PlanetJune Blog: Latest News, Patterns and Tutorials

My Brachiosaurus, Stegosaurus and Triceratops crochet patterns are now available to purchase individually or as a value-priced multipack from the PlanetJune shop.

With no colour changes, they work up quickly, and at 9-11″ long and nice and chunky, they would make great children’s toys. Who doesn’t know a little boy or girl who’d be delighted with a set of these to play with?

Brachiosaurus

Stegosaurus

Triceratops

I’ve also been making some changes in the PlanetJune store:

Eyes: Now you can conveniently shop for the perfect eyes for your creations while you’re picking out your patterns, with my range of black animal eyes available in all sizes.

Custom AmiDogs sets: This feature has been requested a lot! Now you can mix and match to create your own AmiDogs set of three patterns for the same price as the standard sets.

New categories: I’ve recategorized my patterns so it’s easier to find what you’re looking for.

Donationware patterns: All the donationware patterns are now available in the shop, so, in future, if you’d like the printable PDF of any of my free patterns, you can send me your donation in the same way as a pattern order, and then download your pattern(s) immediately.

So please feel free to take a look around the shop and see if anything catches your eye!

UPDATE: The Dinos have been featured on One Pretty Thing, Carina’s Craftblog and Roman Sock – thanks so much, guys!

Thanks so much to everyone who commented on my ring-tailed lemur! It looks like there is demand for a pattern, so I’ll get started on that shortly.

In the meantime, I thought it was time to try something a bit different, so I’ve been making… Dinosaurs! I think a lot of my patterns are more appealing to girls than to boys, and I wanted to redress the balance a bit here:

Click for the full-size image

These dinosaurs are: Brachiosaurus (green), Stegosaurus (blue/grey), and Triceratops (orange). They are all herbivores – in fact, you might remember the brachiosaurus as the ‘veggiesaurus’ from Jurassic Park. They are nice and chunky so they would be good as toys to play with, and they are all between 9″ and 11″ long.

I’ve tried to make each species as distinct as possible, without adding too much detail that would be difficult to crochet. These will definitely not be advanced patterns! I’m especially pleased with the head and neck of the brachiosaurus – it’s all crocheted in one piece! And the body and tail of each are worked in one piece too, which helps to reduce the amount of sewing required.

I used Lion Brand Vanna’s Choice yarn for the first time in these designs. I love the muted colours in the range, and it’s nice and heavy for a worsted weight yarn, so it makes a good firm fabric (great for amigurumi!)

I’m hoping to have the dinosaur patterns up in the next few days. The lemur will take a bit longer. If you’d like to know when either are available, sign up for my mailing list and you’ll be among the first to know 🙂

There’s potential for quite a few more designs in this range, but I’ll see how popular these initial three are before I design any more. What do you think of them?

Time to reveal the design I was working on at the Creativ Festival. It’s a Ring-tailed Lemur:

Lemurs hail from the island of Madagascar, off the southeast coast of Africa. Madagascar’s geographical isolation has led to a unique ecosystem of unusual animals and plants, of which lemurs are probably the most well-known.

Lemurs are the Madagascan equivalent of monkeys, but they are prosimians – more primitive than the monkeys and apes found elsewhere in the world. There are over 90 species of lemurs in Madagascar!

Ring-tailed lemurs are characterized by their distinctive long black and white striped tail and a cat-like appearance. You may recognize them from the Madagascar animated movies or the Animal Planet show Lemur Street/Lemur Kingdom.

Would anyone be interested in a Ring-Tailed Lemur pattern? It would be slightly more advanced than my usual patterns. Specifically, the colour changes in the head (3 different colours) and the shaping of the back legs are a little more advanced than my other patterns. I’ve taken step-by-step photos to demonstrate the trickier parts, but I’d like to know if there’s any interest before I edit all the photos and write it up.

Please leave me a comment if you like my lemur, or if you’d like me to write up the pattern!

UPDATED: The pattern is now available in my shop 🙂

Okay, so I did a little test this weekend to establish what punchneedle is all about and whether it would be something I could design patterns for. This is my test piece – you may recognise the subjects as my Fuzzy Penguin and Fuzzy Seal 🙂 It’s approx 3.5″x 2.25″ and worked with 3 strands of DMC embroidery floss.

For this sample, I wanted to figure out what kind of designs would look best, so I designed the penguin to be not outlined, and the seal with an outline. I’ve learned a few things about designing for punchneedle:

• Not outlining looks best – the outline looks a bit uneven in places because it’s only 1 loop thick
• Tiny detail is difficult to replicate (e.g. the seal’s nose)
• Bold colours and patterns will look really good

But I can see a lot of potential here. I learnt that punchneedle is really easy to do, and it’s so fast compared with cross stitch! I punched the penguin and seal in under an hour and a half – and it was my first attempt, so that includes my slow start as I tried to learn how to punch correctly. The background took a bit longer, but it’s so relaxing and you don’t have to concentrate much, so it’s perfect to punch away while you watch TV.

UPDATE: By request, adding a close-up pic so you can see what the stitches look like:

L: Back of piece: looks like regular backstitched embroidery
R: Front of piece (edge on): lots of loops. Mine are 3mm tall but the tool lets you adjust the loop length to much longer

Now I’ve finished the experiment, I can visualize a whole series of designs… I think a range of dog breeds would be so cute, and also a wild animal range (giraffe, panda, etc). You could use them to make quilt squares (just add a fabric border), embellishments for bags etc, or just to frame.

Now my questions to you…

1. Are you intrigued by punchneedle? Would you like me to put up a basic tutorial so you can see how it works?
2. Might you be interested in PlanetJune punchneedle designs? (They would, of course, be better than my test piece above – I’m thinking more realistic and colourful)

I’m obviously still in the planning stages here, but I’d love some early feedback before I embark on a design range. I’m not asking for any kind of commitment; just your opinion. It’s a cheap craft to get into; once you’ve bought the actual needle, an embroidery hoop, and some woven fabric, then all you need to pick up for each project is the floss colours.

If there’s no interest, I’ll still make some for myself, just for fun, but I really think this is another craft that just needs a little updating with some fresh, cute patterns to be relevant to us. All the patterns I’ve seen are a bit too, um, country (is that the right word?) for my taste.

Please let me know what you think! Any comments welcome.

My ‘Ice Cream Bear’ crochet pattern made his debut in the Summer 2008 issue of A Needle Pulling Thread magazine, but if you don’t have a copy of the magazine, I’m happy to announce that the pattern is now available to purchase directly from the PlanetJune shop.

I designed Ice Cream Bear to have the timeless look of a classic toy teddy bear. I chose a boucle yarn, which masks the stitches in the finished bear – people are amazed to hear he is crocheted! If the thought of working with boucle intimidates you, you could substitute any bulky weight yarn, which would give your bear a more standard amigurumi look.

By the way, these are the first pics taken with my new camera! So far, so good (although there’s a bit of a learning curve!)

I chose to make a cherry ice cream for my bear, but you could easily make cookies & cream (brown chunks on cream) or mint choc chip (brown chunks on green) or any other flavour of ice cream. Mmm, all this talk of ice cream is making me hungry!

It’s always summer with Ice Cream Bear around. I hope you like him!

Wow, it’s May already! I’ve been officially self-employed for 4 months now, so I thought it was time for an update on how the first third of 2009 went.

It’s funny how things work out: I’ve been so busy with other projects that I really haven’t had a chance to try to build my business at all! January to March was basically filled with writing my upcoming book, Paper Chains & Garlands, and most of April was taken up with preparation for the Creativ Festival.

In between all that, I’ve only managed to publish a handful of new crochet patterns:

L-R: African Violets, Mop Top Mascots, Basic Rose, Alpaca, PocketAmi Easter

But now it’s May, and I have nothing on the horizon, so I finally have time to come up with lots of new designs – yay! Not that I’m short of ideas, but if you have any requests or suggestions, please let me know…

Other business news: I’ve just invested in a DSLR camera (a Sony A200) to help improve my product photography. My old camera had issues with grainy noise in low light situations, so in the past I’ve had to spend a lot of time cleaning up my photos before they are good enough to publish. I’m hoping the new camera will let me get clear, sharp shots without much post-processing, which (once I’ve learnt how to use the camera!) will free up more time for other things.

And I’ve also just made a new homepage that fits in better with the style of PlanetJune. I’d love to freshen up my entire website with a new style, but that’ll have to be a longer-term project!

Old: oops, total disconnect with the rest of my site…

New and improved: matches my blog, and bonus orang pic!

Oh, and one more thing: I was interviewed about amigurumi and romanticism for the latest issue of Yareah magazine. Check out my article online.

This basic rose pattern is a perfect introduction to crocheted flowers, and it’s so versatile – make it in any size and colour you like!

Here are some ideas for use:

• Use the optional stem pattern below to create a whole vase of roses
• Stitch a pin to the back of a rose to make a pretty brooch
• Accessorize a bag by sewing on a couple of roses
• Sew or glue a small rose to a hair clip or plastic hairband

UPDATE: I forgot to mention these would also make a perfect Mother’s Day gift!

Continue to the Basic Rose crochet pattern.

I meant to post this yesterday, but I was just too tired to write coherently! The show was a great success – I met loads of lovely people, made some money, and managed to stay awake and reasonably alert through all three wonderful, exhausting days 🙂

My table. The orang utan got a lot of attention!

You can’t really see it in the photo, but I did wear the tiny blue rose hair clip. And if you look carefully just in front of my right arm, you may catch a black and white peek at my latest design-in-progress on the table. More on that next week, most likely…

I was tweeting from the show whenever I had a spare minute (so not very often). Being able to communicate any interesting personal news immediately is one of the most appealing things about Twitter, and I loved being able to read the replies on my phone in quiet moments!

My Who’s Who in the Crochet Zoo was a fun talk – I brought along 15 different animals in all shapes, sizes and yarn types, and tried to share some of my knowledge and tips. I had 15-20 attendees and I think they enjoyed it too.

My Crochet a Decorative Rose class on Saturday also had about 15-20 people (I was too busy teaching to count). On Sunday, though, the same class was insanely popular – people were lining up 1/2 hr early to get tickets, and it sold out within minutes! I felt like a crochet rock star! I’m still working on the pattern for the roses, but it’ll be up here in the next day or two, so if you wanted to come to my class but couldn’t get a ticket, check back here soon…

I’ll also be sending out a thank you discount code to everyone who has signed up for my mailing list, so if you’re not on my list yet, you might want to sign up now so you can take advantage of the discount!

Hmm, what else can I tell you about the show? Oh yes, the new business cards! I put out both new designs (Discworld and Guinea Pigs) and the old ‘classic’ style cards, and people took whichever they liked best. It looks like around 50 each of the Discworld and classic cards were taken, and close to 100 of the Guinea Pig cards, so I think going for the cute eye-catching card designs was worth it! I’d like to think that people might pin them to their noticeboard instead of throwing them away as soon as they got home…

The old card is top right – see how much more eye-catching the new ones are? (All the info is still there – it’s just printed on the back)

I didn’t really get much of a chance to look around the rest of the show, but my lovely booth neighbours from Upper Canada Quiltworks were demoing and selling a very intriguing looking craft: punchneedle. Ever heard of it? I’ll do a post on it when I’ve had a go – I couldn’t resist buying one to try! It makes a sort of looped embroidery. I can’t wait to try it out; I have loads of design ideas already.

It’s a punchneedle!

So, all in all, the show was amazing. As always, the best part of being there was getting to actually interact face to face with people. It was lovely to see some familiar faces from previous shows, and to make new friends! Of course, it’s not all good – you have to wonder at the insensitivity of those people who walked past my table with a look of absolute contempt on their faces because my art/craft is ‘only toys’… Hello?! I hope I’ve never been so cruel to anyone’s face, no matter my opinion of their work! But for each one of that type of person, there were 10, or 20, or 100 people who smiled when they saw my work. And that reaction is just better than anything you can experience online… ♥