PlanetJune Blog: Latest News, Patterns and Tutorials

My Commissions system for new crochet patterns is working out so well – in only 3 months since the launch it’s already pushed me to create three completely original design challenges, with more on the way. I’d like to thank everyone who’s trusted me to come up with high quality designs by pledging towards these pattern commissions…

None of these designs would exist without the people who pledged towards them!

However, as I mentioned in yesterday’s Chameleon post, my system still isn’t perfect – I’m finding it a bit of a challenge to keep up with my commissions and still make progress on the other exciting designs I have queued up on my to-do list. (If you’re part of the PlanetJune Ravelry or Facebook communities, you’ll have more of an idea about those upcoming designs!) Last week, I had three fully-pledged designs in the queue (Chameleon, Sea Otter, Rottweiler), and, at a promised one-month completion time for each design, that puts a lot of pressure on me.

When I originally came up with the idea for my Commissions process, it was going to be just for new AmiDogs breeds, and the $60 limit seemed fair. At the last minute, I added various other animal designs to the commissions list before I launched the system, without really thinking that through. The pledges went crazy and I immediately had to raise the totals to $90 as things were getting out of control. What I didn’t tell you at the time was that I then pledged $30 towards each AmiDogs design myself, as I still felt that a $60 AmiDogs commission is the right level – $90 for a new dog pattern seemed unrealistic.

Even with that price increase, the commissions system still hasn’t stabilised to a manageable level for me, so it’s time to implement another round of changes…

My new tiered commissions include pre-pledges (see explanation below)

Timeframe Extension

I’m modifying the completion time for newly-commissioned designs from 1 month to 6-8 weeks, starting immediately with the Sea Otter – hopefully I won’t need that long for every design, but I’d prefer to have the breathing room so I’m not constantly designing under deadline pressure and I have time to work on my other designs in between commissions.

Price Increase

I’m raising the total commission cost again, from $90 to $120. The minimum pledge amount is still unchanged at $6. I initially kept the price low because I didn’t anticipate that so many people would pledge at the minimum $6 level. I also underestimated the level of interest in this concept – even at $120, it’ll only need 20 people to pledge $6 each (or fewer people with larger pledges) to get a design fully funded.

The price increase will take effect immediately, but, for the two designs that had already been fully pledged at $90, I’ve already committed to designing those at the $90 level, so I’m making up the difference with pre-pledges (see below) so don’t worry, pledgers, Sea Otter and Rottweiler are still fully pledged.

Now, if you’re thinking that your favourite dog breed will never get fully pledged at this rate, don’t worry; I have another new mechanism to take care of that:

Pre-Pledges

While most of the animals on my commissions list have a wide general appeal, the designs that are similar to others I’ve already made (e.g. a new dog breed) are mostly of interest to people who have an interest in that specific breed. The pre-pledge acts as a discounted commission price on these designs, so, for example, a $120 commission with a pre-pledge of $60 needs only another $60 to become fully pledged.

I’ve deleted my own $30 pledges towards the AmiDogs on the list, and replaced them with $60 pre-pledges, so the price for a new AmiDogs breed is now only $60.

e.g. here the Scottie has a $60 pre-pledge, so, with $42 already pledged, it only needs $18 more to become fully pledged

I called it a pre-pledge because it is subtracted from the required commission total before you have a chance to start pledging towards the design. You can see the pink pre-pledge bars on the chart, and the pledged amounts now only need to fill the remainder of the white space to become fully pledged. I hope that makes sense!

The pre-pledge capability means I can now tailor the total price required for any commission to any value up to the maximum. This may come in handy in future as I add more design ideas to the commissions list – it gives the system a little more flexibility.

Next Steps

I’ll be adding some new design suggestions to the list once I’ve had a chance to sort through the requests and choose some new animals to add, but I’ll be away visiting my parents next month, so I’ll probably wait until August to add them to the system.

Although my commissions system may still need some additional tweaks before it reaches long-term stability, I think these changes are a step in the right direction. Once I find the right price point for the non-dog patterns, I think it’ll work very well as the gauge of popularity I’d hoped for (as it already is for the AmiDogs): for example, without these commissions, I’d never have guessed that a Rottweiler design would be in more demand than a beautiful King Charles Spaniel!

It’ll be interesting to see what happens when I add another dozen or so new design ideas to the list – I’ll let you know when I do that, so you can pledge if any of your favourite animals come up…

That’s right, it’s my 3rd commissioned design – the Chameleon!

Thank you to my chameleon pledgers – this design was especially fun for me, as I could run out into the garden to consult with my ‘pet’ (actually wild) chameleon, Kermit, whenever I had a shape or proportion question 😀

Chameleons are probably the most fascinating of lizards because of their unique physiological adaptations. Here are a few of the most interesting chameleon facts for you!

Chameleon Fun Facts

• There are well over 150 species of chameleon, ranging from under 1″ to 30″ in length.
• Most chameleons are found in Africa and Madagascar.
• A chameleon shoots its amazingly long tongue at its insect prey. The tongue is as long as its body and has a suction cup on the end to capture the insect.
• Chameleons move slowly for camouflage, with a swaying motion like a leaf blowing in the breeze.
• Chameleon colour changes are usually due to stress or other emotions, not for camouflage as popularly believed.

I can attest that chameleons are very hard to spot if they want to stay hidden! I’ve spent hours playing ‘where’s Kermy’ in my garden, and sometimes I find him on a branch I swear was empty moments before 😀

Kermy is a Cape Dwarf Chameleon, and he obviously influenced my design decisions – especially with the bright green colour – but my aim was to create the archetypal chameleon without getting too fussy with excessive details. So here are the factors I needed to build into my design:

• Chameleons have large eyes, but their eyelids are fused together leaving only a small opening for them to see through. Each eye can swivel independently through 180° so chameleons can hunt and look for predators in all directions simultaneously.
• Chameleons have amazing Y-shaped feet to grip onto branches. (They actually still have 5 toes on each foot: the toes are just joined together into forward- and backward-pointing groups.)
• A chameleon’s prehensile tail can be held straight out for balance, curled around a branch for stability when climbing, or coiled tightly when asleep.

Some species have large horns, spines, crests or stripes, so, if you’re feeling especially creative and want to make a different type of chameleon, you could crochet extra pieces and add them. Of course, chameleons are found in almost every colour: red, blue, yellow, brown, orange; the easiest modification would just be to make one in a different colour – or wouldn’t a chameleon look amazing crocheted in a variegated yarn?

This design does use pipe cleaners for poseability, so please, as always, be sensible and omit the wires from a toy for babies or young children. (I give tips in the pattern for how to make your chameleon still look good if you choose to omit the wires.)

(A little note about my Commissions process – it’s still going strong – in fact, my 4th and 5th commissions were fully pledged before I even had a chance to complete this one! I didn’t anticipate this level of demand when I set up the commissions process, so I’ll be making some more changes later today or tomorrow – see my next blog post for details.)

With my arm for scale – he’s about 8″ long with his tail fully coiled up!

If you pledged towards the commission, you should have already received your copy of the pattern. Otherwise, if you’d like to make a chameleon of your own – or a whole troop in different colours – you can now pick up the Chameleon crochet pattern from the PlanetJune shop! I hope you like it 🙂

If you’re not quite ready to buy though, how about queuing Chameleon on ravelry so you don’t forget about it?

Monthly update time! I’ll keep it short and sweet…

Free-For-All CAL

Free-For-All means you have free choice to make any PlanetJune patterns you want! Crochet-along with us from now until July 15th in the PlanetJune Ravelry group. (If you’re new to CALs, check out the PlanetJune Crochet-Along FAQ.)

There are currently 118 patterns to choose from, but not for long – I have 3 new patterns that will hopefully all be ready before the end of this month, if all goes well…

Review and Win contest

May’s ‘Review and Win’ winner is Yasmin L, with her Red Fox & Arctic Fox multipack review:

I love these patterns, not only were they great value but they were also so simple to follow!! At no point did i have to stop and think the pattern through before continuing! After making one Arctic Fox I’m now having requests for more!! Thanks for the amazing patterns.

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

To be entered into this month’s draw for a free pattern of your choice, just write a review of any product in my shop – thank you!

I’m so grateful to everyone who writes a review in my shop, as they really are the best way for prospective customers to be assured of the quality of my patterns – a fellow customer leaving an honest review is a more credible source than any marketing-type blurb I could write in the description. So I’d like to give a special mention to Monica from Magical Amigurumi, who has been crocheting her way through pretty much all my patterns, and last month went back through the list of everything she’s made and left over 30 reviews! Thank you, Monica!

Craft Tutorials

I’m still (very slowly!) adding my most popular craft tutorials as handy printable PDFs (donationware) in the shop. New arrivals this month include the Polymer Clay Poinsettia and my beautiful realistic Tissue Paper Carnations (from my Folding Trees days):

If you’d like to make these, or my other craft projects, you can find all my donationware craft tutorials in the shop. (And thank you to everyone who’s already donated towards my tutorials – I really do appreciate it!)

Thanks to Heather and Jesse, I now have a very cool vintage umbrella swift, with one slight problem: the spinning part is missing, so all I had was the umbrella part to hold the yarn. I’ve been waiting for months to find the time to buy wood and get my handy husband to help me make 1) a new base that I can clamp to the table and 2) some sort of rotation mechanism so it can spin freely. So far, we’d only got as far as finding a Lazy Susan bearing mechanism.

Yesterday I got sick of waiting and decided to rig something from available materials: cardboard, craft glue, and thumbtacks. Less than an hour later, I had a functional yarn swift and ball winder combo:

All I did was build 2 cardboard blocks, each made from 3 layers of corrugated cardboard glued together. Corrugated cardboard is very strong, especially if you stack each piece at 90 degrees to the last so the ribs run perpendicular to each other. Here you can see the swift in action: the bottom block remains still, while the top block and swift both rotate as the ball winder pulls on the yarn:

This was my magic idea that would allow it to work without damaging the swift with glue or nails: before I assembled the top block, I cut a fitted hole into each layer of cardboard. With the swift snugly embedded into the cardboard, the two should be able to rotate together:

Here you can see the Lazy Susan ball-bearing mechanism between the two cardboard blocks. I attached it to the blocks with a simple thumbtack through the screw hole at each corner and pushed into the cardboard:

The moment of truth – does it really work? I wasn’t sure if it’d need some sort of non-slip mat underneath the bottom cardboard block, or a clamp to attach it to the table, but it was perfectly stable without either; as I turned the handle on the ball winder, the swift started to spin easily, allowing more yarn to be wound…

…until, within minutes, the entire hank had become a beautiful centre-pull ball. This is the first time I’ve ever been able to wind an entire 400m laceweight yarn hank without getting into a terrible tangle.

Once the umbrella is folded up, the whole thing is very conveniently small:

It’s so refreshing for me to take a break from my usual perfectionism and just MacGyver a ‘good-enough’ solution to a problem. It may not last forever, but I can easily make replacement cardboard pieces (or a sturdier solution, when I have time) – it’d only take seconds to remove the thumbtacks and have the bearing mechanism ready for reuse. But this is the perfect solution for now.

Mission accomplished: now I can crochet my gorgeous yarn into a new design!

This month’s CAL was a Wildlife-Along, so there were lots of patterns to choose from:

…which led to a lovely variety of FOs (Finished Objects) from the CAL participants this month.

Don’t forget to keep reading to the end of this post for details of the next CAL – starting tomorrow!

Ready to visit the amigurumi zoo? Let’s see the roundup…

If you run a crafty business, do you ever feel like it’s overwhelming you? This is how I’ve been feeling:

It’s the price of success: as your one-person business expands, so does your workload. At some point, you have to change something about the way you conduct business. According to this article, the options are to either limit the amount of business you can do (and hence the income you can generate), or continue to expand (by hiring employees, buying new equipment, etc) and spend more time working on your business, and less time in it.

Neither of those options – limiting or employing – appeal to me, so I’ve been developing strategies for coping with my business growth and reclaiming my time both to be creative within my business and to have a life outside of my business. If you’re also feeling overwhelmed by your business and wondering what you’ve got yourself into, maybe my ideas can help you too!

So, how can a crafty business continue to grow without its owner being worked into the ground?

Three Strategies to Beat the Overwhelm

I’m sharing my strategies here in the hope that they’ll help other people with their own creative businesses to improve their working situation and work/life balance. Of course, each crafty business is unique and the way you tackle this depends on what you sell, how you like to work, and the specific situation you’re in with your business right now, so it’s up to you to figure out how you can implement these strategies in a way that makes sense in your situation.

1. Streamline and Automate

How many tasks do you do multiple times that you could streamline or automate in some way to save time in future?

There are several ways you could start to automate your most repetitive tasks:

• Employ someone to do them for you. The classic way to begin to grow your business.
• Create (or purchase) technical solutions. See my examples below. Even something as simple as saving stock responses to paste into your emails (to answer the questions you’re asked over and over) can be a huge time-saver.
• Create batch processes so you can be more efficient by doing each task multiple times before moving onto the next stage. This can apply whether you make handmade goods (making your items in batches vs individually could save a lot of time) or for any other tasks (e.g. processing Etsy orders once a day instead of dealing with each order as it comes in).

2. Prioritise

Firstly, what’s your prime focus for your business? Is it to make lots of money, or to do what you love and, hopefully, earn enough to live on in the process?

(A little aside: if your main aim is to make money, you may want to think about whether a craft business is really the best way to do it. When I told you about reaching a huge financial milestone, I didn’t mention that I’m still working probably twice as many hours to earn that money as I did in a day job, and I work equally hard even on the slow days when I may bring in nothing at all!)

• Passion questions: What do you most love to do? Which areas are you less passionate about?
• Finance questions: Which areas are bringing in more money? Which don’t make financial sense to continue working on?

Note: ‘areas’ could be different crafts, different product ranges, different tasks, or any different aspects of your business; the specifics depend on the nature of your own business.

Ideally, you’ll be driven by the answers to the passion questions, but it’s useful to at least think about your answers to the finance questions. Maybe, if an area is a bust financially but you still love doing it, you can relegate it back to ‘hobby’ status and just enjoy it with no pressure of success. (And nothing is set in stone. Taking a break may let you return to it with a fresh perspective in a few months/years – it could still be a huge success in the future…)

Once you’ve figured out your priorities, you’ll know where to concentrate your efforts and what to stop (or to outsource, if that’s a possibility for your business). These decisions are always hard to make but you’ll know when you’ve made the right choice for you – a weight will be lifted off your shoulders!

3. Re-energise

It’s easy to get so bogged down in work that you feel you don’t have time to do anything else, especially ‘frivolous’ tasks like other hobbies with no purpose other than enjoyment. What do you love to do, apart from what you do for your work? Make time to do it!

You’ll feel better for taking a break, it’ll give you a chance to clear your head, and you’ll be able to bring the creative energy and feeling of accomplishment from having done something fun back with you when it’s time to start work again.

You may even find that your brain will keep working subconsciously and, while you’re concentrating on something completely different, you’ll come up with a solution to something you’ve been puzzling over – I know that works for me!

How I’m Applying the Strategies

I’m working far too hard, and something has to change if I’m going to continue without burning out. I know from my ‘colleagues’ on twitter that I’m not alone in this situation: running the business has become so overwhelming that there’s almost no time left for the creative side of it. My design time is currently limited to evenings and weekends, and my time when I’m not working is pretty much non-existent – not a great situation to be in!

I came up with these strategies last Christmas, and, although I still have a long way to go to bring my workload under control and to be able to manage future growth, I can already see results, and I know I’m taking steps in the right direction. Here’s what I’ve done so far to implement each of the strategies:

Streamline & Automate: I’ve read a lot of advice that says at some point you must hire help if your business is going to succeed, but I don’t want to be at the helm of a PlanetJune empire! I didn’t go down this path because I wanted to run a business; I want to make beautiful things and to help other people to make them too with my patterns and tutorials. The business side of it exists solely so I can distribute my work and earn a living from my creations.

As I know I don’t want to become an employer, I’m creating technical solutions – setting everything up means extra work in the short term, but the resulting systems will reduce my workload in the long term: my own website will be my ‘assistant’ in the future! Here’s what I’ve done so far:

• Making my blog navigation clearer, building up my FAQ and adding more tutorials means I get less questions by email.
• Answering emails with a brief link to the relevant FAQ answer or a pre-written canned response helps me get through the remainder more quickly.
• Setting up automated systems to manage my pattern commissions, to log requests for new commissions, and to create photo galleries for the PlanetJune Crochet-Along roundup posts – all big time-savers.

Prioritise: Before I can scale back on the amount of work I do, I need to identify which of the things I do are really important to me, and what I could (reluctantly) let go.

• I set up my Seller’s list when I realised I’d never find time to accept commissions for finished toys (coming up with new designs beats remaking old ones).
• I’m cutting back on tech editing and drawing crochet stitch diagrams for other independent designers (time is more precious to me than money at this point, so I have to concentrate on my own business).
• I’ve stopped designing new punchneedle patterns (they have limited selling potential as the craft is relatively obscure).
• I’ve stopped my monthly wildlife photography blog posts (they turned into a huge time sink and became more stressful than enjoyable).

None of these were easy decisions to make, but they’re all helping me to reclaim some time. And, I’m also trying to think more carefully before acting on my latest spur-of-the-moment great idea: is it really such an amazing idea that it’s worth exploring right now, or should I just keep a note of it and come back to it at some point when my schedule is less full?

Re-energise: When I started this blog, I used to just craft because I love making things – if you go back through the blog archive, you’ll see lots of those projects in the early years. In the crazy rollercoaster ride that took me from hobby to business, some of the fun got lost somewhere along the way…

For the past few weeks, I’ve tried to give myself enough time to make some quick, easy craft projects (you may have already noticed a few posts popping up here as a result – pictured below). They are nothing to do with work, nothing I need to write a tutorial for, and have no schedules or deadlines. It’s really refreshing to just make stuff with no agenda.

L-R: beanbag smartphone stand, cardboard cat scratcher, fuse bead coasters

As I’ve been posting the finished projects here, even with no tutorial (and I really don’t think many simple craft projects need a full step-by-step tutorial – you aren’t stupid!) I can already see from the comments that my fun projects are inspiring other people to make stuff too – an unexpected bonus.

Continuing: I plan to keep going with all these strategies for the rest of the year, and, fingers crossed, I’ll be finding things much easier to cope with by the time 2013 comes around 🙂

Join Me?

So, that’s my plan to beat the overwhelm, through the strategies of automating, prioritising, and re-energising. What do you think? Can you see how my strategies could also be applied to your own business – or even to your life in general?

And if you have more or better suggestions to beat the overwhelm, I’d love to hear them too!

A couple of years ago, I bought 2 bottles of IKEA Pyssla – more commonly known as Perler or Hama beads, or the generic name, fuse beads. If you’re not familiar with them, they’re little plastic beads that you arrange into a pattern or picture on a special pegboard, then heat using your iron to melt and fuse the beads together. You end up with a plastic sheet you can use for keychains, coasters, or as decoration.

On a regular pegboard, each bead melts into a square shape, so you can use any pixelated sprite (a character from an 8-bit video game, for example) as an instant pattern. One square per pixel – it’s like an instant gratification version of cross-stitching, as you can complete a coaster-sized picture in just a few minutes.

So I borrowed some ideas from sprites other people have made, and searched for game sprite images to make some of my own. Here are my first few:

New coasters! Don’t worry, I’ve tested them and the heat of the hottest mug of tea isn’t enough to melt them 🙂 And, because they’re made of plastic, they’ll be easy to wash clean if they get dirty. You can add a background colour to make your coasters into squares, but I purposely chose round-ish sprites that are large enough to function as a coaster without a background – saves time and beads!

My tips if you’d like to try fuse bead crafting:

• If you have access to IKEA, PYSSLA beads and shape boards are much cheaper than the Perler/Hama equivalents (and the bottle of beads is huge and will probably last forever!)
• Pre-sort your beads by colour – it makes it much easier to create your designs.
• Use tweezers to position the beads onto the pegboard more easily.
• I ironed my coasters for longer than the instructions suggest, so they’d melt together more and bond together more strongly.
• Have fun!

Now, I wonder which designs I should make next…

We all (I hope) know by now about the invisible decrease, to smooth out your amigurumi decreases and make your amigurumi look much neater. But what about increasing? Increasing doesn’t have as much of a problem as decreasing, but forcing 2 stitches into one hole does stretch out the hole and leave a slight gap beneath it compared with the surrounding stitches.

Is there any way to reduce this gap and make your increases less visible? Let’s do an experiment to find out…

The Setup

A standard increase consists of two single crochet stitches, both worked into both loops of the stitch below. But either or both of those single crochets could instead be worked into the front loop (FL) or back loop (BL) of the stitch below. Here are all the possible permutations of loops to work into to make a sc increase:

Option 1 is the standard increase, included for reference as the control: the yardstick to compare against, to see if we find a better option.

We’ll omit Option 9 (both stitches in BL only) from the remainder of the experiment, as I already know that the unworked front loop will leave a visible bar on the surface, so it clearly isn’t an ‘invisible’ candidate. That leaves us with 8 candidates, including the control, to include in our experiment…

The Experiment

I crocheted an amigurumi-style shape with a flat top and bottom, and 8 columns of increases around the sides (one column for each option 1-8). Each column includes 3 sample increase stitches, separated by a non-increased round above and below each increase so I could isolate each specific increase stitch. I noted any difficulty with creating each stitch combination as I crocheted.

Then I stuffed and finished the test piece as though it were a regular amigurumi, and then inspected the finished piece to see which columns of increases were least visible.

Results

You may not be able to see the differences clearly here – my observed results (below) are far easier to see by eye than by looking at the photos.

Conclusions

• To reduce the hole size, one of the stitches must be made through both loops. => #4, #5, #6 rejected
• If either stitch is made through the back loop only, it will leave a visible bar on the front of the work. (Note: Those visible bars may not look too bad in my sample, but would be far more prominent if the increase round and previous round are worked in different colours, as they’d show up as a bar of the wrong colour.) => #3, #8 rejected
• It is easier to work the FL/BL stitch first followed by the both loops stitch than vice versa. => #2 is better than #7

#2 and #7 had the best appearance, but #2 is easier to work than #7, so that gives it the edge and makes it the winner in this competition. But, hang on, is there a genuine improvement over a standard increase?

Introducing… the Invisible Increase!

I know it’s hard to see the differences between all the options in the above photo – they’re much more noticeable when you look at the piece in 3D. To make it clearer that there really is a difference, I’ve drawn around the edges of the ‘hole’ beneath a standard increase and the new invisible increase:

You can see that the hole is much smaller if you use the invisible increase; in fact, if anything, I’d say it’s smaller than the hole beneath a normal sc stitch. Mission accomplished!

So, if you’re looking for a less visible increase for your amigurumi, here’s your answer:

Invisible increase: sc in front loop only of next stitch, sc in both loops of same stitch.

Unlike the invisible decrease, which I recommend you always use for amigurumi (unless there’s a specific reason not to, e.g. turning your work between rounds), I’d definitely call the invisible increase an optional technique, but if you ever notice that the holes below your increases look too large, give my invisible increase method a try and see if it alleviates the problem!

Loved this tutorial? I have so many more amigurumi tips and tricks to share with you!

Boost your amigurumi skills with my latest book, The Essential Guide to Amigurumi, your comprehensive guide to amigurumi techniques and tips.

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Thank you so much for your support! Now click below for loads more crochet video and photo tutorials (and do let me know what else you’d like me to cover in future tutorials…)