PlanetJune Blog: Latest News, Patterns and Tutorials

I can’t stop making these stellated icosahedra! (Alice, it’s all your fault!) I’ve been casting about for different papers to make them from, with some interesting effects.

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 (you can now see that review below), 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…

Review: Print Your Own Origami Paper

This review originally appeared on my old papercraft site, Folding Trees.

I’ve come across several sites that offer printable origami patterns. Origami paper can be expensive and/or difficult to find, so to be able to print your favourite designs on demand sounds like a great solution. But what’s the print quality like? And how does it hold up to being folded into origami? Let’s find out…

In progress

First impressions: looks good! Although it doesn’t have the texture or richness of the best origami papers, the pattern was distinct and the colours were lovely. The pattern I downloaded was a 8.5×11″ pdf file, so it filled an entire sheet of paper when I printed it onto regular white printer paper.

I decided to cut it into smaller squares, and I calculated that I could make 30 (5×6) 4cm squares from one sheet of printed paper – what a bargain! (Tip: a paper cutter is invaluable to speed up this stage!)

After cutting it into squares, it still looks great, but the real test is in the folding. I like to strongly crease my folds with my fingernail, and I thought this homemade origami paper might develop white lines along the folds after creasing…

Finished piece

No problem! No white lines, and the paper stood up well to folding. The paper was probably slightly thicker than regular origami paper, but it still came together well.

Verdict

Print only the designs and colours you like, on demand, at any time.

Notes

I folded all 30 of my 30 squares into one stellated icosahedron – I’m addicted to making them!

Level of difficulty

 to print the paper (I’m not rating the folding as that’s not the point of this review!)

Time

Cost

 – as long as you already own a printer, this is essentially free!

Links

Here are some free patterns that you can use for all types of printing projects. And here are some sites with origami paper patterns available to download and print:

• Canon Chiyogami patterns (I printed Akikusa-mon in blue for this review)
• thekhans Origami Papers
• Origami Club: Japanese patterns

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 🙂

UPDATE: Looking for the pattern? You can find the AfricAmi Elephant crochet pattern in my shop.

As promised, here are some more pictures of my polar bear design. He is not pictured in a snowy scene because I’d like you to be able to see more than just a pair of eyes! It’s difficult enough to photograph white yarn against a contrasting background, let alone white on white…

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.

UPDATE: Looking for the pattern? You can find the AquaAmi Polar Bear crochet pattern in my shop.

Ooh, this is my 200th blog post! Yet another milestone reached – I can’t believe I’ve written 200 posts; it’s amazing how it all adds up…

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.

It’s finally time to unveil the first of my secret projects! Folding Trees is a new international collaboration that I have set up together with Eve in New Zealand (also my co-conspirator in the Crochet Along).

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!

Note: don’t forget to enter my contest at the end of this post!

Year in Review

Doesn’t time fly? I can’t believe I’ve been running this blog for 2 years! Looking back to last year’s blogiversary post, I see that I’ve added 19 more original designs to my crochet pattern store, plus I created 4 more free patterns.

This year’s tutorials included lots of Amigurumi Help, the Offset Square Wrist Pincushion and the amazingly popular Shrinkydinks Rings tutorial. If you’ve made anything from my tutorials, don’t forget to upload the pics to my new Flickr group, PlanetJune Tutorial Gallery – I’d love to see what you’ve made!

I tried some new crafts: felt toys, modular origami and needlefelting – all of which I hope to do more of in the future.

This year, PlanetJune also appeared in print for the first time:

• A pattern in the 2008 Crochet Pattern a Day calendar, and featured on the back cover of the box
• My Joining Amigurumi article in CROQ Zine
• A full page of photos of my designs in the design gallery section of Amigurumi Animals
• My ice cream bear pattern and a companion article I wrote in A Needle Pulling Thread magazine (Summer 2008 issue – should be out any day now, and I can’t wait to see it!)

And, on top of all that, we moved to a new city and bought our first house, which resulted in me driving back to my old job every day for 6 months (that’s almost 4 hours per day in the car) over a very long and snowy winter – I can’t remember how I even managed to get anything else done…

What’s Next?

It came as quite a shock to see how much crochet I’ve done this year, compared with other crafting. I suppose I’ve been concentrating so much on making patterns, everything else has come second. For the coming year, I’m hoping I’ll find more time to make more things, without neglecting my pattern designing either. It’s exhilarating to try new things, so I want to keep pushing myself out of my comfort zone.

I also have some new and exciting things in development, but they aren’t quite ready to share just yet…

Roll on year 3! I can’t wait to see what comes next in the PlanetJune story…

Thank you!

Of course the best part of all this is still getting to ‘meet’ so many wonderful people! I was going to namecheck some of my bestest online friends, but I don’t want to leave anyone out, so… well, I’m talking about YOU. Thank you for reading this, thank you for your comments and e-mails, thank you for buying my patterns.

Contest Time!

Now your reward for reading this far: it’s contest time! I’m running 2 contests this time:

1. Win any pattern (your choice) from the pattern store. FYI, each PocketAmi set counts as one pattern 🙂
2. Win a finished PocketAmi Mouse (shipped to you, anywhere in the world). I have crocheted an adorable little grey mouse especially for this contest… This is a rare opportunity to get your hands on a PlanetJune original!
   
   I have small hands – he is even smaller than he looks here!

To enter, leave me a comment on this post, including:

1. Your choice of prize – type MOUSE or PATTERN
2. Tell me something, e.g. your favourite thing I’ve made, a suggestion for a future design, something you’d like to see on PlanetJune. Anything goes – I just want to hear from you!

If you want to enter both contests, just leave me 2 comments!

On Friday 20th June at 5pm EST, I will draw one name from each set of MOUSE comments, and one from each set of PATTERN comments. (In the unlikely event that the same person ‘wins’ both, I will contact them to see which prize they would prefer, and then draw another name for the other contest winner). Good luck!

Introducing PocketAmi crochet patterns – the perfect introduction to amigurumi making, or a quick and easy way to satisfy your amigurumi addiction! Each PocketAmi is a tiny bundle of cuteness at around 3″ long, and can be made from any colours of worsted weight yarn – use your imagination and your yarn scraps to create a colourful menagerie.

PocketAmi patterns come in convenient variety packs of three. Set 1 includes Mouse, Pig and Bird patterns; Set 2 includes Bunny, Sheep and Dragonfly patterns.

Set 1: Mouse, Pig, Bird

Set 2: Bunny, Sheep, Dragonfly

Buy both sets of PocketAmi together and save even more: $5 per set, or $9 for both sets.

Everyone knows somebody who would appreciate a PocketAmi! Why not pick up the patterns today from the PlanetJune pattern store?

So, Drawing Day was yesterday. Pencils (brought all the way from the UK and never once used in the 5 years since): found, after a bit of a search. Sketchbook (ditto): at the ready. Time and inspiration: sadly lacking. So this is really as far as it got:

Ah well, all is not lost. The materials are ready now for when I do find the time.

And if we count digital art as drawing (and I will, so I don’t feel like a complete failure) I’m very happy to report that I’ve finally got the hang of the basics of vector art, so I ‘drew’ the mouse for my PocketAmi logo (it’s a vector image, so it’s scalable to any size – very useful!):

A crocheted mouse drawn using a computer mouse, haha

Speaking of which, the PocketAmi sets are almost ready for publication – expect the announcement tomorrow. And it’s my 2 year blogiversary this coming Thursday, so check back then as well, to enter my birthday contest!