PlanetJune Blog: Latest News, Patterns and Tutorials

Allow me to introduce the latest member of my AmiDogs family: the Boxer!

He’s about 6″ long and worked in brown, white and black worsted weight yarn. I decided to go with natural, floppy ears, instead of the cropped pointy ones, but if you’re desperate for a Boxer with sticking-up ears, I’ve also included modifications for that in the pattern 🙂

It’s hard to believe that the Boxer is my 15th AmiDogs design! My first three AmiDogs were published in July 2007 – that’s almost 3 years ago. Hmm, I suppose that 15 breeds in 3 years doesn’t sound quite so impressive! But I have to go slowly with designing them or I get really bored (it’s having to make and attach all those endless legs!). And a bored June is not a creative and happy June, so it may be another few months before I start on the next batch of AmiDogs.

Bit of a size difference going on here!

Now I’ve finished another three designs, AmiDogs Set 5 (Great Dane, Airedale Terrier and Boxer) is also ready to go. But if you’d like to mix and match your own three favourite breeds, you can use the Custom Set feature in my shop to choose any 3 dog breeds for the same special price.

I hope you like my boxer. It took a while to get the patterning on the face and muzzle the way I wanted it, but I think I’ve captured that special boxer quality!

I’ve been avoiding paper crafts since I stopped writing for Folding Trees. Trying to scan the web every day for paper craft resources to highlight was exhausting and ultimately put me off papercrafting. But I’ve started to miss coming up with my own crafty paper tutorials – I think I’m out of my paper funk!

Here’s a really simple paper project. The idea came from these GreenMarkers that Kari found in a Japanese online shop:

When you need to mark up a lot of pages of a book, you end up with a swarm of sticky arrows sticking out of the edge of the book. I love the idea of forming a little clump of grass ‘growing’ out of the book instead, so here’s my simple 5-minute DIY version:

<23>‘Grass’ Sticky Page Markers

They look especially cute in my papercraft book, Paper Chains and Garlands, don’t you think? 😀

You will need:

• Green sticky notes (if you can’t find green ones, you could colour normal coloured notes with a green pencil or paint before you begin)
• Pair of sharp scissors
• Bone folder (optional)

I found these recycled paper Post-It notes that include a lovely spring green colour:

Take a sticky note and make sure the sticky edge is at the bottom:

Cut out blades of grass from the note. You need to make a long thin triangular shape with a slight curve, starting from the bottom (sticky) edge and tapering to a point. Cut the shapes freehand – if they aren’t exactly the same size and shape they will have a more organic, natural feel.

Note: Make all the blades curve in the same direction – it saves paper, and when you stick some on left-hand pages and some on right-hand pages of your book, you’ll end up with some blades curving in each direction anyway!

Stick the blades down on a piece of paper.

Turn the paper around so that the sticky edge of the blades is at the top. Use a bone folder or the wrong side of the edge of your scissors to score a line down the middle of each blade, drawing the folder towards you from the base to the tip of each blade.

You don’t have to be too exact! If you look carefully you can see my scored lines on the 4 rightmost blades:

With your fingers, pinch the sides of each blade slightly so that it folds up around the scored line. This adds a little dimension and realism to the grass!

Use your blades of grass to mark up your reference books without damaging them!

A touch of spring, whatever the weather! I hope you like my grass markers 🙂

Did you know it’s less than a month until Easter? I’m a little bored with pastel coloured eggs and I thought I’d try to come up with an Easter decoration that’s a little more contemporary and sophisticated. Using a limited colour pattern of chocolate brown (yum!) and ice blue, I’ve designed 8 different eggs (4 designs in each of 2 colourways) that coordinate beautifully together for Easter-themed decorating. You could arrange them in a bowl or basket as a centrepiece, hang them from an Easter tree, or string them into an Easter garland.

When I was coming up with my basic egg shape, I looked around at other crocheted egg patterns, and I couldn’t find a single one that was the shape of a real egg: some were too pointy, some were too long, some weren’t round enough. I’ve tried to make my design closer to a real egg shape, but a little larger so there’s more room to add the pattern! My eggs are just under 3″ long made with Vanna’s Choice yarn, so they would probably be about 2.5″ long if you used a different worsted weight yarn (Vanna’s is, confusingly, much thicker than most other worsteds!)

I found it really addictive to make my eggs – they are so quick and satisfying, with no sewing required. I loved my colour scheme too – it reminds me of really fancy chocolate eggs, but without the calories! Of course, if you’d like to use more traditional pastel colours, or make a multi-coloured set, that would look lovely too 🙂

If you’d like to make some crocheted Easter Eggs too, my pattern includes 4 egg designs, so that, using only 2 colours of yarn, you can make 8 different eggs. This pattern is a great way to practice crochet colourwork and maybe learn a new stitch. The four egg designs are arranged in order of difficulty, so that novice crocheters can start with the basic plain egg, and move up through the designs, learning something new about colourwork with each one.

If you’re put off by the thought of colourwork and all those ends to weave in, please don’t be: I’ve designed the patterns so that the colours are swapped either every stitch or every row, so that you can just drop the unused yarn to the inside of the egg, and pick it back up again when you work back around to it! Maximum effect for minimum effort – just the way I like it!

You can pick up the Easter Eggs pattern from the PlanetJune store. I’d love to see your finished eggs (and anything else you’ve made from any of my patterns!) so please keep posting your photos to the PlanetJune Crochet Flickr pool!

PS: If you’d like to do some more Easter-themed crocheting, here are my other Easter-y patterns:

I’m so excited to launch my new product today! The Detail Stuffing Tool came about because it’s really difficult to stuff tiny things, or to get that last bit of stuffing in before you close up a hole. After making a million AmiDogs legs (that’s what it feels like, anyway!) and other tiny pieces that have to be stuffed firmly, I realised I needed a better way of doing it…

Dollmakers have a special forked metal stuffing tool, and that’s where I got the inspiration for my tool. The dollmaker’s tool costs around $15, and I wanted to produce something more affordable – if you’re anything like me, you lose tools far more often than you break them, so an inexpensive plastic tool is much more appealing!

Whether you crochet, knit, or sew stuffed toys or amigurumi, you need a Detail Stuffing Tool! Not convinced? I’ve made a short video to demonstrate the benefits of the tool, and techniques for using it:

More Details:

Get a grip on your stuffing: Fiberfill (especially the better quality ones) can be quite slippery, and if you try to use the end of your crochet hook or a chopstick to stuff, you’ll find that the fibres just slide around the edge of the stick, and you end up poking a hole in the stuffing instead of pushing the stuffing into the hole! The Detail Stuffing Tool has two prongs that catch the fibres of the stuffing so it can’t slip away as easily, and twisting the tool as you insert it spins the stuffing fibres into the piece with ease.

Stuff the tiniest pieces: The head of the Detail Stuffing Tool is small enough to fit inside the tiniest amigurumi part. The added bonus is that you can use it to add an extra bit of stuffing to a closed shape after you’ve finished crocheting (when you only have a 6 sc hole remaining to stitch closed) so you can stuff as firmly as you want without having to struggle to avoid catching the stuffing fibres while you crochet that last round.

Stuff right into the corners: The Detail Stuffing Tool also works really well to stuff tiny pieces for sewn plush toys. It can be really difficult to position the stuffing exactly where you want it to fill a tiny finger or arm or nose. By twirling the stuffing around the tool to make a firm blob of stuffing at the head of the tool, you can place the tool inside the tip of the piece, and then grip the stuffing from the outside as you withdraw the tool, so that the stuffing stays in place.

I’ve been using my prototype tool for a couple of months, and I couldn’t be without it now! It makes the pesky task of stuffing small pieces so much less frustrating, and I love that I can easily stuff all my pieces more firmly by adding additional stuffing into the tiny hole that remains after finishing the crocheting.

I hope you like my Detail Stuffing Tool – now available to purchase from the PlanetJune shop! I really think it’s a tool that’s been missing from the world of stuffed toymaking until now 🙂

Finding space for all my creations is a bit of a challenge! I’ve come up with a novel solution for my amigurumi gecko, so I thought I’d share…

When we were in Hawaii, the geckos we saw could climb straight up vertical walls, thanks to their special toe pads. We always saw them climbing around window frames, or running around the walls inside the front porch, right up by the roof. That image was always in my mind when I made my gecko, so I thought it would be cool to let my gecko do a little wall-climbing too.

Also in this photo: my computer desk, the purple trinket shelves I made last year and my new magnetic white board (it’s actually silver-coloured, which is why it looks glaringly white here – reflected light from the window!)

How does he do it? It’s actually very simple – I knocked a couple of tiny nails into the wall and his stitches just hook onto them! The effect is very good – you only see the nails if you put your head right against the wall:

And here’s my Hawaiian inspiration (awww!):

A pretty close match, I think 🙂

Remember my polymer clay frog from a couple of weeks ago? I decided to follow my own suggestion and remake it in crochet. As with the clay version, this is the ‘Blue Jeans’ colour morph of the Strawberry Poison Dart Frog (Dendrobates pumilio), with a distinctive red body and blue legs:

This adorable tiny tropical frog from the jungles of Central and South America is only about 1″ long in real life, but the crocheted version is poison-free and a much more manageable size (about 6.5″ long).

Here she is with her inspiration, my original FIMO sculpture – there’s quite a size difference!

And, just for fun, I thought you might be interested to see my original notebook sketch I made after watching the Amphibians episode of David Attenborough’s Life, which set this whole thing into motion! A little glimpse into my process:

If you’d like to make your own tropical froggy, the Poison Dart Frog amigurumi crochet pattern is now available in the PlanetJune shop. I hope you like her!

I’m fortunate to live only an hour’s drive away from the Bernat/Patons Yarn Factory Outlet store (in Listowel, ON). Twice a year, they have a massive sale, and it’s winter sale time again! Last winter, I went to the same sale, had an amazing time and bought a boatload of yarn. This year, it was a totally different experience for me: since becoming self-employed, my attitude to spending has changed. I’ve always been careful with money, but these days I rarely buy anything! As I walked around the store filled with amazing bargains, all I could think was “do I really need that?” and “24 balls of Patons Grace for $48 – I can’t spend $48 on yarn I don’t need!”

Just noticed that this photo makes it look like a fabric store with a bit of yarn! In every other direction, the store is floor to ceiling yarn 🙂

Everyone else in the store was literally filling black garbage bags with yarn! They probably make sweaters and afghans and other bulky items. My typical crocheted item takes less than 1 skein of yarn, so how could I justify that kind of buying? One lady stepped away from her bag of goodies for a moment (to pick up some more yarn), so I took the opportunity to snap this photo as evidence:

No, that’s not rubbish – it’s a bin bag full of yarn!

I was actually prepared to leave empty-handed, and then I saw the bin filled with mill ends of novelty yarns and other oddments, priced at 20c/oz. That’s practically free! I combed through the entire bin (and it was a big bin!) and managed to find some treaures. I ended up with 21 balls of various yarns for around $8:

My meagre haul

I also picked up this handy pair of snips with a cap that will be perfect to keep safely in an on-the-go project bag:

So, even though I didn’t really take advantage of the sale, I don’t feel too bad – I’m actually quite proud that I only spent $10!

What better way to celebrate than with a bunch of balloons? Made in pastels like these, they’d be perfect for baby shower decorations or for Easter. Made in bolder colours, they’d brighten any occasion!

(I certainly want to celebrate after being involved in a minor car crash yesterday: it could have been so much worse, but luckily nobody was injured. I wasn’t at fault, so my insurance premiums won’t be affected; I just need to take the car in to be fixed soon.)

I’ve created 2 different amigurumi balloon patterns for you: the standard round balloon, and the extra-fun long balloon. Each balloon only take a few minutes to crochet, so you can whip up a bunch in no time!

The balloons 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 Amigurumi Balloons pattern >>