PlanetJune Blog: Latest News, Patterns and Tutorials

I have news. Big news. Mind-blowingly huge news. And it’s not directly craft-related, but will impact my entire life (including my business), so I need to share it with you…

My husband has been offered a job at the observatory in Cape Town, South Africa, and he’s accepted it!

I’m very proud of Dave – he’s worked really hard for years to find a position like this and it’s a great opportunity. We haven’t figured out yet exactly when we’ll be leaving, but it’ll be some time this winter. Can you believe it?! We’re moving to South Africa!

Pics from our trip to African Lion Safari (how prescient!) last year

It is great news, but, PlanetJune-wise, it’s really thrown me for a loop. I had a book contract literally sitting in my inbox waiting to be signed that I’ve had to turn down because there just wouldn’t be time to write it while organising an intercontinental move – so frustrating! And it’s obviously going to cause some changes with my business.

Luckily for me, PayPal started up in South Africa earlier this year. It has extra fees and complications, but I’m just glad it exists at all – I don’t know how I would have managed otherwise!

Pattern downloads in my shop are, of course, instant and automatic, so there’ll be no disruption in service there. The only difficulty will be in shipping physical items (eyes, stitch markers, stuffing tools) – I’ll have to shut down that part of my shop for a couple of months while everything is being shipped over, but that won’t be for a few months, so don’t panic! I’ll keep you updated on the situation when I’ve figured out what needs to happen and when.

I’m still reeling from this – it doesn’t seem possible that it’s really happening! I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t overwhelmed and a bit terrified too, but it’s definitely going to be an adventure, and it’ll provide endless inspiration for my future designs.

See, I told you it was big news..!

I’ve run three crochet-alongs (CALs) this year: Spring, Summer and Fall. I’ve been a little disappointed with the outcome: approx 3-4 times as many people used the CAL discount code than actually submitted completed projects to the CAL roundup. Some people contacted me to apologise that they didn’t manage to complete their projects in time, and I can I understand that – life sometimes gets in the way, despite our best intentions – but these numbers are just too high for that to apply to everyone, and it makes me really sad that some people must have been abusing my generosity by using my 20% discount although they had no intention of participating in the CAL 🙁

I’d like to finish the year on a high note, and actually reward the people who do want to participate in the CALs without losing money to the opportunists who just want a cheap pattern, so we’re going to do it differently this time around, and have a crochetalong contest!

The PlanetJune Christmas CAL & Contest

Top row: Christmas Trees, Christmas Baubles
Middle row: Poinsettia, PocketAmi Christmas
Bottom row: Christmas Pudding, Candy Cane

Here’s how it works:

1. Make one of my Christmas-themed patterns. There’s no CAL discount this time, but there are plenty of Donationware patterns in my Christmas line-up, so you can pay whatever you can afford for those, or even just use them for free if cashflow is a bit tight at this time of year.
2. Show us what you’ve made! Post it to your blog, or to ravelry, flickr, facebook, or anywhere else you like to show your work.
3. Enter the Christmas CAL contest. Read this part carefully: to enter the contest, send an email to CAL@planetjune.com with a link to where you’ve posted about your project. If you don’t have anywhere that you post to online, you can still enter: just email a photo of your completed project to me.
4. Bonus entries. Make more than one of my patterns and you’ll get an entry for each one!

The prizes:

• 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.

The rules:

• The PlanetJune Christmas CAL (& contest) will run from today until December 24th 2010.
• Enter by crocheting any of my Christmas-themed patterns, as shown above.
• Post your completed projects online and email the link to CAL@planetjune.com, or email a photo of the completed project to CAL@planetjune.com.
• If you complete several patterns, send me one email per project so you’ll get more entries!
• If you’ve already started your Christmas projects this year, you may enter them, but please keep to the spirit of the CAL and only submit projects you’ve made for this holiday season.
• First and second prize winners will be drawn randomly from all eligible entries; all participants will receive the runner-up prize.
• All photos will be posted here on Christmas Day in a grand CAL roundup!

Grab this button for your blog!

I hope this will be fun and encourage lots of participation! This is a new CAL model for me, so please let me know if anything is confusing. I’ll answer any questions in the comments or by updating this post.

Sounds good? Get crocheting!

I hadn’t planned to do a Christmas pattern this year, as I have so many already and it’s getting more and more difficult each year to think of something original! I’ve had the idea of a set of tree decorations kicking about in the back of my mind for a couple of years now, but it suddenly coalesced into a real design idea a few weeks ago, and this is the result:

Christmas Baubles! My pattern includes 9 complete designs (3 plain baubles and 6 different patterned designs) that you can make in your favourite seasonal colour scheme, using 2 or more colours. I used white plus 2 shades of blue for mine; you could do a colour scheme as simple as traditional red and white, or brighten up your room while you use up your yarn scraps by making each ornament in a different colour scheme.

By switching around the main and contrast colours in each design, you can create 18 different ornaments using only 2 colours of yarn. If you add a third shade (as I have for my samples), you can make 45 different ornaments! And (if I’ve added this up correctly) if you used 4 colours, you could make a mind-blowing 84 different ornaments with no repeats – wow!

I’ve also included instructions on crocheting them all into a garland like this – wouldn’t that look great along the mantelpiece?

I hope you like my bauble collection! It’s up in the shop now at an introductory price.

So tell me… what colour(s) would you make them in?

Punchneedle Globe menu:

• Update 1
• Update 2
• Update 3 – you are here
• Update 4
• Update 5
• The Finished Globe!

I wasn’t feeling great last weekend so I treated myself to a day resting on the sofa, working on my punchneedle globe project. And I’ve finally made some serious progress: I’ve finished the southern hemisphere! I thought for a while I’d never reach this point – I finished the land masses months ago, but there’s just so much ocean below the equator (i.e. blue, blue, and more blue – so boring!). Here’s where it was last time you saw it:

And now:

The back

You can see how close I made my stitches – in punchneedle there are supposed to be gaps between the rows of stitches, but I intentionally covered the entire surface with stitches so there’d be too many loops on the front. By the way, I always keep those straggly ends long and then clip them at the end, but they aren’t going to show, so I don’t think I’ll bother clipping them (I’m such a rebel!)

The front

Ooooh… I think this just might work!

Close-up

It looks like my over-dense punching strategy is going to work – see how the piece wants to curl under at the edges already? The excess of loops on the front means that the front surface wants to be larger than the back, making it curl. It should mean that when I stitch up the globe, there won’t be any visible bald patches between loops, even when it’s curved into a sphere. Aren’t I smart?!

Thoughts I had while I was punching the neverending blue oceans:

• I’ve been using 3 strands of embroidery floss. I wonder, could I have used all 6 strands for the ocean and made my stitches further apart (i.e. less of them), or would the result have looked strange?
• File this under “duh”: why didn’t I dye my fabric blue before I started?! The landmasses would have stuck out realistically from the oceans (the bare blue fabric), and I wouldn’t have needed to punch any blue at all!
• Of course, now I’m halfway through, I’m committed to the strategy I originally chose, otherwise the two halves wouldn’t match when I eventually assemble the entire globe. But I do like that my method means it’ll all be smooth and even (and snuggly soft!) all over so I’m okay with that.

Now for the (fingers crossed) magic part: turning the 2D into 3D. My idea is probably self-explanatory; I’m going to stitch up those ‘darts’ of unembroidered fabric extending into the circle, to (hopefully) turn it into a hemisphere. Stay tuned!

A couple of months ago, I had a Greyhound pattern commission request from a lady who works with The Greyhound Supporters Of The National Capital Region (GSNCR), a not-for-profit charity that works towards facilitating adoptions for retired racing greyhounds in the Ottawa, Ontario region.

This was probably my most challenging AmiDogs design to date – how to make a greyhound that won’t fall down? They’re just so skinny! My solution was to make him a bit larger than my usual breeds (he’s about 8″ long), because there’s no way he could support his own weight on long spindly legs, plus can you imagine stuffing a long tiny 5-sc-around tube?! Even with my Detail Stuffing Tool (which I really recommend for all legs and small pieces), it’d just be too fiddly. So here’s what I came up with…

Obviously stylized, like all my AmiDogs breeds, but I hope it clearly says ‘Greyhound’ (although it could equally well be a Whippet, if you’re so inclined…) I kept it all one colour so I could concentrate on getting the shaping right without making the pattern too difficult to follow.

AmiDogs Greyhound takes my AmiDogs collection up to an astounding 17 different breeds – and I’m in no danger of running out of breed ideas any time soon, either… You can buy the pattern from my shop, or, as always, take advantage of the savings when you make up a custom set of any 3 AmiDogs breeds.

So, what do you think of my greyhound?

I’m guessing that not everybody knows that I run a monthly ‘Review and Win’ contest in my shop. Every review of one of my patterns or other items in the shop is automatically entered, and every month I draw a random winner who gets to pick a free pattern of their choice.

It’s really easy to write a review: just go to my shop, find the page of the item you wish to review, click the Reviews tab and click write a review.

The odds of winning are great because, for some reason, I don’t get that many reviews each month. Hint hint, please review my products! Some of my poor patterns don’t have a single review yet and feel very neglected…

And now for the October ‘Review and Win’ winner… Crystal V, with her review of my Tunisian Stripe Purse pattern (which you can see in the bottom left corner of the photo below):

I just finished making this purse and absolutely loved this pattern! I have never used the tunisian crochet technique before but learned quickly with the included instructions. My favorite part is that there is no sewing involved. 🙂

Congratulations, Crystal, I’ll email you to find out which pattern you’d like as your prize!

And I’m really happy to see that my PlanetJune Accessories patterns (pictured below) are starting to receive some reviews.

If you’d like to be entered into the November drawing to win a pattern of your choice, it’s easy! Just review any item(s) you’ve bought from me – each review in my shop gives you another entry into the contest. Thank you!

The Fall CAL in the PlanetJune crochet designs group on Ravelry is now over! Participants crocheted along using my Pumpkin and PocketAmi Halloween patterns. Check out my roundup below of all the cute and spoooooky finished projects. (If I’ve missed yours, please email me or leave a comment with the link, and I’ll add it to this post.)

Ready to see the cuteness? Read on…

Halloween Trio by klopferli. I love the blue witch – why aren’t there more blue witches out there?!

Nicole (klopferli) was very busy this time around; she also whipped up both cute AND spooky pumpkins!

A nice set of all 4 designs (love the cat’s eyes!) by amanda1981, pictured in a very cool handmade set!

Spot the crocheted pumpkin! Megan of Crochet Every Day held her own CAL using my Pumpkin pattern – and here’s her contribution.

Another cute set by Silverlotus, with a special surprise…

…she used Glow in the Dark yarn for the ghost! Love it! And on the right, we have another creative idea: Veggie used bamboo skewers to turn her Halloween set into a mobile. (Cool idea!)

Here’s a spot the difference by Missie of Crafting With Cat Hair. It’s so cute together with the real mini pumpkin!

Launi of Gracious Rain crocheted my pumpkin pattern using ‘yarn’ she made by cutting an old t-shirt into strips! Cool, huh?

Here’s a monochrome set by rastakt – I love how the cat’s eyes look like they’re glowing in this pic!

A very stylish pumpkin by Becky L (submitted via my Facebook page).

A set by saudistitcher (the witch’s eyes are hilarious!). It’s incomplete because her real-life cat Bibi made off with the black crocheted kitty before Jana could take the photo! 🙂

These teeny-tiny pumpkins were crocheted from thread by Anne R (again, submitted via my Facebook page). To give you an idea of just how tiny they are, that’s a marble in between them – wow!

And last but definitely not least, jucatka made a spooky Haunted Cactus Garden using the CAL patterns and my Cactus Collection patterns! Too cool for words – I love it!

It’s so great to see such variety here, and I’ve especially enjoyed seeing how people have staged their photos this time around – nice job, everyone! Thanks so much to everyone who joined in; I hope you enjoyed it 🙂

If you like seeing things people have made using my patterns, check out the PlanetJune Crochet Flickr group. Join the group, and add photos of everything you’ve made from my crochet patterns – I just love to see what you’ve been making!

And one more thing: Happy Halloweeeeeeen!

You may remember from the Reepicheep I crocheted that I’m a Narnia fan, and with The Voyage of The Dawn Treader movie coming out in just over a month (yay!), what better time to make my own Aslan?

I really think that every lion needs a lioness, so the idea for a pattern including male and female lions was born, and you can now find the Lion and Lioness crochet pattern in my shop, if you’re so inclined. I love the shaping on my lioness:

Here’s where I approach crazy levels of dedication to the cause: I made eight prototype manes for my male lion (each using a different yarny technique), and only one looked anywhere near good enough: the eyelash yarn mane. But a) eyelash yarn is quite hard to come by these days, and b) I know how most people’s hearts sink at the mere mention of the stuff, so I was determined to find a way to make a lion’s mane that only used regular, worsted weight yarn and still looked fairly realistic. And, with attempt #9, I cracked it!

Now, don’t worry about having to latch hook hundreds of strands to the head: this mane is all crocheted (remember that loop stitch video tutorial I just made? Now you know why!) – with a little additional magic after crocheting to give it that realistic look.

My Lion and Lioness crochet pattern has a little more detail and shaping than most of my other patterns. It’s 13 pages long, and includes 30 step-by-step photos with detailed explanations of every stage (including 3 pages devoted to the special mane techniques) so you can make a perfect realistic lion and lioness of your own.

You can just about see that the lions have cute little white chins 🙂 I used a light brown for the mane (and tail tassels), but you could use any shade ranging from the same yellow as the body, any shade of brown, or even black, and it’d still look realistic – did you know that lions’ manes darken with age?

I know lions don’t look much like other cats, but I feel like I’m one step closer to coming up with the realistic cat design that’s always eluded me to date. I’ve never seen a realistic toy cat that I like, and I aim to change that some day…

But, for today, I hope you like my lions!