{"id":20933,"date":"2020-10-26T11:44:22","date_gmt":"2020-10-26T15:44:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/?p=20933"},"modified":"2025-03-16T15:09:56","modified_gmt":"2025-03-16T19:09:56","slug":"tortoise-a-10-month-or-10-year-design-study","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/tortoise-a-10-month-or-10-year-design-study\/","title":{"rendered":"Tortoise: a 10-month (or 10-year!) design study"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m so happy with the reception my Tortoise patterns<\/a> have had already! Thank you so much to everyone who’s already bought them or shared them on social – I’m so glad you love them too!<\/p>\n

\"Tortoise<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s been a very<\/strong> long journey to get to this point, so I thought I’d put together a visual diary of creating my most complex, detailed and challenging pattern to date.<\/p>\n

For anyone who looks at the pictures of my finished tortoises and thinks that doesn’t look so hard to design<\/em>, this post should be an eye-opener! Although my style is to create designs that look smooth and simple, the process is anything but.<\/p>\n

So here goes: a decade to get properly started, and then 10 months to get finished!<\/p>\n

2011: Conception<\/h2>\n

I came up with the idea to make a tortoise along the same lines as my AquaAmi Sea Turtle<\/a>, with a segmented shell and amigurumi-style head and limbs.<\/p>\n

\"AquaAmi<\/p>\n

There were a couple of other cute tortoise patterns out there, but they all had circular shells and that’s just not right<\/em>: tortoises have very oval-shaped shells. I sketched out a design for the shell segments that would make an oval shell using simple geometric shapes, and started crocheting.<\/p>\n

\"initial
\nThe initial concept for the shell<\/em><\/p>\n

Once I started to assemble my pieces, I quickly realised the problem with my design: it was going to produce a flattish shell top. That’s fine for a sea turtle, with its streamlined shape for swimming, but completely wrong for a land tortoise with its domed shell.<\/p>\n

I was a fairly new designer back then, with only a few years of experience, and the challenge of creating a very specific asymmetrical 3D shape from simple geometric segments was beyond me – I just didn’t know where to go from there – so I set it aside, and the notes and prototypes were filed for later…<\/p>\n

\"amigurumi
\nYou can see a couple of the original shell segments (with some dinosaur parts!) in this work-in-progress photo from 2011 – before I realised my idea wasn’t going to work…<\/em><\/p>\n

2012-2017: Research<\/h2>\n

Moving from Canada to South Africa in 2011 brought an unexpected benefit. Although I knew that tortoises must live wild somewhere<\/em> in the world, I only specifically knew about giant Galapagos tortoises, until I made the delightful discovery that ‘normal’ tortoises are pretty common in conservation areas and empty wild spaces in the Cape!<\/p>\n

Throughout my years in Africa, I had endless opportunities to meet and study tortoises, from spotting wild tortoises while I was out in nature…<\/p>\n

\"tortoise<\/p>\n

… to hanging out with rescued tortoises at my local wildlife sanctuary, World of Birds<\/a> (tortoises live for a very long time, and keep growing throughout their lives, so ‘cute’ pet tortoises are often abandoned when they get too large)…<\/p>\n

\"June<\/p>\n

… to braking for wild tortoises crossing the road in undeveloped areas (and ‘awwww’ing whenever I spotted an adorable baby tort!)…<\/p>\n

\"tortoise<\/p>\n

… to getting to hold those baby torts and learn more about them at an education and conservation centre…<\/p>\n

\"tortoise<\/p>\n

In all that time, I learnt to appreciate these fascinating reptiles more than ever, and study their shells and markings up close.<\/p>\n

2020: Realization<\/h2>\n

January<\/h3>\n

After my Christmas break, I was ready to jump into new designs for 2020! With an extra decade of design experience under my belt, I had a new idea for how to tackle that tortoise shell shape.<\/p>\n

After all my research time, I knew exactly what I was aiming to create: a life-sized realistically-shaped tortoise with correct (if simplified) shell structure:<\/p>\n