PlanetJune Blog: Latest News, Patterns and Tutorials

Review: e-magazines

I’ve only bought 2 or 3 crochet magazines over the past few years; to me they are expensive to buy, hard to find, and awkward to store. Now I know about digital magazines, though, I’ve changed my mind. I can read the latest magazines on my tablet and PC without the problem of storing years of back issues or having to throw out old issues to make room for new ones. Availability is a huge plus too: you can buy e-magazines from anywhere in the world for the same price, whereas finding the printed magazines outside North America is difficult and expensive, and you can download the latest issues as soon as they are released.

I hadn’t even heard of Zinio, a digital magazine provider, until they offered me some subscriptions to give away last month. My concern about e-magazines was that my magazines may be tied to one device, but, I can log into my Zinio account from all my devices (I have a desktop PC, laptop and Nexus 7 tablet) and download my subscriptions to any/all of them at no additional cost. That also means if I lose or replace a device, I won’t have lost my magazines, as they’ll all still be available from my account.

Now I can enjoy an e-mag while I crochet

I’ve really been enjoying the subscriptions Zinio gave me, and I wanted to let you know that, if you didn’t win my contest (or even if you did!), today (January 7th) is the last day to take advantage of their holiday sale. These are such great deals I couldn’t resist, so I just treated myself to another year’s subscription each of Crochet Today! and Interweave Crochet – only $10 for a whole year of one of these crochet magazines is a real bargain:

Update: As of today (Jan 14), Crochet Today! is still only $10 for an annual subscription 🙂

If you’re interested, click on the magazine cover photos above, and they’ll take you straight through so you can buy a subscription at Zinio. These are affiliate links, so I’ll make a few cents from your purchase, but this is a genuine recommendation – $10 for a year of each of these magazines seems like too good a deal to pass up, and I didn’t want you to miss out if you’d like to take advantage before this crazy sale ends today!

Pet-Along CAL

The January crochet-along is going well: we’re making pet animals this month, and we already have amigurumi dogs, hamsters, bunnies, an alpaca, and a gecko entered! Most of the pattern options are below – they’re all available from my shop except the Hamsters, which you’ll find in my book.

You can find the CAL details, and a bonus CAL discount on the PocketAmi Pets pattern, in the PlanetJune Ravelry group…
 

Review and Win contest

December’s ‘Review and Win’ winner is Nicole D, with her review of my Fuzzy Guinea Pig:

Perfection! A true embodiment of a guinea pig. Your little guy will come to life under your fingers, his shape forming readily with each stitch. He has bumps in all the right places and the loveable guinea bottom all owners come to adore.

I made one of these for my sister in law after her guinea pig passed and he elicited a squeal of excitement, a cuddle and easily an hour laminating on how lifelike he looks.

June’s pattern is remarkably easy to follow and contains everything you need to know to craft yourself a new friend.

Congrats Nicole – I’ll email you to find out which pattern you’d like as your prize 🙂

What an amazing year 2012 has been! Even though I’ve been exceedingly busy behind the scenes, when I look at all my 2012 patterns, I feel like I’ve made a lot of artistic progress in my designs this year too:

PlanetJune 2012 crochet patterns

In 2012…

• I created 25 new crochet patterns – a mix of animals, plants, geometric, accessories, commissions, and donationware. All different, and yet, somehow, all very me. Seeing them all together like this makes me feel accomplished!
• As part of my goal to create the essential online go-to reference, I created 9 new video tutorials, 7 photo tutorials, and a handy one-page index for all my crochet tutorials at www.planetjune.com/help 🙂
• I launched the PlanetJune logo and redesigned my blog to make it clearer and easier to use. (The homepage and shop redesigns have been shifted to the 2013 list…)
• I began refreshing my entire pattern catalogue with new clearer formatting, more details, and additional tips where they’d be beneficial. (Sign up for the pattern updates list if you’d like to be notified when you can download the updated versions of any patterns you’ve purchased!)

Personal Report

Without going into too much detail, living as a visitor in a foreign country (as opposed to a temporary resident, as I was when we first moved to Canada) is not at all easy. Being treated as a dependent wife instead of a person in my own right is endlessly frustrating; I can’t even do the most basic things (buy a phone, open a bank account, get a library card, etc) in my own name. I’m sure all this contributed to the stress-induced eczema I developed this year, which is complicating my life even further.

It’s not all bad though; the wildlife situation here is spectacular and we’ve had many wonderful nature experiences this year, as well as the small daily pleasures of our garden full of birds, butterflies and lizards. (If you’re interested, you can look back on my year of monthly nature posts.) And, if you’ve been missing my photos, I have good news: I’ve been saving up my photos of all the new animals and birds we’ve seen since my last nature post, and I’ll be doing a big South African wildlife update in the near future, so you can enjoy it too!

Business Report

2012 was all about building for the future: a growing business is a wonderful thing, but you have to be able to cope with the growth. To that end, I’m trying to improve everything so the business will run itself as much as possible, and my customers will be able to easily find answers to all their questions without having to ask me for personal help.

I never imagined that PlanetJune would get this far, but, aside from a slight blip when I moved halfway around the world, my business has grown by 1.5x per year, every year since 2007. I’m sure that growth can’t continue indefinitely – I don’t know of any millionaire crochet pattern designers, so there must be a ceiling! – but, through years of very hard work and some luck, I’ve built a serious business here.

Of course, this business growth brings its own challenges: as sales increase, so does the amount of admin and tech support required. To provide the same level of service to all my customers, I have to put in 50% more time each year – not a desirable or sustainable situation! I discussed this in my post on Beating Craft Business Overwhelm and I’m working on the strategies I outlined there. (And there’s a technical growth side too: I didn’t think I’d ever hit my huge 1TB/month bandwidth limit, but that happened this year, so I had to upgrade my server to cope with all that traffic.)

Looking back
Here’s what I said in last year’s review:

My resolution for 2012 is to work smarter, not harder. I need to slow down and enjoy life, not let it pass me by while I’m working non-stop. I want to invest time into things that will, in the long run, save me time in the technical and administrative sides of the business, leaving me with a larger proportion of time to spend on the creative and instructional sides, and having a life apart from my work.

Did that work? Yes and no. I’ve totally failed on the ‘slowing down and enjoying life’ part, but that was primarily because I’ve been focusing on the other part of the resolution: investing time in things that will save me time in the long run – putting the work in now that will save me endless work in future years.

Although this project is still ongoing, I’ve spent many weeks of 2012 wearing my web-developer hat and coding new PlanetJune features:

• A system to manage pattern commissions.
• A way to automatically re-enable pattern downloads when updates are available.
• A system for adding ‘dummy’ orders into the shop so people who didn’t originally order through the shop can still receive pattern updates.
• An order-fulfillment mechanism for Etsy orders so I won’t need to email patterns by hand any more. (Created, but not yet implemented.)

I’ve also implemented many smaller changes to streamline and automate the business, such as:

• The Master List for all my crochet tutorials, which has already proven to be an amazingly useful resource.
• A ‘triage’ system of rules for incoming emails (referrals to my tutorials, FAQ, or sellers’ list; a bank of standard responses to common questions; new policies such as not replying to any questions not written in English or providing support for patterns written by other people).
• Improved spam-blockers that reduced the spam I have to check from approx 800/day to approx 2/day (a huge time-saver!)

And, because you can’t work all the time and stay sane, I taught myself to knit, and made some stuff for fun:

My 2012 craft projects

What’s next?

Well, I’m still moving towards the goal where the business more-or-less runs itself and I’m free to design, innovate, and teach, and enjoy life without working all the time. Although I had hoped all the big automation and coding projects would be completed this year, that wasn’t realistic – probably because I keep adding to the list and coming up with more ideas! But the pieces I’ve already set in motion have made a huge difference to my workload, so I’m moving in the right direction.

I hope by next year’s review I really will have completed all my big tech goals, and then I’ll have more time to explore some of my other creative ideas – I have plans for online classes and ebooks that I don’t have a hope of finding time to create at the moment (but I’m writing everything down, so my notes will be waiting for me when I have time to get to them!)

This past year, I’ve worked harder than I ever have in my life – I’m essentially working 3 large jobs now: Designer (and photographer, editor, blogger, etc), Administrator (order processing, customer and tech support, etc), and Programmer (web developer, back-end tech support, server manager, etc). But the big goal here is worth it: to transition my business from a very hands-on one-person business to an automated one-person business, so I can spend the majority of my work time creating new designs and tutorials.

This interim stage is hard going, but I’m trying to do something here that (possibly) no other craft business has done: to grow past the one-person level without expanding or outsourcing. I’m hoping that all my automation strategies will pay off in 2013, and I’ll have a virtual assistant (in the form of my own website and systems reducing my workload) instead of having to hire an actual assistant.

Although I anticipate another year of very hard work behind the scenes of PlanetJune, I’m giving this plan one more year to succeed. If it doesn’t, I’d have to either find a way to scale back my business, or take on minions (unless I can come up with another alternative, as neither of those options appeal to me). But for now I’ll think positive: I can make this work!

On the creative side, I’m very excited about the coming year: I have loads of sketches for new designs that I’m looking forward to transforming into crochet; several design series I’ve already started prototyping; and some brand new concepts for design themes that I’m eager to research. I can’t wait to get stuck into some of my new ideas after the holidays…

Thank you so much for continuing to follow me on this journey – your support makes a huge difference to me. Although I know I’ll have some challenges this year, I’m really looking forward to 2013, and I hope you are too.

Happy New Year!

Time for the final CAL roundup of the year! The Accessory-Along was started in October, but we decided to extend it until now, so CALers could make lots of Christmas presents. I designed 2 new donationware patterns for this CAL: the Frosty Windows Scarf and Chunky Moebius Cowl – you’ll see lots of both of those below!

For details of the next CAL, which starts tomorrow, keep reading to the end of this post. And now to the roundup of beautiful projects made from my PlanetJune Accessories patterns:

Happy Christmas! Let’s celebrate with a look at the results of the 2012 PlanetJune Christmas Crochet-Along. Thank you to everyone who joined in; as always it’s so much fun to see what you’ve made. My contribution to this CAL was a thread crocheted poinsettia:

And now get ready to have your day brightened with an explosion of colourful Christmas crochet:

This extended 6-week CAL theme was Dino-Mania including my 9 original dinosaur patterns and the 9 new expansion pack patterns:

Those are my 18 dinos; now take a look at the Dino-Mania CAL roundup – it’s an explosion of colour! I hope you’ll love seeing all these dinosaurs together as much as I do…

If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you may remember that I have a tradition of crafting a new poinsettia every year, to mark the holidays. Here’s the collection to date:

Top (L-R): 2006 kanzashi poinsettia; 2007 crocheted poinsettia 
Middle (L-R) 2008 polymer clay poinsettia; 2009 punchneedle poinsettia
Bottom (L-R) 2010 felt poinsettia; 2011 beaded poinsettia

Although you can’t tell from these individual photos (and I don’t have them all to hand to take a group shot), there’s one sore thumb in my poinsettia group: the crocheted poinsettia. It wasn’t until after I’d made it that I decided to start this collection, so it doesn’t match in colour or size. All the others are 2-3″ diameter; the crocheted version much larger, at about 6″ across!

I decided to rectify that this year, and scale down my crocheted Poinsettia pattern by using thread and a small hook instead of the worsted weight yarn specified in the original pattern. I like #8 perle cotton because it’s available in many colours, so easy to find appropriate shades, but it’s too fine for me to crochet with – I get hand pain when I try to crochet with very fine yarns and tiny hooks. This time I determined to be sensible – it’s so important to listen to your body and stop when it hurts, before you reach the point of doing real damage…

And here’s the result: the 2012 PlanetJune Poinsettia is a thread crochet poinsettia. If you’d like to make one too, just follow the Small Poinsettia instructions in my pattern and use crochet thread and a small hook.

For this poinsettia, I used 2 strands of #8 perle cotton held together, and a B (2.25mm) hook, which gave me the perfect sized poinsettia (2.75″) to fit in with the rest of my collection. I limited myself to a maximum of 2 leaves per day, with only minimal discomfort as a result. And now I’ve proved I can do thread crochet again, provided I keep it to just a few minutes at a time 🙂

There’s still time to make your own small poinsettia before Christmas: with only 12 leaves instead of 18, it’s much faster than the standard large version, and it still looks good. You can find all my Poinsettia designs as PDFs in my shop, or use the links above for the free online versions.

And that makes 7 poinsettias! I wonder which craft I’ll try for next year’s design…

Dear Readers, this is my Christmas present to you: a super-fast free crochet pattern that might just be the solution to all the last-minute gifts still remaining on your list! Just look at all the variety you can create using this one simple pattern:

Based on a Möbius strip, the Chunky Moebius Cowl is worked in one continuous spiral from the centre outwards – an ingenious construction that makes it very fast and simple to crochet once you’ve made and joined the foundation row.

Although I didn’t have anyone else available to model for my photos, this pattern is most definitely suitable for men too (in a suitably non-fluffy yarn; see the green version below for an example) – the stitch pattern has a simple but bold texture and the cowl is easily customized to fit any size – men, women, or children.

My top 3 reasons to love this unisex pattern:

1. Quick and easy: With simple stitches and no turning or seaming, this pattern is amazingly fast to work up using a large crochet hook and bulky yarn. I can make one in under half an hour, so I’m pretty sure even the slowest crocheter can whip one up in couple of hours or less!
2. Infinitely versatile: I’m calling this pattern a cowl, but I could just as easily have called it a neckwarmer, infinity scarf, headband, earwarmer… The pattern is easy to customize to any length and width.
3. Stashbusting: One cowl only takes one skein of yarn or less, so it’s a perfect way to use a single skein of bulky yarn or to use up some of that novelty or textured yarn you have lurking about! Or, hold 2 strands of a finer yarn together to make your own custom colour-blend (as I did in my red/purple version below).

Looks good in any yarn! L-R: fluffy #6 super-bulky yarn; normal plied #5 bulky yarn; 2 strands of #3 light (DK) yarn held together; soft textured #5 bulky yarn.

I hope you’ll enjoy this pattern!

Go to Chunky Moebius Cowl pattern >>

Crochet-Along with us…

If you’d like to make one (or more – it’s pretty addictive once you’ve made one and seen how easily it comes together!) please join the PlanetJune Accessories Crochet-Along and show us what you make, by posting to the Accessory-Along CAL thread in the PlanetJune Ravelry group.

The CAL runs until the end of the month, so perfect timing for those mad-dash-to-the-finish gifts you may or may not need to make – and if, for some reason, this cowl doesn’t grab you, you might like one of my other donationware scarf patterns that are also pretty fast to work up (although nothing beats this cowl for speed!):

Frosty Windows Scarf and Scalloped Scarf

Christmas CAL and Contest

I can’t believe it’s that time again already! I hope you’ll take part in this year’s PlanetJune Christmas CAL; it’s turned into an annual tradition. I now have 9 seasonal patterns to choose from (several of which are free/donationware), there’ll be prizes for all participants, and you can browse through the lovely roundup post on Christmas Day when you’re stuffed full of food and feeling too lazy to do anything else!

You’ll find all these patterns in the Holiday & Seasonal category in my shop.

• First prize: a $10 gift certificate to spend on anything in the PlanetJune store.
• Second prize: a free pattern of your choice from the PlanetJune store.
• Runner-up prizes: I’ll send a discount code to all participants, to use against their next order from the PlanetJune store.

Whip up some of the popular new pine cones – or any other of my seasonal designs – snap a quick photo, and join in by posting it to the Christmas CAL 2012 thread in my Ravelry group – I hope we’ll see you there!

Review and Win contest

November’s ‘Review and Win’ winner is Diane G, with her review of my Farmyard Pigs:

If you are wondering if you’ll be able to do this, you can. I’ve been crocheting for less than a week, and he turned out amazing.
The directions are simple, straight forward, and for someone very new to crocheting, I had no questions at all.

What I really like about him is how closely he resembles an actual farm pig. Most of the crochet patterns you find are for a more cartoon-y look. Personally, I prefer realistic.

The price is great and I’m looking forward to trying alternate colors on him next. I think he’d make a great gift for any pig lover!

Congrats Diane – I’ll email you to find out which pattern you’d like as your prize 🙂

Other News

My crochet video tutorials are on hold until next year, as my hands are currently in no state to be filmed in HD (or at all) after my recent eczema fiacso. I was also hoping to take most of December off, as I did last year (to rest and rejuvenate, and plan for the coming year), but I lost a lot of November to illness so I need to keep going just a little bit longer so I can get one last quick-to-crochet pattern to you in time for your last-minute Christmas gift-making. I can feel myself slowing down though – my batteries are going to need some serious recharging after this last push!