{"id":278,"date":"2008-06-12T17:26:16","date_gmt":"2008-06-12T21:26:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/?p=278"},"modified":"2025-03-16T14:17:44","modified_gmt":"2025-03-16T18:17:44","slug":"blogiversary-contest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/blogiversary-contest\/","title":{"rendered":"blogiversary + contest"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Note: don&#8217;t forget to enter my contest at the end of this post!<\/em><\/p>\n<h2>Year in Review<\/h2>\n<p>Doesn&#8217;t time fly? I can&#8217;t believe I&#8217;ve been running this blog for 2 years! Looking back to <a href=\"\/blog\/happy-blogiversary\/\">last year&#8217;s blogiversary post<\/a>, I see that I&#8217;ve added 19 more original designs to my <a href=\"\/shop\">crochet pattern store<\/a>, plus I created 4 more <a href=\"\/blog\/free-crochet-patterns\/\">free patterns<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/blog\/images\/year2_patterns.jpg\" alt=\"planetjune year 2\" \/><\/p>\n<p>This year&#8217;s tutorials included lots of <a href=\"\/blog\/amigurumi-help\/\">Amigurumi Help<\/a>, the <a href=\"\/blog\/offset-square-wrist-pincushion-tutorial\/\">Offset Square Wrist Pincushion<\/a> and the amazingly popular <a href=\"\/blog\/shrink-plastic-ring-tutorial\/\">Shrinkydinks Rings tutorial<\/a>. If you&#8217;ve made anything from my tutorials, don&#8217;t forget to upload the pics to my new Flickr group, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/groups\/planetjune_tutorials\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">PlanetJune Tutorial Gallery<\/a> &#8211; I&#8217;d love to see what you&#8217;ve made!<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/blog\/images\/year2_tutorials.jpg\" alt=\"planetjune year 2\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I tried some new crafts: <a href=\"\/blog\/supercute-sea-creatures\/\">felt toys<\/a>, <a href=\"\/blog\/origami-star-ornament\/\">modular origami<\/a> and <a href=\"\/blog\/adventures-in-needlefelting\/\">needlefelting<\/a> &#8211; all of which I hope to do more of in the future. <\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/blog\/images\/year2_newcrafts.jpg\" alt=\"planetjune year 2\" \/><\/p>\n<p>This year, PlanetJune also appeared in print for the first time:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A pattern in the 2008 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.knittingpatternaday.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Crochet Pattern a Day calendar<\/a>, and featured on the back cover of the box<\/li>\n<li>My <em>Joining Amigurumi<\/em> article in <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20201202063208\/http:\/\/croqzine.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">CROQ Zine<\/a><\/li>\n<li>A <a href=\"\/blog\/amigurumi-animals\/\">full page of photos<\/a> of my designs in the design gallery section of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Amigurumi-Animals-Patterns-Techniques-Creatures\/dp\/0312378203\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Amigurumi Animals<\/a><\/li>\n<li>My ice cream bear pattern and a companion article I wrote in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.aneedlepullingthread.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">A Needle Pulling Thread magazine<\/a> (Summer 2008 issue &#8211; should be out any day now, and I can&#8217;t wait to see it!)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And, on top of all that, we moved to a new city and bought our first house, which resulted in me driving back to my old job every day for 6 months (that&#8217;s almost 4 hours per day in the car) over a very long and snowy winter &#8211; I can&#8217;t remember how I even managed to get anything else done&#8230;<\/p>\n<h2>What&#8217;s Next?<\/h2>\n<p>It came as quite a shock to see how much crochet I&#8217;ve done this year, compared with other crafting. I suppose I&#8217;ve been concentrating so much on making patterns, everything else has come second. For the coming year, I&#8217;m hoping I&#8217;ll find more time to <strong>make<\/strong> more things, without neglecting my pattern designing either. It&#8217;s exhilarating to try new things, so I want to keep pushing myself out of my comfort zone.<\/p>\n<p>I also have some new and exciting things in development, but they aren&#8217;t quite ready to share just yet&#8230; <\/p>\n<p>Roll on year 3! I can&#8217;t wait to see what comes next in the PlanetJune story&#8230;<\/p>\n<h2>Thank you!<\/h2>\n<p>Of course the best part of all this is still getting to &#8216;meet&#8217; so many wonderful people! I was going to namecheck some of my bestest online friends, but I don&#8217;t want to leave anyone out, so&#8230; well, I&#8217;m talking about <strong>YOU<\/strong>. Thank you for reading this, thank you for your comments and e-mails, thank you for buying my patterns. <\/p>\n<h2>Contest Time!<\/h2>\n<p>Now your reward for reading this far: <strong>it&#8217;s contest time<\/strong>! I&#8217;m running 2 contests this time:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Win <strong>any pattern <\/strong>(your choice) from the pattern store. FYI, each PocketAmi set counts as one pattern \ud83d\ude42<\/li>\n<li>Win a finished <strong>PocketAmi Mouse<\/strong> (shipped to you, anywhere in the world). I have crocheted an adorable little grey mouse especially for this contest&#8230; This is a rare opportunity to get your hands on a PlanetJune original!<br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/blog\/images\/mouse_contest.jpg\" alt=\"Win a PocketAmi mouse!\" \/><br \/>\n<em>I have small hands &#8211; he is even smaller than he looks here!<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>To enter, leave me a comment on this post, including:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Your choice of prize &#8211; type <strong>MOUSE<\/strong> or <strong>PATTERN<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>Tell me something, e.g. your favourite thing I&#8217;ve made, a suggestion for a future design, something you&#8217;d like to see on PlanetJune. Anything goes &#8211; I just want to hear from you!<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>If you want to enter <strong>both<\/strong> contests, just leave me 2 comments! <\/p>\n<p>On Friday 20th June at 5pm EST, I will draw one name from each set of MOUSE comments, and one from each set of PATTERN comments. (In the unlikely event that the same person &#8216;wins&#8217; both, I will contact them to see which prize they would prefer, and then draw another name for the other contest winner). Good luck!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Note: don&#8217;t forget to enter my contest at the end of this post! Year in Review Doesn&#8217;t time fly? I can&#8217;t believe I&#8217;ve been running this blog for 2 years! Looking back to last year&#8217;s blogiversary post, I see that I&#8217;ve added 19 more original designs to my crochet pattern store, plus I created 4 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=278"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24371,"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278\/revisions\/24371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}