PlanetJune Blog: Latest News, Patterns and Tutorials

One of my crazy habits idiosyncracies is that I hate to throw anything away. As a result, I have a box full of rejected crochet pieces: the prototypes that didn’t work out; the spare pieces I made to take photographs for patterns. The box is now full to overflowing (and has been for a long time!), and I’ve sometimes wondered if I’m being stupid by keeping these useless pieces.

But, are they really useless? No, they are not! Allow me to present the case as to why I am actually very smart for keeping all these random bits:

Exhibit 1: Photo Props. When I needed to take a photo for my stitch markers, I just delved into the box to find some photogenic pieces to clip the markers to for my photo:

The pieces in this photo are actually (clockwise from top left): a rejected flower design from my African Violet pattern; a snout from a prototype pig that never made the cut; and a spare section of shell from my Sea Turtle!

Exhibit 2: Experimental Pieces. When I wanted to try out yarn brushing with non-wool yarns, I delved into the box to find some pieces I could test it on:

Cotton and acrylic samples – perfect!

Exhibit 3: Emergency Yarn. I can’t believe this has happened to me twice now: a couple of weeks ago, I ran out of black yarn with one round to go on the final leg of my Farmyard Pigs, and yesterday I ran out of white yarn with one round to go on another new design..! The black yarn was old and a new skein probably wouldn’t have matched, and the white yarn was out of stock when I went to buy a new skein… What’s a girl to do?!

Luckily, in both cases, after a momentary panic, I thought to search through the magic box for any pieces made from those same yarns. And there I found a rejected Boston Terrier ear that was made from the right black yarn, and a partial Beagle body that contained the right white yarn – a minute of frogging and I had salvaged more than enough yarn to finish both my amigurumi 🙂

The defence rests – one more crazy perfectly sensible habit justified! The box of bits is staying in my craft room – I wonder what it’ll come in handy for next time…

I’ve seen a lot of cartoony amigurumi pigs but I thought it was about time we saw a more realistic-looking pig design, so here’s what I’ve come up with:

I named this design Farmyard Pigs to denote that it’s a realistic pig pattern. Then I realised that the word farmyard is British English, and wasn’t sure if my US-based audience would understand it (the US equivalent is barnyard) so I did a quick poll on Twitter to check. The results were varied, but overall it seems that, although most Americans wouldn’t use the word farmyard, they would understand it well enough for my purpose. So, phew! The pattern name stands 🙂

I’ve created the pattern with two variants: the simple pink colourway, and as a black saddleback pig with a pale coloured band (the ‘saddle’ of the name – you could make it in pink, white or beige) and forelegs. The pattern includes full instructions for both versions – including positioning instructions for the single-coloured pig’s forelegs, where you don’t have the visual cue of the band to guide you!

It’s a really quick and easy pattern to work up, as the head, body and snout are all worked in one piece, but there’s some clever shaping around the face (which I hope you can see in these photos) that gives the piggies their personality!

One thing: I’d just like to clarify that, although my saddleback pig is smaller than my pink pig, both versions of the pattern make the same sized pig; the size difference between my samples arises because the pink yarn I used was slightly thicker than the other shade!

If you’d like to make your own piggies, you can find the Farmyard Pigs crochet pattern in my shop!

I bought a cute summer top last week. It was very inexpensive, the colour was lovely, the fabric had a nice texture, and it looked like it would be a cool, pretty, summer top.

And then I tried it on. Um…

Please excuse the bathroom fixtures in these photos – it’s the only place I have to take photos of myself in the mirror!

I don’t know which body types the ‘potato sack’ look would flatter, but it’s certainly not mine. Is it a maternity top? No it’s not – I did check after seeing the fit, or lack thereof! Do I need a smaller size? No – it’s a size XS. Ridiculous.

I thought of returning the top, but then I decided to try a little refashioning instead to see if I could improve it. The fabric doesn’t stretch, so I had to take care not to make it too fitted – I need to be able to get it on and off!

Step 1: Measure for new side seams. I turned the top inside out, tried it on, and pinned new seamlines down each side. I took in about an inch and a half on each side, tapering out a bit at the bottom because I didn’t want it to get too tight around my hips. (Turning the top inside out first lets you pin the new shape while you wear the top, and means that you can stitch directly along your pin lines once you take it off.)

Step 2: Sew new side seams and cut off excess fabric. I stitched along my pinned lines with a straight stitch, and then cut off the excess fabric 1/4″ outside my new seams. A serger would be helpful here, but I don’t have one, so I used a zig zag stitch to overcast the new raw edges so they wouldn’t unravel after cutting the fabric.

L: pinning the new seams; R: the top after sewing the new seams

Already a little improvement, but I think we can do more…

Step 3: Add an elastic empire waist at the front. I tried on the top and pinned an empire waistline under the bust, from one side seam to the other. Next, I measured myself along that line and cut a piece of 1/4″ elastic to the same length. I pinned the ends of the elastic to the side seams at the front along the empire waistline. To keep the resulting gathers in the fabric even, I stretched the elastic so that the fabric was flat, and pinned the two together at several points along the elastic.

Step 4: Stitch elastic in place. I picked a pretty stretch stitch that happened to match the texture of my fabric, and stitched the elastic to the front of the top, stretching the elastic as I went so that the fabric lay flat as I sewed.

Now the front looked good, but the back was still bulging with excess fabric.

Step 5: Make ribbon ties. I salvaged the strips of fabric I had cut from each side and unpicked the original seams so I had 2 strips of fabric from each side of the top. I ironed them flat and trimmed each pieces into a 1″ wide strip. Then I stitched each pair together to make two longer strips, and ironed the long edges into the middle (using my 1/2″ bias tape maker to keep the strips straight). I couldn’t hide the raw edges because I didn’t have enough fabric width to fold the strip in half again, so I just zigzag stitched down the middle of each strip, catching both raw edges as I went. I ended up with two 24″ ribbons to tie together at the back of the top.

Step 6: Attach ribbon ties. I unpicked enough of each side seam just underneath the elastic to insert the unfinished end of the tie to the inside. I then turned the top inside out and re-stitched the side seams, trapping each tie in place as I sewed.

Turn it back the right way out and… Ta-da!

Still loose and floaty, but it has enough shape to not make me look horribly dumpy – which, as I’m only 5’2″ tall, is a prime consideration for me! Potato sack into cute summer top in 6 easy steps 🙂

It just occurred to me that I haven’t really shown you this hamster yet. You may have spotted him (in progress) in the demo video for my Detail Stuffing Tool:

I wanted to make a stitched project to use in the demo video, to show people that my tool has uses beyond stuffing amigurumi. Coincidentally, only a couple of days earlier, I’d saved the link to an adorable hamster pattern at Nuno Life, even though I had no plans at the time to make one. And then the perfect excuse came along: a cute hamster toy and the prop I needed for my video, all in one!

When I was clearing out my old bedroom at my parents’ house last year, I brought back all my old craft supplies from when I was a kid: rubber stamps, spirograph, cross stitch supplies, and a small stash of fur fabric and felt from my pre-teen toymaking endeavours. It seems strange that I’ve had these materials for around 20 years (let’s not think about how old that makes me sound!) – is that old enough to call them ‘vintage’ craft supplies? Ha!

I found that I had the perfect golden hamster-coloured fur fabric and pink felt in my rediscovered treasures. I’ve always hoarded supplies, to the extent that I used to not use anything in fear of making a mistake and ‘wasting’ it, so it’s especially satisfying to finally be able to use some of my precious, carefully guarded materials.

The pattern was easy to follow (just remember that, as with most Japanese sewing patterns, the pattern shapes don’t include a seam allowance, so cut outside the lines to add your seam allowance) and the minimal instruction was enough to piece it all together. I snipped two tiny eyeholes in the fur before stuffing so that I could use safety eyes with backs. The nose (made by the pattern seams) seemed too low to me, so I cut a tiny piece of felt and made a higher nose. Finally, I trimmed the fur around the eyes so they weren’t obscured.

It was a small and satisfying hand sewing project, and look how cute my hamster is – especially those little ears!

If you’d like to make one too, check out Runo’s free hamster pattern 🙂

I have two winners to announce today…

First up, the winner of a copy of Crochet for Bears to Wear.

There were 80 entries, and the randomly chosen winner was… #1! (Huh, how often does that happen?! I guess 1 in 80 times in this case; although it seems strange, it’s as likely as any other number to come up.) So, Susan G of Finagling Life, I’ll be emailing you for your address, and then I’ll mail your book out to you. Congratulations!

And now onto my second winner off the day! It’s time for the first monthly drawing for a free pattern (winner’s choice) from everyone who reviewed one of the patterns or products in my shop.

Since I launched the review capability in my shop, there have been 44 reviews, and the randomly selected winner for April is review #24, written by Katie U. Congrats Katie, I’ll be emailing you to ask which pattern you’d like as your prize!

I’ve had this one in the works for a while, so I’m really happy to finally be able to show you my latest design: Lucky Bamboo. A crocheted Lucky Bamboo arrangement never needs watering, never dies, and is always fresh and green. It’s the perfect thing to brighten up your office desk, or to give as an unusual and thoughtful gift. Add a little Zen tranquillity to your life with a Lucky Bamboo!

Did you know that Lucky Bamboo isn’t really bamboo at all? It’s actually a tropical plant called Dracaena sanderiana (Ribbon Dracaena) that just happens to have a bamboo-like appearance. Lucky Bamboo is often associated with Feng Shui, and the number of stalks in an arrangement have significance in Chinese tradition: three stalks (as in my design) for happiness, five stalks for wealth, seven for health…

I really stretched myself with this design: I wanted to make a Chinese-style pot with sloped squares sides, but, as you probably know, working amigurumi-style in the round really doesn’t lend itself to making corners. After much trial and error, I’ve managed to develop a technique that produces real square corners, even while working in the round in spirals! The shaping is built right into the crochet, and even when you stuff it, the square corners remain right up the sides. It’s a little tricky to see with my black pot, but it may be more obvious when you see the pot at an angle:

The Lucky Bamboo pattern also features a few bonus modifications you can use to make the pattern your own:

• Full patterns for three stalk sizes, and instructions to create different stalk lengths
• Three different leaf styles so you can mix and match to create a larger arrangement, if desired
• Alternative colour scheme, so that if you can only find one suitable shade of green, you can still achieve the full lucky bamboo effect

If you’d like to make a Lucky Bamboo of your own, or to give as a special gift, the pattern is now available in the PlanetJune shop.

I hope you like my design! I’ve been getting requests for more plant designs for a long time now, so I hope this will satisfy the plant-lovers out there 🙂 Any other design requests? Keep ’em coming – I’m always on the lookout for new, original, ideas.

Last week, I got a big box in the mail. It contained all the sample projects I made for my book, Paper Chains & Garlands, and shipped off to New York over a year ago to be photographed. It’s so strange to see them again after all this time!

It brought me right back to early 2009, when I was writing the book – it was my first experience of print publishing, after years of self-publishing patterns and writing web-based tutorials. I thought some of you may be interested in hearing a bit more about my experience of writing my first craft book…

The timeline was very tight. I spent my days writing, designing, shopping for paper and tools, and learning more about how to use Adobe Illustrator for the book’s illustrations. Evenings were spent cutting, scoring, folding, gluing. I re-started every time my scissors slipped, because I was not going to have an imperfect sample in my book. I cried in frustration when my hands were too painful to hold the scissors any more, and I had to stop for the evening. I gritted my teeth and went paper shopping yet again when my editor told me that one of my colour schemes wasn’t going to work (when I’d already cut and folded over 100 pieces for the original sample!).

And then, after killing myself making 16 perfect sample garlands (of at least 5 ft long, and some much longer), the photographs in the book are all close-ups (at least my perfectionism paid off there!) and show no more than 1 ft of the garland in most cases, so most of my work was wasted… Although, now I finally have them back, I have ready-made paper decorations for every possible occasion 🙂

All this had faded in my memory, but seeing all the paper projects brought it all back. Please don’t think I’m complaining: it was great experience and an eye-opening introduction to print publishing. The book is a Barnes & Noble exclusive (the big US bookstore chain), so it’s hard for me to gauge how successful it is, when it’s not even available to purchase here in Canada! But I see that its status at bn.com is ‘sold out’, so I assume that’s a good sign! I’ll let you know if/when it’s reprinted and available again.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m very proud of my first craft book and happy to have been given the chance to write it. But let me just say this: if anyone tells you that writing craft books is easy and fun, they may not be telling you the whole truth…

Have you joined the PlanetJune Spring CAL on Ravelry yet? I’m so excited to see the Whales and Daffodils starting to be posted into the group! The Crochet-Along runs until the end of May, so you have plenty of time to join in and crochet along with us 🙂

I wanted to join in the Crochet-Along too. Of course, I’ve already made Daffodils and Tiny Whales before, so I wanted to do something a bit different, but still crochet along with everyone else. So here’s what I came up with: Mega Whale!

One of these whales is not like the others…

Mega Whale is made following the Tiny Whale pattern exactly, but instead of using worsted weight yarn and an E hook, I used two strands of a bulky weight yarn and an L (8mm!) hook. And I had to upgrade the eyes from the standard 8mm size to my largest 15mm size!

A regular Tiny Whale is 3.5″ long. Compare that with Mega Whale at 7″ long – it’s amazing the scale difference you can make to an amigurumi pattern by sizing up (or down) the yarn, and choosing a correspondingly larger (or smaller) hook! Despite the same number of stitches, Mega Whale took considerably longer to crochet than a regular Tiny Whale: it’s more difficult to keep the tension amigurumi-tight when you’re handling two strands of yarn, and the squeaky plastic hook was so much more difficult to work with than my preferred aluminium hooks, which easily glide through the tightest stitches without the slightest squeak or resistance.

The invisible decreases, in particular, were a real challenge: trying to get the big plastic hook into the front loops of both strands of yarn required a bit of coaxing! But when you size up in this way, everything is increased – it’s just like blowing up a photograph on a photocopier – and so as the stitches increase in size, the holes between your stitches also become larger. So the invisible decrease was absolutely invaluable for preventing a giant sized gap or bump at every decrease point, and well worth the extra second it took to begin each stitch!

I have to say, I still love this pattern. I designed it to be really basic – and, with no sewing involved and the whole whale worked in one piece, it doesn’t get much more basic than this! It’s amazing that something so simple can have so much character. Even though they don’t have mouths (although you could certainly embroider one if you wanted!) you can just tell that these whales are happy and smiling. 🙂

Mega Whale has happily joined the Tiny Whales and, as you can see, they have welcomed their oversized brother into the pod!

Do join us at the PlanetJune crochet designs Ravelry group and be a part of the Spring CAL! As I said at the start of this post, the Crochet-Along runs until the end of May, so you have plenty of time to join in and crochet along with us 🙂

If you don’t use Ravelry, you can still play along – just upload your pics to the PlanetJune Crochet flickr group! (Or if you don’t use Flickr either… um, just email your pics to me 🙂

PS – My giveaway ends on Monday at 6am 12 noon EST. Don’t forget to enter the contest if you’d like to win a copy of ‘Crochet for Bears to Wear’!