Amigurumi Beach Ball is a fun no-sew pattern for summer – or for any time of year!

• Make a play ball for the kids, a set of juggling balls, or a stress ball to play with at your desk.
• Make it interactive by adding a squeaker, rattle or bell when you stuff it.
• Stuff it with plastic pellets to make your ball into a bean bag or hacky sack.

For this pattern, crisp colour changes are essential, and I’ve come up with a special new technique (a variant of my invisible increase) that makes the colour changes look extra neat at the increase points, plus I’ve included lots of tips for dealing with the yarn as you go – there’s no cutting or knot-tying required!

This pattern is great for using up scraps of brightly-coloured yarn! You can choose any 6 colours of yarn for this pattern, and the main colour you choose will also be the colour of the top and bottom circles on the beach ball. I made my main beach ball (above) in light worsted weight yarns (Bernat Satin and Red Heart Soft) with an E US/3.5mm hook, using ‘classic beach ball’ saturated colours.

I also made a second beach ball (below, left) from Patons Grace, a sport weight mercerized cotton, with a C US/2.75mm hook and whatever colours I happened to have in my stash. This gave me a slightly smaller ball (2.5″ vs 2.75″), and I love how it looks in the cotton too!

Both balls are a great size for playing with, juggling, etc.

And can I just mention that I designed this pattern very carefully, so the bottom of the ball looks just as good as the top! Look:

Yep, these are the bottoms of the balls! They look good from all sides 🙂

As I like to reward people who choose to donate for my donationware patterns, the PDF version of the Amigurumi Beach Ball pattern also includes additional tips and photos that you’ll only find in the PDF version (including instructions for how to fix any too-tight stitches on your finished ball), and the crochet instructions are all included on one printer-friendly page, so you can save paper and ink by printing only that page.

As always, the pattern is free for you to use online, and you need only donate if you’d like to thank me for my time in creating it, or if you’d like the easy-to-print PDF version with the bonuses.

Go to the free Amigurumi Beach Ball pattern >>

Or jump straight to donate:

Order the Amigurumi Beach Ball pattern >>

Not ready to make one yet? Add this pattern to your Ravelry queue:

Summer Fun CAL

If you’re about to make a beach ball, why not join a relaxed PlanetJune crochetalong (CAL) while you make it? The rules of the Summer Fun CAL are simple: make any PlanetJune pattern in July or August 2022, and share photos of what you’re making!

Here’s a selection of quick and/or summery PlanetJune patterns to give you some ideas…

If you want to join in with the community and see what everyone else is making, come and hang out in the Summer Fun CAL thread in the PlanetJune group on Ravelry or the #crochetalongs channel on the PlanetJune Discord server.

You can also join in by posting your pics on your social media, and remember to tag me (@planetjune) so I can see what you’ve been making!

I hope to see lots of Beach Balls in different colourways and yarns this summer – this is going to be fun 🙂

This is your last call to order from my Crochet Tools shop before it closes tomorrow (Wednesday) night.

If you’re reading this after June 15th, click here to sign up to be notified next time the shop opens!

Below, I’ll give you a quick rundown of what I have on offer this time – the classic PlanetJune tools plus exclusive new products! I only open the tool shop once or twice a year*, so if anything catches your eye, please don’t wait – get your order in now before the shop closes…

(And if you’ve already placed an order but want to grab something else while you have the chance, I’d be happy to combine your orders and refund you for the second shipping charge – just let me know!)

Detail Stuffing Tools

The ever-popular PlanetJune-exclusive stuffing tools are back, in all 5 cheerful colours:

The Detail Stuffing Tool lets you get a grip on your stuffing, stuff the tiniest pieces and stuff right into the corners with ease. Don’t miss out on your chance to grab my bestselling tool that’s already an essential for thousands of amigurumi makers!

Detail Stuffing Tool Handles

If you’ve ever wished your stuffing tool was just that little bit longer or stronger, the Detail Stuffing Tool Handle is just what you need! Made from high quality aluminium, the handle is strong, lightweight, rustproof, and will last a lifetime. Note: At their low introductory price, these have been selling like hotcakes!

The Detail Stuffing Tool Handle is available as a Standard 4″/10cm length (pictured above), an Extra-Long 6″/15cm version, or a value pack of both lengths. They give your tool added strength and longevity, plus over an inch (Standard) or three inches (Extra-Long) of extra length, so you can place your stuffing further into your amigurumi with ease.

PlanetJune Enamel Pins

I’m thrilled to be able to bring my first pin designs to you! PlanetJune Enamel Pins are high quality, wearable and collectable. Pin them to your jacket, your backpack or your project bag, decorate your cork board, or add them to your pin collection.

Choose between the stylish PlanetJune Logo pin, a precious baby sea turtle on the Turtle Beach pin, or a value pack including one of each pin!

Vinyl Stickers & FREE Signed Bookmarks

Show your PlanetJune love with a premium vinyl sticker that will stick on any flat surface! Stick it on your notebook, your laptop, your coffee mug, even your car’s bumper…

And, by request, here’s another chance to pick up a free signed Collector’s Edition bookmark to go with your collectible copy of my out-of-print first book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Amigurumi. (And if you don’t own the book but still want a signed bookmark, that’s fine too – I have plenty left, and I’d be happy to sign one for you!) This bookmark is totally free with the purchase of anything else from my Crochet Tools shop, or, if you don’t need anything else, you’ll just pay the cost of a stamped envelope.

More Crochet Tools

PlanetJune Stitch Markers are back in extra-strong black plastic with a wider opening, but still with the same rounded tip that won’t snag your yarn, a secure clasp that won’t pop open accidentally, a large enough size (3cm/1.2″) to be able to open and close easily, and a super-cute safety pin shape. Sold in a set of 5.

Needles in Flip-Top Pebble Cases – finally, the perfect way to store your needles so you won’t lose them! The stylish flip-top Pebble container is smooth and flat and easy to slip into your project bag, but large enough not to be mislaid. Each high quality needle slides into its own space in the Pebble, so it’s easy to see if you’ve forgotten to replace it after use. Available in three varieties:

• The Knitters Pebble (jade) includes 3 large assorted yarn needles for weaving in the yarn ends on your crochet or knitting projects.
• The Tapestry Pebble (lavender) includes 6 assorted tapestry needles for embroidery (including embroidering faces on your amigurumi!)
• The Household Pebble (pink) includes 12 assorted general hand sewing needles for emergency repairs or any other sewing projects.

That’s everything! You can find them all on one convenient page in the Crochet Tools shop, so do head over and have a browse – but please be quick, the shop closes tomorrow night. ⏰

* In case you’re wondering why I don’t keep the shop open all the time, this isn’t a marketing ploy – it’s just not logistically possible for me. Canada Post’s only international shipping option is slow, expensive and untracked, so I use a cross-border shipping service instead. It’s faster, cheaper, and includes tracking as standard, but to use that I have to ship all my orders at once, in a single batch. So now you know: there is a good reason!

I’ve had such great feedback about my worsted weight yarn comparison chart – being able to tell in advance which yarns are likely to work well together if you mix them within the same project is so helpful! It would have been worth making the chart just for myself, but I’m so glad to know you’re finding it useful too.

But there was something missing from my comparison – all of my samples so far have been from North American yarn lines. I often have questions from UK- and European-based customers who don’t have access to the same yarns, and I’d love to be able to offer some alternatives that are more readily available to them, so I asked my favourite UK- based online yarn store, Wool Warehouse, if they’d collaborate with me on this project. They generously provided samples of all the UK and European 100% acrylic worsted (aran) weight yarns they carry, so I could test them and add them to my chart for you – isn’t that great?

New Yarn Samples

New additions: Cygnet Aran, James C Brett Super Soft Baby Aran, King Cole Big Value Aran, Scheepjes Chunky Monkey, Sirdar Hayfield Bonus Aran, Sirdar Snuggly Supersoft Aran, Stylecraft Special Aran, Stylecraft Special for Babies Aran

You’ll see that all these yarns are called ‘aran’. This is where things get a bit unclear with the terminology differences between countries: technically, aran weight yarn should be equivalent to heavy worsted weight, so we’d expect that all these yarns would end up on the right-hand side of my chart. But in the UK, all medium weight #4 yarn is called ‘aran’ instead of ‘worsted weight’, so that may not be the case…

And that’s why I like to test and compare, not just go by the information on the ball band. In fact, it turns out that some of these aran yarns are equivalent to a light worsted weight yarn, proving once again that worsted (and aran!) weight yarns are not all the same.

Testing the Yarns

I wound yarn bobbins to add to my reference collection, and compared samples to figure out where each of these additional yarns belongs in the table.

This addition to the chart will be so valuable for crocheters (and all yarn crafters) based in the UK and Europe, who often don’t have access to the worsted weight yarns we have here in North America. Now if you buy a pattern that recommends a specific US yarn, and you want yours to look as close as possible, you’ll be able to see which yarns are the closest match!

And vice versa – if you, like me, have been curious about the yarns our UK/Euro friends use (and maybe want to order some that we can’t find in the craft stores here), here’s a way to find out which US yarns they most resemble!

I was most excited to find that I finally have the first entry in my ‘soft and thick’ category – usually, the softer worsted yarns tend to be thinner, and the sturdier yarns tend to be thicker. But Scheepjes Chunky Monkey yarn is a very heavy worsted weight and it’s also very soft and shiny – that’s a first for me!

Download the Comparison Chart

I’ve categorised all the other new (to me) yarns too, and you can find the results in my updated Worsted Weight Yarn Comparison.

Both the online and downloadable versions of the chart have now been updated, so, if you’ve already ‘bought’ the downloadable version (it’s a free product in my shop – no charge), there’s no need to order it again; as with all your PlanetJune orders, you can re-download the PDF from your PlanetJune account at any time to get the latest version.

About Wool Warehouse

This addition to the comparison chart wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Wool Warehouse! I’ve been a customer of Wool Warehouse for years (every time I visited my family in the UK, I’d place an order for some interesting-looking yarns that I don’t have access to where I live). It feels like a real treat to receive my orders, as they always come beautifully packaged in organza drawstring bags, which I reuse as project bags or to help organise my stash.

It feels like my birthday when I open a Wool Warehouse package!

Wool Warehouse is based in the UK but ships worldwide, and I see that they also stock a selection of common US yarns, so if you’re outside North America and want to try some of the amigurumi standards (Bernat Satin, Caron Simply Soft, Lion Brand Vanna’s Choice, Red Heart Soft, etc), this is a convenient way for you to do that too.

Thanks so much, Wool Warehouse, for helping me (and all of us!) with this project 🙂

Adding to this List

I want this resource to be as useful and complete as possible, so I’m always happy to compare and add more samples of 100% acrylic worsted weight yarns. If your favourite amigurumi yarns don’t appear in the list, there are instructions for how you can send me a sample on the ww yarn comparison page.

(And, if you’re a yarn manufacturer or distributor and would like me to include your yarns, please get in touch. I’m always happy to receive new yarns to try, and they may even end up being used in a future PlanetJune design as well as being added to the chart!)

I hope you’ll find this update useful, and if you haven’t grabbed the downloadable Worsted Weight Yarn Comparison chart yet, please do – it’s completely free, no strings attached!

I’d never force you to sign up for my newsletter, for example – although if you want to do that too, I’d be delighted 😉

Today I have a brand new PlanetJune crochet pattern to share with you. I’ve been wanting to make a realistic Squirrel crochet pattern for a long time, and it’s turned out just as cute as I’d hoped!

Which is your favourite? It doesn’t matter – you can make both!

I started this design during the Ravellenic Games, but I had to set it aside for a while – it took 6 prototypes to get that perfect squirrel tail, but I’m so glad I stuck with it. All those curves are built right in, and I love the result 🙂

Squirrel Fun Facts

Note: If you hear an animal called just a ‘squirrel’ that means it’s a tree squirrel, but there are also other types of squirrel (ground squirrels and flying squirrels). My pattern, and these fun facts, specifically relate to tree squirrels!

• Squirrels are rodents that are found all over the world.
• They live in trees and eat nuts, seeds and berries.
• Squirrels have long bushy tails that help them to balance as they run and jump through the trees.
• Their tails are also used to keep them warm in winter, and for communication. For example, they flick their tails rapidly when they sense danger!
• Squirrels hoard their food, and hide caches of nuts and seeds in trees or buried in the ground.

About the Design

With this design, my goal was to capture the smooth curves of the essential squirrel pose: perfectly balanced while standing up on its back legs with its beautiful bushy tail curving up behind it.

The front legs are crocheted right into the body, so there are very few parts to assemble at the end, and you can choose to attach the head at any angle, to give your squirrel its own personality – will your squirrel be cute and bashful, or bold and inquisitive?

I’ve included two versions in this pattern: a standard Grey Squirrel (aka Eastern Gray Squirrel):

…and an adorable European Red Squirrel with long tufted ears:

Ideas for variations:

• Despite their names, ‘grey’ squirrels can be brownish, black, orange or white as well as grey, and ‘red’ squirrels vary from orange through deep red to black, so you have lots of colour choices, even if you want to make a realistically-coloured squirrel.
• Although I designed both my squirrels to use regular yarn, you can brush your squirrel’s tail before assembly to give it a fluffy, furry look (and you can brush the tips of the red squirrel’s ear tufts too!) See my brushed crochet tutorial for instructions.

About the Pattern

The Squirrel pattern includes 4 pages of step-by-step bonus info in 2 two-page appendices (for both right- and left-handers) that clearly explain my innovative method for joining the front legs and body while you crochet so they sit at exactly the right angle in the finished squirrel.

If you’ve made any of my AmiCats, you’ll already be familiar with the concept of this technique and how well it works – the assembly method is the same here, although of course the squirrel shape is very different!

Buy Now

Ready to get started? Pick up my Squirrel crochet pattern  from my shop right now. Or, if you’re not ready to make it just yet, add it to your Ravelry queue or favourites so you don’t forget about it:

By the way, I’m sure you know that squirrels love to gather and hoard their pine cones – and mine are no exception! My Pine Cone Collection pattern is now officially squirrel-approved 😉

I hope you’ll love my Squirrel pattern and will start making your own adorable squirrels right away. And please do let me know what you think of them!

This is a quick announcement to let you know that I’ve just updated my ebook, The Complete Guide to Giant Amigurumi.

What’s New?

I’ve added 2 new pages of instructional techniques (what to do if your original amigurumi pattern has wired limbs, and how to add an optional lining to contain the stuffing), and an inspiration gallery page with all the giant ami I’ve made since I first published the book (7 new additions!) with any special tips I have for each one.

Newly added: my technique for replacing the wire in an amigurumi that’s intended to have wired legs, like my gecko!

Free Update!

If you’ve previously purchased The Complete Guide to Giant Amigurumi, your licence entitles you to a lifetime of free updates! Your download link in your original order has been updated, so please log back into your PlanetJune account and re-download the PDF file to get the latest version. 🙂

Get Started with Giant Amigurumi

If you’re just beginning your Giant Amigurumi journey, this is the perfect time to grab your guidebook for this adventure!

You can upsize almost any amigurumi pattern with the techniques in The Complete Guide to Giant Amigurumi and get an irresistibly cuddly, adorable result. You’ll learn how to take a normal amigurumi pattern and enlarge it by 3 to 4 times to make a giant huggable amigurumi! All you need is your favourite pattern, a 15mm hook, and a super-bulky yarn, and you’ll be ready to start.

I’ll guide you through every step along the way, from choosing your materials and learning how to work giant stitches, to stuffing, assembly and embellishment, and more. Everything is explained in my usual detail, with clear, close-up photos and instructions.

Giant amis are so fun and satisfying to make (and you can also apply all the techniques to Mini Giant amigurumi if you don’t want to scale up as far as full giant size).

I doubt this is the end of my giant amigurumi explorations, so there may well be another updated version of my ebook in a few more years, if I develop any more new techniques and tips to share with you – I love that there’s always more to discover on my crochet journey!

In the meantime, I hope you’ll find this update useful, and I wish you happy giant amigurumi making. 🙂

I’m so happy to present another new design that was many years in the making: the Barn Owl!

Barn Owls are my favourite owl, and adding a Barn Owl option to my Owl Collection was always part of my plan. Out of interest, I thought I’d look back at my digital notes to see how long it’s taken to bring it to life…

I first came up with the seeds of this idea in March 2014. It took until 2017 (and a whole year of prototyping) to figure out the unique shaping for the smooth lines and minimal sewing of the main Owl Collection design, but I couldn’t quite get the barn owl right… At that time, I said:

Fun Fact: Owls are divided into two families: Strigidae (typical owls) and Tytonidae (barn owls). With this pattern, you can choose appropriate colours to make any of the typical (true) owls.

Note: I’d love to design a barn owl too, but to make it look right it’d need lots of colour changes and special shaping to make the distinctive heart-shaped face, so that’s a challenge I’ll have to save for some future point in time!

I’m so glad I decided to publish the single-colour owls in June 2017 instead of waiting for the inspiration to finish the barn owl as well, because it took another 5 years to figure out how to add the barn owl’s distinctive facial features and get the colour changes that run all the way down the body just right!

Whoooo’s this then?! My owls are delighted that their beautiful cousin, the Barn Owl, has joined them to complete the owl family.

Barn Owl Fun Facts

• There are species of barn owl living almost all over the world.
• It’s easy to recognise a barn owl by its heart-shaped facial disc and dark eyes.
• The facial disc isn’t just an attractive feature! It helps barn owls to locate their prey by funneling sounds to their ears when they are hunting.
• Unlike typical owls, barn owls don’t hoot: they have a loud shrieking cry.
• Barn owls hunt at night, and they are often mistaken for ghosts when people see a white face with staring black eyes floating above the ground!

About the Pattern

Barn Owl is an Expansion Pack for my Owl Collection pattern, and includes all the modifications required to crochet a Barn Owl with realistic face shape and markings.

Although it’s only an Expansion Pack, there’s a lot to this pattern – the special stitches that make the raised part of the face are all crocheted while you make the head, so I’ve included right- and left-handed appendices that walk you through exactly where and how to make those stitches so your barn owl will be perfect!

Aside from the colouring and facial features, the Barn Owl has all the same features as the Owl Collection – the smooth, seamless head, body, wings and legs, giving you the perfect elegant owl posture with minimal assembly.

(And btw, I’ve also updated the Owl Collection pattern in my new publishing software so both patterns will match, so you may as well re-download it too if you’ve already bought it! The new layout doesn’t look very different, but it’s higher quality, and all the round numbers are bolded to make for easier reading.)

What is an Expansion Pack?

• An Expansion Pack is an add-on to an existing PlanetJune pattern.
• The Expansion Pack lets you modify or add to the original pattern to create something else.
• You cannot use the Expansion Pack alone – you must also purchase the original pattern in order to be able to complete the pictured items in the Expansion Pack pattern.

Links to Buy

You can buy the Barn Owl Expansion Pack for only $3.50 individually from the shop, or, if you haven’t yet bought the Owl Collection pattern, you can buy the multipack of both owl patterns, and save 50c on the pair.

Not ready to make it yet? Add Barn Owl to your queue on Ravelry:

Although it’s ridiculous how long some of my designs take to be birthed, I’m so happy I waited until I could do justice to the gorgeous Barn Owl – this design is exactly what I pictured in my head, eight years ago…

I hope you’ll love it too!

I had a request earlier this week in the PlanetJune Discord group to modify my Love Hearts pattern to look like the Ukrainian flag, and that was a request I just couldn’t refuse.

I thought it would be simple, but I made prototypes to figure out the straightest line…

It’s *not* what you’d think – crochet stitches aren’t straight, so the straightest line is not formed from a symmetrical pattern…

And then more prototypes to figure out whether hook size affects the straightness of the colour change line (it does – smaller is better) and the best way to manage the yarns with all the colour changes…

Cut-and-tie gives the cleanest result on the front, but a messy back with lots of yarn ends to deal with. Tapestry crochet (working over the unused colour with every stitch) gives a neat front and back, with only two yarn ends from each colour to weave in, but the unworked yarn colour is slightly visible between the stitches (especially in the yellow half).

After several rounds of prototyping, the final pattern is ready for you, in flat and puffy versions, with colour change recommendations for how to get the best balance of appearance, speed, and simplicity.

Please use this pattern however you wish, and especially to make hearts in the colour of the Ukrainian flag to show your support during this crisis. You can also sell hearts to fundraise (look for an accredited humanitarian aid charity in your country).

Go to the Two-Tone Heart crochet pattern >>

There’s something about giant amigurumi that’s just so appealing. I love how quickly you can make a huge soft toy or decoration! So on December 1st I tweeted:

I may have just decided to crochet a giant purple mushroom and a giant blue gecko… These seem like entirely reasonable and useful items that need to exist in the world, right?

The reason for those colours? I had lots of random blanket yarn that I bought last year from the yarn factory outlet store without considering that the colours I like for clothing etc (purples, blues, etc) don’t really translate into useful colours for a lot of amigurumi (lots of browns and neutrals)…

Blanket yarn is so bulky, it takes up a lot of storage space, so keeping a stash of giant yarn isn’t the best idea. This plan would use up a good chunk of my blanket yarn stash, and all I’d need to buy is one ball of white for the mushroom stalk!

And here are the results:

Giant Mushroom

My Giant Mushroom uses mushroom design ‘C’ from my Mushroom Collection crochet pattern, and less than one ball each of the cap and stalk yarn colours.

I love how the giant gills turned out. The head was initially flopping about far too much for my liking, so I unstitched the cap from the base and used the technique for stiffening stuffed pieces (from my Giant Amigurumi ebook) to fix it.

Giant Gecko

My Giant Gecko gave me some problems at first – after using the yardage calculator from my giant amigurumi ebook, I realised I didn’t have enough of any single yarn colour to make the whole gecko. I didn’t want to buy more yarn for my stashbusting project, so I decided to base my gecko (very loosely) on a neon day gecko – lime head, aqua body, teal legs.

I was very uncertain about this project when I’d crocheted all the pieces but not yet assembled anything – I was pretty sure it was going to look terrible! But I’d forgotten the PlanetJune maxim:

Trust The Pattern

…I give this advice all the time, but forgot to take it myself!

Lots of my designs can look weird and wrong when you’re partway through making them, but if you just trust the pattern and follow along with all the steps, it magically comes together in the end. (That’s why I often need to tweak my prototypes multiple times before everything comes together in a way that looks deceptively simple in the final pattern. )

And yes, my gecko turned out just like I’d originally imagined he would:

I kept my fingers crossed that I’d be able to make the legs work without the original pipe cleaners inside them – imagine how large the pipe cleaners would have to be to work for a 3-ft long gecko! With normal amigurumi, you can skip the wires in the legs and just stitch the legs into a fixed bent position, but I wasn’t sure that technique would hold up with this size and weight.

Although my giant gecko’s legs won’t support his weight, they don’t have to – his belly touches the floor and the legs just stick out to the sides, so there was no problem in the end. He looks pretty realistic considering he’s 9 times larger than a real neon day gecko!

Giant Tortoise

And then there’s my Giant Tortoise! I actually made him at the same time I made all the normal-sized tortoises for my Tortoise pattern, but I never got around to showing him to you.

He looks very similar to a real-life giant tortoise in shape and size – I love him so much! And isn’t he cute with all the ‘baby’ (aka regular-sized) tortoises?!

I didn’t make any changes at all to the pattern except for scaling up the hook and yarn to Giant size and using my standard Giant Amigurumi techniques.

Thanks to the double construction of the shell with the crocheted body inside, there’s nowhere with gaps for the stuffing to be exposed, and the finished tortoise is satisfyingly sturdy – as you can see, I sometimes use him as a footrest!

Crochet your Own Giant Amigurumi

Have I tempted you to try giant amigurumi for the first time? My ebook,The Complete Guide to Giant Amigurumi, will give you all my tips and tricks for upscaling a regular amigurumi pattern to giant size.

And here are the links to my crochet patterns for all the patterns I used here:

• Mushroom Collection
• Gecko
• Tortoise

Please send me a photo if you upscale any of my patterns – I always love to see the results! You can find me everywhere as @planetjune 🙂