a while to eat all 30 chocolates, so I’ve only just finished it! The result wasn’t quite what I expected - the outside looks like a Milka advert:

All the bright colours ended up on the inside of the star, where nobody will ever see them (except in this photo):

I still like the end result though - and Milka does make lovely chocolate, so there are worse things to inadvertently advertise

Here’s my modular origami collection to date:

(Joanna, the top left star uses some of the Japanese papers you gave me - thank you!)

Next, I think I need to find some different designs to fold…

I think I’m in love! He just flowed straight out of the yarn like this - I barely even had time to think about designing an elephant before he was there.

He’s crocheted from one of the new ‘heather’ shades of Bernat Satin
- have you seen them? I’m really excited about these new shades! They would make lovely colours for clothing too, and Satin is so soft I’d probably be happy with it against my skin, unlike Vanna’s Choice, which has some gorgeous colours, but isn’t quite as soft as I’d like.

Now back to the elephant: I’ve made him very small for a specific purpose - he’s going to be getting a big brother for the pattern version

Polar Bear will be part of my AquaAmi range; you’ll see from my fun facts below that he is an appropriate member of the AquaAmi family, even though he doesn’t live in the water all the time…

Here’s what my polar bear research uncovered:

• The polar bear is the largest land predator, at typically 2-3m long
• He is insulated against the freezing conditions of his Arctic habitat with a thick layer of blubber (fat), black skin, and two layers of hair
• He is adapted for swimming with a longer, more streamlined shape than other bears, and small ears that lay flat under water
• Big powerful front paws make him a strong swimmer, but also come in handy for swiping prey and for distributing his weight when walking on ice!

If you’d like to be notified when the AquaAmi Polar Bear pattern is available for purchase, please sign up for my mailing list.

Here’s a taster of my amigurumi polar bear. He’ll get a full post of his own with more photos, more details and some interesting polar bear facts, but here’s a pic to keep you going for tonight:

This polar bear is the latest design for my AquaAmi collection. I’ve never seen a toy polar bear in the standing position before, but to me this is the classic polar bear pose, so it was the obvious choice for my design.

Now back to the real subject for this post: I want to thank everyone who entered my 2nd blogiversary contest. Your comments were so kind and thoughtful - you really know how to make a girl feel special. Over the next week or so, I’ll go through all the comments and make a note of all your suggestions and check out all your blogs too - I’m sure I’ll discover some new (to me) gems this way

After sifting through an amazing 153 comments on the contest post, I’ve filtered them into 2 numbered lists in Word - one for the pattern entries and one for the mouse entries. As I’ve had 90 entries for the pattern and only 53 entries for the mouse, I’ve decided to commemorate this 200th post by drawing an extra winner for the pattern contest - yay!

I’m using the Random.org to select the lucky winners from my Word lists:

So without further ado, the two pattern winners are:

• #47 Barbara Liedtke
• #85 falwyn

Ladies, I will e-mail you both to notify you personally and to find out which pattern you’d each like to select for your prize.

And the PocketAmi mouse goes to:

• #12 Josefin

Josefin, I’ll be e-mailing you to get your mailing address so I can send your mousey out to you - I hope you’ll give him a good home in Sweden Please post a picture of him on your blog after he gets to you!

Congratulations to all three winners! And thanks to all the other entrants too - you’ve given me some great ideas to take me into year 3 of PlanetJune.

There is a huge variety of crafts that can be made from a humble piece of paper: origami, paper art, quilling, papercutting, recycled paper crafts - to name just a few. Our aim with Folding Trees is to collect the best tutorials we have found on the net, inspire people by highlighting amazing paper creations from talented artists and crafters, and share our own paper crafts and tutorials.

On the site today, I am sharing a tutorial to make these puffy origami lucky stars from strips cut from magazine pages:

We invite people to share links to their own tutorials or point us to inspirational paper crafts they have seen. Everyone is also welcome to join the Folding Trees Flickr group and share photos of all their crafty paper projects with us! We will feature some of the submissions on the site.

Eve and I hope you’ll like our new project, and we’re looking forward to seeing you at FoldingTrees.com!