PlanetJune Blog: Latest News, Patterns and Tutorials

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you’ll have already had a sneak peek at this guy:

He’s a gecko, a type of smallish lizard found in warm to tropical climates. Leopard geckos, the type you’ll see most often kept as a pet, have tiny claws on their feet, but most other gecko species have toe pads that let them climb up vertical walls!

My first introduction to a day gecko was in Hawaii last year, where this little guy was living in our room and spent his time climbing up and down the window frame:

So cute! I’ve had the idea to make a gecko in the back of my mind ever since then. My little Hawaiian buddy was only about 3″ long (a bit small for a crocheted version), but some of the Madagascan species of day gecko reach 9-11″ long. You’re probably familiar with Madagascan geckos from the talking one in those Geico ads 🙂

My crocheted gecko is 10″ long, and, like his cousins, climbs the walls with his special toe pads! Here he is climbing my window:

I think he’s after my origami decorations!

…and climbing back down again

(Okay, he needed a little assistance to stay in place on the window, but isn’t the effect perfect?!)

Gecko is only my 2nd reptile design (after my Sea Turtle) but he was a lot of fun to make. Maybe I should try some other more unusual animals in future – what do you think?

The Gecko pattern is now available to purchase from the shop!

Last week, Dave and I took a ‘research trip’ to the zoo. It was the perfect day to go – the weather was gorgeous but not too hot, and with all the kids back in school, it was practically deserted! I always love to see the animals, and African Lion Safari is very special because you can drive around inside the huge enclosures while the animals roam free. It gives you a chance to get much closer to some amazing animals than you would normally get in a zoo.

I was hoping for some inspiration for new designs, but it turns out I’ve made a lot of the animals already! Let’s take a look:

Monkey: check.

Ring-tailed lemur: check.

Elephant: check.

Llama: check. (Well, Alpaca, that’s close enough!)

Rhino: check.

What’s left? How about some of these?

I’m sure you’ve heard of ‘Sister’ Diane Gilleland, the creator of the popular Craftypod podcast and blog. A few months ago, Diane entered the world of self-publishing via eBooks with her first offering for craft bloggers: Making a Great Blog: A Guide for Creative People. Diane’s latest eBook, Creating a Blog Audience: An Unconventional Marketing Guide is the next in her craft blogger series, and something I thought might be useful for me as I try to reach new customers for PlanetJune…

The first thing I noticed when reading this book is that Diane’s voice really shines through. If you’ve ever listened to Craftypod, you’ll know exactly what to expect – every word is written in Diane’s warm, clear, conversational tone and it’s hard not to imagine her speaking the words on the page directly to you.

As the subtitle of the book suggests, this is indeed “an unconventional marketing guide”. Far from the traditional marketing concept of sending out your message to everyone possible and hoping some of them will listen, Diane focuses on ‘Engagement Marketing’ techniques: engaging with people and, by doing this, starting to build a community of people who are actually interested in what you have to say.

As an established blogger (I’m now into my fourth year of blogging!) I’m fortunate to already have an audience of wonderful readers, and a lot of the material in this book covers things I already do. Having said that, this book provided a new way of thinking about these things, and I’ve been able to identify several areas that I’d like to invest more time in – even things as simple as commenting on others’ blogs (which I’m guilty of not doing often enough, as I usually read posts through Google Reader and don’t take the time to click through to tell people I enjoyed their post or to leave my opinion). And some of Diane’s suggestions were completely new to me – her Gathering Place #5 was something I’d never even considered as a place to meet like-minded people, although it makes total sense. (You’ll have to buy the book to find out which website I’m talking about!)

Diane’s advice is tailored to craft bloggers, so it’s very easy to understand and apply. Diane includes a set of worksheets to help you identify and plan for what will work best for you and your blog, and related links and resources on her website.

If you’re a new or relatively unknown blogger and are trying to build an audience for your blog, you’ll find this book will be absolutely invaluable. If, like me, you already have an audience but are looking for ways to grow and to market your business, you’ll find some tips in here that will help you to increase your audience and build your community. Now I just have to put what I’ve learnt into action!

Creating a Blog Audience by Diane Gilleland is 62 pages long and is available to purchase for $13.50 from Craftypod.

Last night I recorded an episode of Mary Beth Temple’s crochet podcast, Getting Loopy. Mary Beth and I chatted about me and my designs, amigurumi in general, and all sorts of other things, including life-size crocheted giraffes! You can listen to the podcast here – and as incentive to listen there’s a contest in there to win 2 of my patterns of your choice!

Getting Loopy listeners, here are some of the links I mentioned:

• My amigurumi help pages
• My free crochet patterns
• Folding Trees (my papercraft site)
• Follow me on Twitter
• Please email me with your suggestions for new patterns!

In other news, I’m teaching another online class at Crochetville, starting this Friday, September 11th. This time I’ll be showing you step by step how to make my amigurumi Alpacas:

Registration is now open, if you’d like to sign up and get the benefit of my expertise – it’s going to be fun!

Remember my Red Fox from last week? I decided to make him a cousin in a white brushed yarn, to be an Arctic Fox, and now I’ve completed both patterns. Two different foxes with very different appearances – which is your favourite?

Arctic Fox is a great project to try if you’re intrigued by the idea of brushed crochet. Brushing the finished crocheted pieces gives a realistic fur effect, and because it’s all done in one colour, that’s one less thing to worry about 🙂 Full instructions are given in the pattern – all you need is a wire pet brush or a mohair brush, and you’re guaranteed to get a cute fluffy result! And the pattern also works with regular yarn, if you don’t want to try the brushing technique.

Red Fox has a totally different appeal, combining 3 colours with that distinctive shape to make a realistic amigurumi fox with a cunning glint in his eye!

It’s amazing that you can achieve such different effects with just a crochet hook, some yarn and the single crochet stitch! I really do love crochet…

The patterns are for sale in the shop for $4.50 each. If you’d like to try both types of fox, I’ve made a fox multipack including both patterns for only $7.

Happy crocheting!

My lemmings pattern continues to take over the world 🙂 Here’s another commission I just finished, (currently on their way to Italy):

And this is just too cool not to share: JS left me a comment on my original lemmings post to tell me about a project planned and executed to perfection by the craft club at the Helsinki University of Technology. The girls in the club spent five months secretly crocheting about 200 (yes! two hundred!) lemmings based on my pattern, and then strategically arranged them – walking, building, climbing, floating, etc – all around the IT building.

Here are some waiting to be arranged:

(image source)

And some action shots:

(image source)

Isn’t that the coolest thing ever?! Congratulations to everyone involved in the epic project – it looks amazing. I’d love to walk through a building and see tiny lemmings popping up everywhere I looked!

If you’d like to make your own lemmings, the basic Mop Top Mascots pattern is free (donationware). If you leave a donation, the PDF version also includes hints for how to adapt the Mop Tops into the various lemmings 🙂 Thank you to those who have donated already – I really appreciate your support!

I got 4lbs of blueberries free as a special offer with my groceries – yum! I’ve munched my way through over 2lbs of them so far(!), but thought it might be good to try some blueberry recipes.

Blueberry syrup

Ingredients
1 cup fresh blueberries
1/4 cup sugar
1/4 cup water

Directions

1. Bring ingredients to a boil in a saucepan.
2. Simmer for a few minutes until the berries are soft.
3. Squash the berries with a potato masher or the back of a spoon.
4. Either serve as is, or push the syrup through a sieve with the back of a spoon to filter out the skins.

After straining, I was left with just under 2/3 cup of fresh blueberry syrup. Simple, and delicious served over pancakes!

I saved a tweet from @craft_tips:

Warm water, baking soda, aluminum foil. Insert tarnished silver, remove after 10 minutes. Clean!

The idea of a quick and easy method to clean it without any effort was too good to pass up – I have a lot of silver jewellery (because I only wear silver or white gold jewellery) and some is horribly tarnished. I googled to try to find more details and the consensus seems to be that foil, baking soda, a little salt, and boiling water are the magic formula.

Let’s see it in action!

Before (I chose the blackest, most tarnished pieces for this photo. Note also the green tarnish on the two earrings next to the horseshoe charm – I’ll refer to this later!)

Aluminium foil in the bottom of a glass bowl, with baking soda and a little salt

Boiling water added – bubbles!

I added the jewellery – the trick is to make sure that each piece is in direct contact with the foil. Here comes the science part (I probably haven’t mentioned this before, but I used to be a Materials Scientist in a past life): the black tarnish on your silver is silver sulphide. An electrochemical reaction causes the sulphur to transfer from the silver to the aluminium foil, and the tarnish disappears! You can tell it’s working when you smell the sulphur (bad eggs)…

Look how dirty the water becomes (I’d taken out most of the jewellery by this point)

Most of my jewellery came out clean and shiny. Some had a whitish powdery residue (probably from the salt etc) but after rinsing them in clean water, they were fine. Some still looked black, but the black came off easily when I dried it on some paper towel:

The remaining black tarnish rubbed off easily on a paper towel

Now here’s something interesting: the silver that started with green tarnish to begin with didn’t get clean – it turned orangey/black. This makes sense – pure silver is very soft, so the standard 925 silver (sterling silver) is made from 92.5% silver, and the remaining 7.5% is often copper. It would have been the copper content in the silver that produced the green tarnish in the first place.

Look at the result of the ‘cleaning’ of the green-tarnished pieces:

Yuck – discolouration from the copper content in the silver

The good news – this isn’t permanent. I used silver polish on these pieces and they turned back to shiny silver (phew!). But I recommend that if you have any silver with green tarnish, don’t use the baking soda method – it won’t help!

After rinsing (and polishing the copper from the surface of the above earrings), here’s all my jewellery:

And here’s the final proof that it does (mostly) work – remember my blackened flower ring from the first picture? Look at it now!

Clean and shiny!

Yay! I can wear it again! And I didn’t have to polish into all those little crevices by hand 🙂

If you’d like to try this technique yourself, you just need aluminium (that’s aluminum to the Americans) foil, baking soda, salt, and boiling water to make most of your silver look like new again with zero effort! Just don’t forget to rinse the pieces after cleaning (if you leave the salt residue, it’ll corrode the silver).

I hope you found my review interesting – just tell me if I get too science-geeky and I’ll scale it back in future 🙂

Edited to add:

Several people have asked about silver jewellery that includes gems or other stones. I’ve mentioned a few important tips about those in the comments, so I thought I should add them here too:

• Pearls are NOT stones and must be treated very carefully with only a damp cloth or a very mild soap solution. NEVER put pearls into a baking soda solution!
• The finish of some gems may be damaged by hot water or salt, so do Google for cleaning instructions for your particular gemstone to make sure it’s safe before you try this or any other cleaning method.
• If your stones are glued in place, there’s also a chance that the glue will react with the solution, or even melt in the boiling water.

So, if in doubt, save this technique for your silver jewellery that’s all. silver and doesn’t have any gems, stones, crystals etc.