For the past year or so, I’ve been working on a collaboration with my mum, Lilian Linden, who is an acclaimed Scottish music pianist and the founder of the Invercauld Scottish Dance band.

For three decades, Mum has been composing original music ranging from lively jigs and reels to traditional strathspeys and lyrical slow airs, and now we’ve collected them all for the first time in her own music book, The Lilian Linden Collection of Scottish Music!

From learning how to use professional quality music notation software to create the sheet music (mostly Mum’s side of the collaboration), through designing, editing, laying out and publishing the book (mostly my contribution), via endless international Skype calls to progress the project, publishing this book has been a new challenge for both of us, but we’re delighted with the result.

Doesn’t it look good?

When I visited my parents last week, Mum and I had a final check of the proof copy to make sure it was 100% perfect, and now it’s up on amazon and available to purchase worldwide!

Amazon links: US, UK, CA, DE – and you can also find it on all the other Amazon international sites by searching for “Lilian Linden”. 🙂

If you know anyone who enjoys playing Scottish or Celtic music or who plays for Scottish dancing or ceilidhs, please let them know about this book. It includes 33 original tunes with chords, and is intended to be played primarily on piano, accordion and/or fiddle.

I’m so proud of Mum for all the work she’s put into this project and for finally getting all her original music published in print form. Please leave my mum (Lilian) a comment to congratulate her on this huge achievement!

I’m visiting my parents in the UK this week, and I decided to make a quick travel pillow for the flights. I’d looked into buying a travel pillow, but they all seemed far too bulky. All I want is something to support my head as I attempt to sleep on the plane. Here’s what I came up with:

It’s not just cute (hello, kitty!) but it also has a special feature that I came up with myself. Although I may not be the only person to think of this idea, I haven’t seen a pillow like it before, so I should explain how it works.

When you rest your head on it, the pillow creases in the middle to cup your head gently:

And you can also fold it in half to make a wedge shape. Rest the fold on your shoulder against your neck, and you can sleep with your head resting on your shoulder while your neck remains at a fairly comfortable angle:

Here’s how the magic works: the pillow has two compartments, separated by a simple seam down the middle:

(I stitched the central seam first, then stuffed each compartment separately.)

The seam forms a natural fold line in the pillow, without compressing the stuffing when you fold it:

It’s very compact, which makes it easy to pack. Flat, it measures 9 x 6.5″ (23 x 16cm):

And folded in half, it’s only 6.5 x 4.5″ (16 x 11cm):

This pillow is 100% recycled: the washable, removable cover fabric comes from a pair of Hello Kitty lounge pants that developed a hole, the pillow inner is fabric from an old cushion, and the stuffing is leftover from another pillow that was too thick for me, so I removed some of the stuffing. Total cost: $0 (the best price…)

In practice, the incredibly uncomfortable seat on my plane meant I had to use it, flat, as lumbar support behind my back for the majority of the flight – I should have made two of them! But now I know it works as a behind-head pillow, a neck support pillow and a lumbar support pillow, so it’s even more useful. 🙂

You might think I’d be running out of animal ideas to recreate in crochet, but there are lots of really obvious choices that I haven’t had a chance to make yet. Case in point: the national animal of Canada – how could I have not designed a beaver pattern yet?! Well, let’s rectify that right now…

When I stopped my pattern commissions program, the beaver was almost fully pledged, so I’m really happy to have finally had the chance to fulfill the wish of those would-be commissioners (and other Canadians, nature lovers, people who just like cute amigurumi animals…) with my PlanetJune Beaver crochet pattern! (And – bonus for the commissioners – now you don’t have to pay the full cost of your pledge, just the regular pattern price!)

Beaver Fun Facts

• The beaver is the largest rodent in North America. It lives in ponds and lakes and on riverbanks.
• Beavers can see underwater as well as they can on land, and can close their ears and nostrils when swimming. They swim using their webbed back feet as paddles and their flat tails as a rudder.
• Each beaver uses its chisel-sharp teeth to cut down over 200 trees a year, to use both as food and building materials.
• Beavers are one of nature’s builders, using mud, twigs and bark to build a lodge to live in. They contruct the lodge on a platform in a pond, with all the entrances underwater.
• Beavers remain active in the winter, beneath the ice of their pond. If their water source isn’t deep enough, they build a dam to create a deeper pond so it won’t freeze all the way through.

If you’ve ever heard the phrase “busy as a beaver”, now you know why – beavers are always busy, building and repairing their constructions!

About the Design

I love how beavers sit up on their back feet, using their tail for balance, and that’s the distinctive pose I tried to capture in my design.

I think you’ll love how it all comes together – the body shaping, the cute little arms and big webbed back feet, and of course the iconic tail.

Buy Now & Launch Discount

What are you waiting for? Pick up my Beaver 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:

And for one week only, you can take an extra 50c off the price: add the Beaver pattern to your shopping cart, and enter the discount code BEAVERTAIL at checkout! (Offer ends Tuesday 5 March, 2019.)

I hope you love this beaver design as much as I do!

Don’t forget to tag me (I’m @planetjune everywhere) when you’ve made yours 🙂

If you’ve ever considered upgrading your craft/design hobby into a business, this post may offer an interesting insight, as I’m now both a professional designer in one field (crochet) and a hobby designer in another (knitwear), so I can speak to both sides of this.

My Hobby/Pro Designer Experiences

I’m really enjoying my journey as a knitwear designer – I get to design, make and wear my own clothes, and that feels like a pretty amazing process. Every now and then, I feel a little wistful that I’m not parlaying my designs into a new income stream by selling patterns for my sweaters. It may seem like an obvious next step, but there are many reasons why I don’t want to do this.

Knitting is my hobby. I enjoy doing it for relaxation in between my crochet designs. I like making clothes for myself, that fit me and in colours I’ll wear. I can take months or years to finish a design and it doesn’t matter. If something isn’t perfect I can fudge it to make it good enough to wear.

Crochet is my business. It’s how I earn my living. I enjoy the challenge of developing new designs – and I love the things I design! – but there’s always a voice at the back of my head thinking ‘How well will this translate into a pattern? How can I explain this technique? Can I simplify anything to make it more enjoyable to crochet?’ Every new design has to be as good as I can possibly make it, and, while I never hurry an individual design, there’s always pressure to have regular new pattern releases, to keep PlanetJune in people’s minds and keep my business going.

Support. I’ve built an extensive website full of tutorials to help crocheters successfully follow my patterns. I don’t have the time or inclination to do that for knitting techniques. At best, I could provide links to other sites that offer tutorials, and that’s not the level of service people expect from me.

Fitted garments. I intentionally don’t design fitted garments in crochet. When I design and knit clothes for myself, I make them to fit me (short and pear-shaped). There are so many different body types and shapes, and it’s important that your clothes fit your shape as well as your size, or they won’t look or feel good on you. And I love making knitwear for myself that makes me feel good when I wear it!

If I designed a (knit or crochet) garment in the style I like as a pattern for sale, I’d have to:

1. design it for ‘standard’ body measurements
2. make a standard-sized sample (that wouldn’t fit me well!)
3. find a ‘standard’ shaped lady to model it for the pattern photos
4. either accept that ‘non-standard’ bodies (i.e. most people!) won’t be 100% happy with the result of my pattern, or offer extensive customization advice for how to modify the sizes to fit your own shape

The other option would be to change my design style to create very simple, non-fitted, rectangle-based garments that will work for most people as-is, but that’s not a style I’d enjoy either making or wearing. (There are also plenty of designs like that already, so I probably wouldn’t even make any money from trying to sell something I didn’t want to make in the first place!)

My Decision

I’m sure there are many more potential difficulties I haven’t even thought of, but just these few are more than enough to keep me from starting down the path of publishing my knitwear designs.

I know I don’t have time to start a parallel second career, and certainly not to run a knitwear pattern business with the level of quality and support that (I hope) people have come to expect from PlanetJune.

So, at least for the foreseeable future, I’m keeping my knitting (and garment design) on a purely hobby level. But I do love sharing what I’ve made, and I hope my projects will inspire others to try knitting (or crocheting, or sewing) a garment. It’s a very empowering feeling to be able to make your own clothes, and so satisfying when you get it right and it actually fits!

Hobby or Business?

Finding a way to make a profitable business from your hobby may sound like a dream come true, but it has the potential to suck all the joy out of your hobby, and, at best, it permanently changes your relationship with your craft.

I’m endlessly grateful that I’ve been able to build a successful business from my crochet designs. I try to keep innovating and developing new techniques to keep my designs fresh and exciting – both for my customers, and for my own enjoyment and improvement in my craft!

But, even so, I do sometimes miss the freedom of being able to create more complex crocheted art pieces that wouldn’t make a good pattern. Keeping my knitting as a purely creative outlet, with no motive other than making things I want to make, has given me that freedom back. It’s a way to balance the pressure of creating for my business with the joy and relaxation that only comes with making for fun.

So, the moral of the story is: there’s no right answer as to whether you should try to turn your hobby into a money-making venture:

• A hobby gives you complete artistic freedom, relaxation, enjoyment, and personal satisfaction.
• A business reduces all those things in exchange for the possibility of success: happy customers, recognition, more financial freedom, etc.

Having a hobby can give you a release from the stresses of everyday life. Turning it into a business adds to those stresses, but if you’re willing to put in time, hard work, and the determination to keep going even when you don’t feel like it, turning your hobby into a business can be very rewarding.

Or you could keep it more casual – instead of aiming to start a serious business enterprise, you could have a ‘hobby business’, where you sell a few things you’ve made to pay for your craft supplies etc, but don’t try to scale it up into a full-time business.

On the other hand, there’s a lot to be said for the pure joy of making just for fun! Maybe you should keep your craft as a hobby, like my knitting- it’s important to protect the things that make you happy. 🙂

So, what’s your experience? Have you ever considered turning your hobby into a business? Have my words made you think about doing (or not doing!) it? Or have you already tried, and how did that change your relationship with your hobby?

I’d love to know! Please leave your thoughts in the comments below…

Are you unsure about taking the plunge into full-scale Giant Amigurumi? Then Mini Giant Amigurumi might be just what you’re looking for!

Allow me to demonstrate with my cute purple whale:

Front: Standard (worsted weight) whale (silver)
Middle: Mini Giant whale (purple)
Back: Giant Whale (blue)

As you can see, the Mini Giant whale bridges the gap between a standard amigurumi and a giant – it isn’t close to the size of a full giant ami, but is still over twice the size of a standard amigurumi.

Why Mini Giant Amigurumi?

There are lots of reasons why Mini Giant Amigurumi might appeal to you vs Giant Amigurumi:

• You don’t have a 15mm hook
• You want to ease yourself gradually into sizing up
• You don’t have the strength or mobility for the larger hand/arm motions
• You’re short on funds for all that yarn and stuffing
• You don’t have the space for giant ami!

Don’t let that be a reason to stop you trying to size up some amigurumi – you can still join in the supersizing fun and use all the techniques from The Complete Guide to Giant Amigurumi to great effect by making mini giant amis.

How to Make Mini Giant Amigurumi

To make a Mini Giant Amigurumi, instead of worsted weight yarn and an E US/3.5mm hook, you’ll need:

• 1 strand of a super bulky (#6) yarn – I recommend a chenille-type yarn such as Bernat Blanket
• an L US/8mm crochet hook

Then use the techniques from The Complete Guide to Giant Amigurumi (especially my Secure Magic Ring, which works beautifully on this chenille-type yarn) to make and stuff your Mini Giant Amigurumi!

To finish, you can either use one of my crocheted ‘glinting’ eye patterns from the ebook, or you may find that you have plastic animal eyes large enough. For my whale, 15mm plastic eyes were just about large enough; for a larger amigurumi, the Small Eye pattern from the book would work perfectly.

Your Guidebook to Giant Amigurumi

Now, between standard amigurumi, mini giant amigurumi, and full giant amigurumi, you have the choice of sizing up your amigurumi as much as you like!

And if you haven’t bought my new ebook, The Complete Guide to Giant Amigurumi yet, check out the reviews (here) to see what people are saying about it – I think you’ll love it too 🙂

After my fun but challenging experiments with extreme amigurumi last year, I set out to see if there was a way to make super-sized amigurumi that was easy and fun to do, and develop instructions I could pass on to you. After lots of experimentation, I developed the technique of Giant Amigurumi. Look!

About Giant Amigurumi

Giant Amigurumi retains the joyous side of being able to scale up a small amigurumi pattern to an impressive and extra-cuddly scale, but it’s much, much simpler to crochet, and the materials you’ll need are far easier and less expensive to acquire.

Giant Amigurumi are big, squishy, and cuddly. You’ll be amazed how quickly you can crochet such a large toy! Giant amis are perfect as nursery decorations, super-snuggly toys, or decorations everyone will be talking about. Add a spark of life to your amigurumi animals with my giant dimensional crocheted eye patterns, or whip up a super-sized plant.

About The eBook

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.

As examples, I’ve crocheted up several PlanetJune classic patterns using the techniques from this book, so you can see how they compare with the standard-sized amis. 

Much bigger! Just as cute! And (you’ll have to take my word for this until you make your own…) exceptionally huggable.

With The Complete Guide to Giant Amigurumi, 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.

I’ve discovered lots of tips and tricks that will make your giant amigurumi easy to make and assemble, and many of them will also be useful for non-giant amigurumi, such as:

• A better way to make a secure magic ring for bulky, textured or weak yarns
• How to add more stiffness to floppy/curling pieces

…Having these tools in your back pocket will improve your everyday amigurumi projects too!

You might think there’s nothing more to giant amigurumi crochet than choosing a large enough hook to go with your extra thick yarn, but every stage of making a giant amigurumi is slightly different from what you might expect, and I’ve designed this book as a comprehensive reference guide that covers everything from the absolute basics to tips for fixing problems and making complex amigurumi.

I encourage you to use the book as a reference – whenever you get stuck, or move onto a new stage of your pattern, check back with the book and see what I advise! (Check the full contents here.)

The Complete Guide to Giant Amigurumi also includes patterns and assembly instructions to make my realistic ‘shiny’ crocheted eyes in all sizes – the perfect finishing touch to your giant amigurumi. They look just as round, shiny and appealing as plastic eyes, but are child-friendly and easy to stitch into place.

And the ebook also includes my Tiny Whale pattern as a bonus, so you can get started right away with a simple introduction to giant amigurumi crochet. 

To keep it relevant to you, this ebook is available in two versions, for right-handers and left-handers. Choose your version knowing that all the photos will show you exactly what you need to do from your perspective for every technique! 

And, as with all PlanetJune patterns and ebooks, your licence includes access to any future updates if there’s a new edition of this book in the future. 

Links and Launch Discount

You can buy The Complete Guide to Giant Amigurumi right now from my shop, and download the ebook immediately as a PDF file. (It’s 50 pages long and about 9MB.)

Click here to buy The Complete Guide to Giant Amigurumi now >>

And, for this week only, use code GIANTAMI at checkout to save $2 on the purchase price. (Valid until next Tuesday: Feb 5th, 2019)

Ready to Get Started?

I’m sure you’ll find giant amigurumi-making just as fun and appealing as I do – I just love these big squishy amis 🙂

Don’t forget to share photos of your giant amigurumi projects using the #giantamigurumi hashtag, and please also tag me @planetjune so I can see what you’re making!

Usually in amigurumi, the goal is to join pieces with an invisible, seamless join, so you can barely tell where one part ends and the next begins. But sometimes, especially with a piece of a different colour, you can get a neater finish by not smoothing the join, and instead making invisible stitches so it looks like the pieces are magically holding themselves together without any stitching at all:

You can use this technique to attach something where you want there to be a clear defined edge between pieces, for example, attaching a beak to a face, or (as I’ll show in this demo) attaching a cactus to the soil of its pot.

Continue to the Amigurumi Clean Edge Join tutorial:

• Right-handed version >>
• Left-handed version >>

After ‘graduating’ from my long term project to teach myself to knit through designing and making 12 sweaters, I wasn’t at all bored with sweater knitting, so my next project was bound to be… yep, another sweater to add to the pile!

As soon as I arrived back in Canada I loaded up on Michael’s Loops & Threads brand Woolike yarn – it’s a super-soft super-fine non-wool yarn with amazing yardage for the price, and I wondered what it’d be like to make a whole sweater from such fine yarn.

The answer? An incredible amount of work, but the result is my favourite sweater to date!

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do for this sweater, so I started by knitting plain stockinette sleeves while I pondered. It was slow going with such fine yarn and small needles, but I was encouraged to continue because the knitted fabric felt so soft, and looked so smooth and fine when I draped it over my arm.

I was worried that the fine knit wouldn’t keep my torso warm enough, so I decided on a thermal stitch pattern for the body. This was the slowest thing ever to knit, but the pattern is neat and stretchy and snuggly, so it was a pleasure to watch it grow, however slowly.

The fine yarn and stretchy stitch pattern gives it a wonderful flattering drape, even with no shaping built in. Doesn’t it look good?

It was very fiddly to stitch the sleeves to the body neatly – with hindsight, I should have worked the last 2 stitches at the armhole edges in stockinette so I’d have a plain unpatterned edge for joining. My first seaming attempt ruined the whole look of the sweater, so I unpicked the join and tried again very slowly and carefully. I think it took the best part of an hour to seam each sleeve, but it was worth it.

After seaming, I finished my sweater with simple 1×1 rib cuffs and bands, which, again, took forever – switching between knit and purl for every single tiny stitch slows things down considerably – but now I could see that it was going to be a gorgeous sweater, I didn’t mind at all.

I love this sweater! The patterned body and smooth arms; the v-neck that isn’t too deep (for warmth); the fit that I intentionally made loose enough to wear with a long-sleeved t-shirt underneath to keep me warm, but still nicely fitted… I’d have cried at spending so much time on it if it hadn’t turned out well, but it’s exactly what I hoped it would be.

I’d have liked to switch to smaller needles for the ribbing for the cuffs and bands, but I was already using my smallest (3mm) needles, so the ribbing isn’t quite as neat as I’d like, although I don’t think you’d notice if I hadn’t pointed it out, right?

If I were making this sweater again I’d buy smaller needles for the ribbing, and maybe add a tiny bit of extra height to the shoulders, but overall I’m very pleased with how this one turned out, and it’s now my favourite sweater in my wardrobe!

What’s next in my knitting adventure? I’m trying something other than a sweater for once – I’m in need of a really warm hat…