PlanetJune Blog: Latest News, Patterns and Tutorials

Yesterday’s amigurumi piglet needed a friend. Here is the smallest, simplest bunny I could dream up:

If you’re interested, there will be patterns for the pig and the bunny – sign up for my mailing list if you’d like to know when they are available 🙂

And now I have a question for you. I could keep designing these simple tiny ami for just about every variety of animal out there. They are a joy to make because they are so small and easy to whip up. Would you like to see some more (a whole new mini pattern range), or is two enough? Help me to decide!

PS – Catherine Andrews: please contact me with an alternate e-mail address. I keep getting a delivery failure when I try to send your patterns to the e-mail address you use for PayPal!

UPDATE: Looking for the pattern? You can find the PocketAmi Set 2 crochet pattern in my shop.

Sometimes a quick project is the most satisfying. He was quick to design and easy to crochet, but my amigurumi piglet does make me smile:

He may be small (about 3″ long) but he has big ambitions! This little piggy is hoping for a grand adventure – I’ll have to see what I can do about that…

UPDATE: Looking for the pattern? You can find the PocketAmi Set 1 crochet pattern in my shop.

Click for larger picture

In case you’ve never heard of needlefelting before, here’s the basic premise (ignore the rest of this paragraph if you already know all about it). By stabbing unspun wool repeatedly with a barbed needle, the wool fibres get tangled together and the wool begins to form a denser, more coherent piece. The more you stab, the firmer the piece becomes. By building up layers of wool in different colours and in different areas, it is possible to form complex sculptures with fine detail. That’s the theory, anyway!

There are some amazing examples of finished work in the Needle Felting Flickr group pool. I think I first heard of needlefelting over a year ago through articles in CRAFT magazine, but I’ve never tried it until now. I had my first attempt this weekend, using the supplies I got from the show last weekend. I couldn’t decide whether to start with something simple to learn the techniques, or to jump straight in and try to make something I actually wanted to make. In the end, I decided I didn’t want to ‘waste’ my wool on a test piece, so I dug out my photographs of Cinnamon (the best guinea pig ever) and started work.

I really liked needlefelting – I found it to be like a combination of my crocheted animals (texturally) and polymer clay sculpting (you can build up areas by adding more wool, in the same way as you can with a clay sculpture). It takes a lot of stabbing to get the wool to felt together firmly , but I discovered that, by compressing the wool first as much as possible, the wool begins to hold together after only a few stabs. I also discovered (after a few hours of make-it-up-as-I-go-along experimentation) that there are some very helpful videos on YouTube that show the process – I recommend watching a few if you plan to start needlefelting for the first time!

Now back to my guinea pig sculpture. It took a long time and a lot more wool than I expected. I tried to make the markings as accurate as possible, so I started with the white wool at the head and worked my way back, adding darker sections where they were needed. With hindsight, I think it would have been a lot easier to make and shape an all-white guinea pig body and then add thin patches of darker wool over the top to create the markings – I’ll know for next time!

I needlefelted in tiny black wool patches for the eyes, and then sewed round black onyx beads over the top to give them that realistic glint. I also used two strands of embroidery floss to stitch on a tiny nose and mouth. Apart from that, the whole mini-pig is solid wool.

I’m very pleased with this as my first piece, and I have enough wool left to make a few more little sculptures. It’s very satisfying when the piece comes together, and if the shape isn’t quite right, you can just add a litle more wool over the top to reshape it.

Another craft conquered! Well, the basics of it, at least. What shall I try next…? Any recommendations? Please leave them in the comments!

One of my personal challenges for my other blog, Crochet Along, is to come up with a banner design to reflect the new blog theme every two months. I try not to be influenced by my personal preferences for colour, style, etc and I think it’s helping to improve my graphic design skills.

I thought I’d share how I came up with my design for the new Summer Crochet theme.

First, find source graphics. I looked through stock photography sites for royalty-free photos that matched my design concept (‘orange’ in this case), and made sure to only save images that had no copyright restrictions or required credit to use – no copyright infringements here!

When I had saved about 20 images, I looked at them all together on the screen and eliminated them one by one until I had narrowed them down to my final source images (I took the crochet hooks photo myself):

After that, it’s time to cut, paste, resize, arrange, change colours, erase unwanted backgrounds, and add some text. Here’s the end result:

If you’d like to see the full sized banner, or you’d like some Summer-themed crocheting fun, head over and join the Crochet Along!

Reporting back after day two of the show. Sunday was a lot quieter than Saturday, although I still had a lot of interest in my patterns. In the quiet periods, I managed to sneak away to wander around the show for a while, and pick up some new toys – some quilling paper, a bias tape maker, and a new light-up crochet hook, so now I have my three favourite sizes: E, G and H.

Best of all, the owner of Bears and Bedtime gave me a quick demo in needlefelting, which I’ve been wanting to try for months, and I found that, despite my wool sensitivity, my hands seemed okay with it – yay! So I bought some felting needles and a bag of mixed colours of wool roving (and aren’t these colours perfect for my animals?). Now I just have to find some time to try out all my new craft purchases…

To the eagle-eyed commenters on my last post, yes, you’ve spotted my hidden projects:

1) Looks like the cat is out of the bag with my ice cream bear! He is going to appear in the Summer issue of A Needle Pulling Thread magazine, together with an article about my crocheting. ANPT is a wonderful magazine featuring Canadian designers and artists and it covers the full spectrum of needle arts in every issue, with each artist contributing an article and a project. My ice cream bear is the reason I got to set up my display at their booth and work on my crochet throughout the show – thank you, Carla and John, for sharing your space with me!

2) I chose to finally make a start on my crocheted orang utan (I bought the yarn for it way back last August). As a break from pattern designing, I’m doing this one freeform. This gives me more freedom to experiment and figure out some new techniques, which may then find their way into future pattern designs!

So far, I’ve just made the arms. Each finger is individually wired, so the hands are completely poseable. A lot of people wanted to look at them, although one girl let out a little shriek when she saw the disembodied arm!

Now on to the subject you’ll be most interested in if you are a crafter thinking about doing a show: the festival itself…

This was my first real offline experience of putting myself out there as a crochet designer, and it was amazing! Watching people’s reactions to my designs, hearing them call their friends over to come and see, and being able to interact face to face with the public are things you really miss out on as an online seller. I think people appreciated being able to actually pick up my work and take a closer look – no matter how good your photography is, it’s never quite the same as letting people actually touch your work. And getting to see small things, like the little girl who picked up and cuddled every animal I’d brought, and then refused to move on until she had kissed every single one goodbye… there’s no way you can get that kind of feedback through e-mail.

Another thing that was interesting was seeing the kind of people who were interested in my work – I never usually get to find out that kind of demographic information. I met people ranging from 8 year olds who were just learning to crochet and teenagers who wanted to know how to get started, right through to 80 year olds with decades of experience, and women of just about every age in between. I met lots of amazing creative people, made some new friends (hi Rose!), and even met a few people who already knew me from the online world or were previous customers, which was surreal but very cool!

I can’t tell you about how the financial side of it worked out, since I didn’t have my own booth, and I wasn’t actually selling anything at the show… I displayed some finished pieces, worked on my orang utan, and answered people’s questions, but I also brought a portfolio with the cover pages of all my patterns for people to flip through, and I gave out over 200 PlanetJune business cards and postcards, so I hope a lot of the people I met will be visiting my site once they get back home.

Oh, and my PlanetJune t-shirt was a hit – several people even asked where I got it printed! Maybe I should start up a side business 😉

Overall, the show experience was fantastic. It’s a bit daunting to jump in without the protection and anonymity of the internet, and by the end of the weekend I was totally exhausted, but I’m so pleased to have had this experience. I would definitely encourage other online-only crafty businesspeople to consider getting out there and introducing people to your craft in person once in a while!

I had an amazing day at the show today. So good, in fact, I’m going back for more tomorrow!

And to everyone who is visiting my site for the first time after picking up my card at the show: welcome!

Thank you for patiently waiting for the debut of the AquaAmi Sea Turtle pattern. It’s taken a while to produce because this pattern is a whopper! The pattern is 13 pages long and includes over 20 step-by-step photographs and explanations so you can crochet a perfect sea turtle of your own.

More info about the pattern: there are a lot of steps, but they aren’t difficult! I would classify this as an intermediate level pattern – although the assembly is more complicated than my usual patterns, the entire turtle is worked in standard amigurumi fashion (single crochet in the round), with just a few hdcs thrown in! And, if you still worry you may have difficulties, I am always happy to answer any questions by e-mail 🙂

Also, why not take advantage of your last chance to purchase your favourite PlanetJune patterns at 2007 prices? Save $.50 per pattern and $1.25 on the sets of 3 AmiDogs or AquaAmi (sale prices are automatically applied). You have until May 10 2008 to take advantage of this offer – don’t miss out! All patterns are available from the pattern store.

PS – I will be at the Creativ Festival all day today, but will process all orders tonight when I get back!

To any of my readers in or around Ontario, Canada, I’ll be at the Creativ Festival near Toronto (Mississauga to be precise) this Saturday (April 26th). I’ll be hanging out for the day at the booth for A Needle Pulling Thread magazine. I’ll have some of my creations on display, and I’ll bring my latest WIP to work on in any quiet moments!

So people will be able to recognise me there, I’ve made a custom PlanetJune t-shirt using iron-on printable transfer paper:

I bought the transfer paper for dark t-shirts and printed my design onto the paper. I had to cut it out very carefully so I didn’t leave any white borders to spoil the design, then ironed it on to my prewashed T-shirt.

I even added a second mini design on the back of the shirt:

If you’re going to the Creativ Festival, please make sure you stop by the booth and say hello to me! And I have AquaAmi cards to give away if you mention you read my blog 🙂 Hope to see you there!