PlanetJune Blog: Latest News, Patterns and Tutorials

Better late than never: my blogiversary was a over week ago and I’ve been so busy and unwell that I totally missed it! Still, I want to note this milestone: I can’t believe that I’ve been blogging for 5 years now. I owe so much to this blog; I wouldn’t have my crafty career without it…

Year 5 Review

This was a year of turmoil. Between finding out we’d be moving to South Africa, preparing to move, 2 months of bronchitis, selling the house, actually moving, living out of a suitcase in temporary accommodation for months, and a second bout of bronchitis, I’ve been forced to spend far less time on PlanetJune than I would have liked.

Despite all that, I have had some accomplishments in Year 5:

• I designed and published 16 new amigurumi crochet patterns.



• I launched the PlanetJune Accessories pattern range with 6 published designs.



• My first crochet book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Amigurumi, was published and very well received (4.9 out of 5 stars on amazon!)



• My kingfisher was published in Inside Crochet magazine in the UK, and, in the US, Create and Decorate magazine ran a feature on PlanetJune.



• I completed two major art projects: my punchneedle-embroidered 3D globe, and an amigurumi Reepicheep (from The Chronicles of Narnia), who won the Craftster Fantasy Crochet Challenge.



• I started the PlanetJune YouTube channel to create high quality crochet tutorial videos, and it won the Flamie award for Best Crochet Video (Amateur)!

• I also received Flamie nominations for Best Crochet Blog (for this blog) and Best Instructional/Technical Crochet Book (for The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Amigurumi).

Hmmm, it doesn’t seem so bad when I look at my work all together like this… Imagine what I could do without sickness and international moves occupying all my time!

Goal Review

Last year, I had grand plans for Year 5:

My goal for the coming year is to build my business to the point where I no longer have that niggling feeling that I should really go and get myself a ‘real’ job – a feeling that comes down to the grim reality of earning enough money to continue to support myself.

…and I’d taken significant steps along that road before I hit the major roadblock of moving to another continent and having months and months (still in process) with very little time to devote to the business.

Here’s a very clear illustration of that: of my 22 new patterns this year, 16 were released in the half-year before Christmas, and only 6 in the half-year since then! But, looking on the bright side, that was a pretty good record until my life took its detour, so I know I can get back to being prolific once things settle down here.

What’s Next?

For the upcoming year, I’m not going to set any real goals, as so much is still unknown at this point. I need to figure out the logistics of operating from here and how to get myself back on track under such different conditions. It’s certainly going to be a challenge! For starters, it may be another month or more before I can get internet hooked up at our new house, and that obviously makes a huge difference to how I operate.

I need to prioritise getting settled into my new life and getting my health back. Only then can I really focus on making PlanetJune everything I know it could be if I only had the time… It will happen – I am determined to keep moving forward, no matter how hard this road is to travel. Losing the past few months (and maybe one more) isn’t going to ruin me. My ideas aren’t going anywhere – I just have to have the patience to keep them on the back burner until I have time to fulfill them to the standard I expect from myself.

Thanks!

I just wanted to add a thank you to you, my readers, for all your support and for following on my journey. This has been the hardest and loneliest time of my entire life, and knowing that you’re out there means a lot to me. I’d never have made it this far without you!

Now, onto Year 6…

After a very long 10 weeks of being without any of our stuff, the delivery team arrived yesterday with our shipping container! We spent most of the day re-assembling pieces of our IKEA furniture and discovering long-lost treasures in some of the many boxes we now have stacked up all over the house. The day ended when we went back to our flat to collect Maui and bring him to his new home 🙂

Here’s my craft room this morning:

Yay – a whole room full of my craft supplies! It’s going to take some effort to turn this into a functional craft room though…

I also just realised that with all this moving craziness, I missed my 5th blogiversary last week. Let’s pretend that didn’t happen, and I’ll write my end of year roundup post later today – I’ll need to take a break from unpacking at some point and this will be a good reason 😉

There’s a lot more work ahead of us to get everything sorted out, but I’m just so happy and relieved that we finally have a home again!

We’ll hopefully be moving into our new house this week, and I’ll have the challenge of figuring out how to set up my new craft room/office/photo studio. To make that task a bit easier, I thought I’d put together a visual guide to my old craft room, and I thought you might enjoy seeing it too – maybe it’ll give you some ideas for your own craft space!

I sadly didn’t have time to take photos before dismantling everything and depersonalizing the room to stage the house for sale, so I’ve compiled this guide from photos I took for previous posts. There are some strange angles, gaps, and different lighting etc as a result of that, but that just makes it more interesting, right? 😉

In case you want to know more about the crafty projects you see in the photos, I’ll link back to my original posts where applicable.

Okay, now let’s take a tour anti-clockwise around the room, starting from the doorway…

To your right as you enter, my bookcase, made prettier with a little crafty decoration down the side.

To the left of the bookcase, amigurumi galore! My overcrowded toy shelves. (Beneath the shelves, I kept my business/shipping supplies and digital piano – I had to sell the piano before we moved, so at least I won’t need to fit that into the new room.)

At the left of the photo, you can see the edge of desk 1…

As you can see, it had good natural light from the window, so I used this desk mostly for polymer clay and papercrafting. I kept a row of cubbies and baskets along the back of the desk to store small supplies: paintbrushes, crochet hooks, glues and varnishes, etc.

Under the window, I had a low table with my toaster oven (for polymer clay, shrinkydinks, etc) and I kept storage boxes underneath the table. No photos of this, and of course I couldn’t bring the toaster oven to South Africa (it’s electric, so the voltage would be wrong).

I decorated the window with origami – this strand of lucky stars along the top, and 6 dangling vertical strands of silver thread, each strung with a few sparkly beads and origami lotus flowers, cranes, and diamond shapes, spaced across the window. (I did try to photograph the vertical strands but, with them being so small and backlit, I never managed a decent photo.)

My computer desk, with a magnetic dry-erase board mounted on the wall next to it, and my wall-climbing amigurumi gecko!

Above the desk, some shelves I made to keep various trinkets – mostly handmade ornaments and a few travel souvenirs.

I prettied up my stark black leather office chair with a custom-designed crocheted granny throw.

Now moving along to the other side wall…

Light tent for my pattern photography. I eventually replaced the tiny table you see here with a wider coffee table and then stored all my computer accessories, gadgets etc in decorative patterned cardboard boxes (from IKEA – sorry, I apparently never photographed them) underneath – you’d never guess their geeky contents from the outside!

Desk 2. I kept my sewing machine here, and borrowed the desk space when needed for the print-quality tutorial photography for my book (shown in-progress here – the letters refer to my blog post about this setup), and for filming tutorial videos.

I re-covered this boring grey office chair with pretty fabric. I shared the chair between desks 1 and 2, as I could only sit at one at a time anyway!

And finally, the built-in closet, aka craft supply heaven. The wire shelving on the right contained my fabric stash, and the plastic towers of drawers were filled with yarn, FIMO, and supplies for all my other crafts. For each plastic tower, I cannibalised 2 units and snapped them together so I could create these taller towers that fit my space better. The contents are organised and the drawers are all labelled so there’s a drawer for stamps and punches, one for papercrafts, one for embroidery supplies, one for art supplies, etc etc, and then yarn split by weight, type and brand.

Not the prettiest solution, but I could always close the closet doors to hide the mis-matched units if required. The only problem is that my yarn stash inevitably outgrew the closet, so I’ll need to rethink things a bit this time around.

On top of the units, I had a stock of clear plastic boxes with lids, in two sizes. Each in-progress project gets its own box, so I can easily see what I have on the go, and keep all the pieces of one project together. This idea works really well for keeping organised and keeping the clutter down on my desks.

So that’s what I left behind… My new room will be very different and quite a challenge – it’s currently an empty square apart from a very cool fireplace in one corner:

The lighting is terrible (small window, bare bulb hanging from the ceiling near the door) and there’s only one power socket on one wall, but that’s what happens when you buy an old 1920s bungalow instead of a modern cookie-cutter characterless house. Our new place has a lot of personality!

What do you think of my craft storage solutions? Any suggestions for me to improve things this time around? If you have photos of your craft space, or links to photos of other people’s beautiful craft rooms that might inspire me when trying to set up my new room, please share them in the comments!

…June the month, that is! I suppose all my posts are ‘June updates’, in a sense 🙂

I’m finding it hard to get my head around the fact that it’s autumn/winter here – switching hemispheres is quite disorienting! And the fact that flowers are still blooming, birds are mating, and most trees are still green makes it even more difficult to believe it’s not really spring. But – finally – I found a view that does make it look (slightly) like autumn:

Beautiful, isn’t it? This tree is on the Observatory grounds.

The May ‘Review and Win’ contest winner is Mary Z, with her review of my Gossamer Lace Wrap:

The Gossamer Lace wrap pattern is very clearly written with nice charts. I recently used the pattern to make a scarf, and had no trouble adjusting the pattern to a shorter starting chain. The scarf has gotten many compliments! Thanks PlanetJune!

Glad to hear that, Mary, and congratulations – I’ll email you to find out which pattern you’d like as your prize!

It’s always nice for me to see people enjoying my PlanetJune Accessories patterns, as they aren’t as well-known as my amigurumi designs. I’ll be designing some more accessories this year (I actually have a beautiful lacy scarf in the works already – it’s cold in this apartment and I needed it to keep warm!), so do let me know if you have any suggestions for future designs you’d like to see in my pattern line.

I feel a strange symmetry here: last time a review of the gossamer lace wrap won the contest was back in March, at which time I was suffering from bronchitis while getting ready to move. It feels like I’ve barely stopped wheezing from that (it lasted well over two months) but now I’ve been struck down with another outburst, just when we’re on the verge of moving out of our temporary accommodation and into our new house!

I’m sure all the stresses of trying to get set up and used to life in a very different country has played its part – I just hope I can get over the exhausting cough more quickly this time around. I have half a dozen designs in various stages of completion, but between getting sick and now having to move again (although thankfully only a few kms this time!), I’m not sure exactly when I’ll be able to complete any of them.

But it’s exciting times ahead: we just got the keys to our house, our possessions should be arriving any day now, and then once we get moved in I can set up my new craft room/photography studio/office and get back to work properly! Now there’s incentive to get back to full health in a hurry 🙂

This Plumeria is the first design that I’ve completed since my arrival in South Africa. I first encountered these beautiful flowers on holiday in Hawaii, so I was delighted to discover that they grow here too! Picking up fallen blossoms on my travels, I started to look at the intriguing spiral petal formation, and wondered if I could reproduce it in crochet… Turns out, the answer was yes 🙂

Here’s the resulting design:

I tried to take a photo of my inspiration for you, but by that time almost all the blossoms had fallen (it’s autumn here!) and all I could find were these two tiny specimens on a rainy day. But the lighting conditions gave my photos this lovely ethereal glow, so that’s okay:

And now you can use my pattern to make your own plumeria blooms, wherever in the world you happen to be. Crochet a touch of the tropics with these exotic plumeria blossoms. Use a plumeria flower to make a beautiful pin or hair accessory, or to embellish anything! My pattern includes three different petal designs – choose your own colours to make custom blooms.

The Plumeria crochet pattern is free for you to use. If you’d like to thank me with a donation, you’ll get a handy printable PDF version of the pattern as a thank you 🙂

Enjoy!

Go to Plumeria pattern >>

Today’s PlanetJune Story is from Melissa Frelo of Aurora, IL, and it’s a case of perfect timing: it’s a guinea pig story, and I also have a guinea pig photo to share with you today. We found a wonderful Wildlife Sanctuary in Hout Bay called World of Birds. I joined as a member so I can go back often – it’s the largest bird park in Africa so it’ll be a while before I’ve explored all the amazing free-flying walk-through cages and aviaries. They rescue animals as well as birds, and for some reason (abandoned pets, maybe?) they have a huge cage full of guinea pigs:

Guinea pigs galore!

Unexpected, but very cute! The guinea pigs all seemed very contented, running free in their giant outdoor area and then going back inside for food and water – I think they have a good life there.

And now a segue from real guinea pigs to crocheted guinea pigs!
Melissa writes:

I just wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed making the fuzzy guinea pigs. I ordered the pattern from your website and made the piggies for my childrens’ Easter baskets. Although I have experience crocheting, this was my first attempt at amigurumi. Your instructions were very detailed and easy to follow and the results were great. I attached a few photos of the real piggies and their crocheted friends. Thanks for the wonderful pattern!

And thank you, Melissa, for sharing your story with us. Here are Melissa’s guinea pigs, Roxie and Gracie, and their crocheted counterparts – it’s hard to tell which are real and which are crocheted!

Melissa did a great job with matching the markings to her piggies’ markings.

Just look at those sweet guinea piggy faces – so adorable! My guinea pig pattern has been a bestseller for years now, but if you haven’t jumped on the guinea pig train yet, you can get on board and pick up the pattern in my shop 🙂

Do you have a PlanetJune Story you’d like to share? I’d love to hear it! Please email your story to june@planetjune.com, together with one or more high quality photos showing what you’ve made from PlanetJune patterns. If I choose your story to feature here on the blog, I’ll send you your choice of pattern from my shop to say thank you!

Wow, I’m blown away by the response to my bird photos post! Not only that you like my photos (yay!) and my sharing my nature-related experiences here (double yay!) but also to hear from some previously-silent readers. Hello new commenters! Thanks for speaking up – it’s really nice to hear from you 🙂

* * *

Over the last couple of months, my business has obviously suffered: firstly having to (temporarily) close some sections of my shop as I can’t ship physical products at the moment; secondly not having any time to work on new designs for my pattern range; and thirdly not being available much to converse/share/help in my usual way, which has also led to a drop in my pattern sales.

I was on the brink of putting out a call for help and asking you to recommend me to your crocheting friends, when I came up with a perfect plan: we can help each other! I’ve created the PlanetJune Affiliate program so you can earn a commission when you refer your friends and readers to my shop.

If you’re familiar with the Amazon affiliate program, mine is very similar: you link to me using your unique ID code, my shop tracks everyone who visits using that code, and you get 5% commission on any orders that are made using your code. Every quarter, I’ll pay out your affiliate earnings as PlanetJune gift certificates.

I’m really excited about this program, but because it’s brand new (I pre-launched it on Twitter and my Facebook page last week) I’m open to modifying things to make it work better for you…

For example, you can choose any of the banners pictured above to post on your blog etc, but if none of them is a convenient size to fit your sidebar, or you run a website full of pug fans (for example), and a pug banner would be the best way to grab their attention, just let me know and I’d be happy to add custom banners to fit your site and audience 🙂

I hope you’re as excited about this opportunity as I am! If you are, please sign up as a PlanetJune Affiliate today, help me to spread the word about my patterns to other crocheters, and we’ll both win as a result!

I have the amazing opportunity now I live in South Africa to experience a different side of nature; one that most of you will probably only see in wildlife documentaries, if at all. So I hope you’ll forgive me if I occasionally deviate from the crafty nature of my blog to share some photos of the plants, birds and animals I see! As these will probably be inspiration for my future crochet designs, I don’t think it’s totally off-topic, and I hope you’ll enjoy a few glimpses into the nature of South Africa. (Please just skip these posts if they don’t interest you – I promise they won’t take over the blog!)

In this first post, I’ll show you some of our garden birds…

Wild Guineafowl roam freely everywhere – these are part of a group of about a dozen that patrol the grounds of our flats and the surrounding streets. They look a bit like small turkeys and they bob their heads quickly as they walk (as captured by the motion blur in my photo). Their loud call sounds like a squeaky bike wheel, and when several start up, it gets pretty raucous…

The Cape Sugarbird feeds on the nectar in protea flowers, as shown here (this type of protea is called a Sugarbush and produces copious nectar which can be used as a natural sweetener). The female (above) is nice-looking, but the male is the real stunner…

…his tail feathers are twice as long as his entire body! Very impressive when he’s sitting like this, but it looks like hard work to fly dragging those feathers behind him…

There’s nothing in this picture for scale, but ibis are very large! I’ve only seen them in zoos before, so having them as a common garden visitor is pretty amazing – we see them from our window, pulling worms out of the lawn with those long beaks. This type of ibis is called Hadeda (rhymes with la-di-la!) and is named for its loud call of “ha-ha-haadada”. When a group fly over or sit in a tree shouting that in unison, you really know about it!

Larger than the common starling you’re probably familiar with, the Red-Winged Starling looks fairly unexciting, until it takes flight… Do you see that edge of rusty red-brown on its wing? Their entire wings are that colour when in flight, so they look much more interesting as they fly by than they do when they land. I haven’t been able to capture that in a photo though 🙂

I know doves aren’t exactly unusual, but they are so sweet I thought you might like to see one anyway. There are two common types of dove here: the Cape Turtle Dove and the little colourful one pictured here, the Laughing Dove.

I first saw White-Eyes on holiday in Hawaii, so they feel like a very tropical bird to me. Very small and shy, the Cape White-Eyes are very hard to photograph because they don’t stay in plain sight for long. This is the best photo I’ve been able to capture so far, but I’ll keep trying 🙂

There’s so much more amazing wildlife here. I’d love to write more posts like this and share what I see with you, but only if I have an interested audience: I don’t want to bore you! If you’ve enjoyed this post, please leave a comment so I know you’d like to see more…