2014 in review

WordPress has done another year in review for me. Which has reminded me that I haven’t updated here since July. JULY! That’s ridiculous. Just to reassure you, this blog is not dead and will be updated at some point – probably February because at the moment I’m directing a Panto I wrote (!) so all my time is taken up with that. But fear not! I have already crocheted some new things I just need time to write up the patterns.

Happy 2015 everyone!

Amiguruthi x

Here’s an excerpt:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 73,000 times in 2014. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 3 days for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Amiguruthi goes to the craft faire.

Hi everyone. This is a couple of weeks late but I still wanted to post it cos it was quite a big thing for me, even if it was pretty much a fail! Plus, it’ll give you a sneak peek of a couple of free patterns I’ll be posting soon.

A couple of weeks back me and my friend did a craft faire together. It was at our old high school (which was super weird because between us leaving and the faire ten years later it had been burnt down and rebuilt to look like something out of Glee!). We arrived super early and set out our stall:

That’s my friend Jenny. She does some amazing graphic art and you can check her out at www.jennystorey.com

I had on my branded t-shirt:

I’d even got business cards made:

Here’s my stock:

All patterns my own, expect for:
Owl pattern by A Morning Cup of Jo Creations.
Mini Minion pattern by Mad Crochet Lab.
Super Hero Pencils, Santa and Rudolf coming soon to Amiguruthi!

The day was five hours long and I sold a grand total of (drum roll please…) FOUR ITEMS!

Yeah, four. One of which was to my own Mum. Although I did sell three of the owls to a friend later on and I also gave away a Rudolf and a Wonder Woman Pencil.

To be honest although I’m a little miffed I didn’t expect to sell much because footfall at the event was dire – maybe twenty people came in all day! Asking round not even the more experienced stall holders sold much either. Oh well. I’ll consider doing another next year but we need to research a popular one first I think. Plus my stock can go to a local gallery in town who I have contacts with and who say they’re happy to sell my stuff (they’ve done so before). It was a fun experience and that’s the main thing right?

Ok, I PROMISE I’ll be back with a free pattern next time. The run up to Christmas is very busy so I can’t promise when, but I’ll let you help choose – just comment below with your favourite and I’ll post that pattern first.

Super Hero Pencils, Santa and Rudolf, or The Lady?

How I design

Allo everyone. I’m still getting used to being a full time teacher, so my time for crochet has taken a HUGE plummeting this month. It’s been three weeks since the start of term, and this is how my days have generally gone:

1) Wake up at 6:15. Get up at 6:45.
2) Stumble around in an effort to get dressed, feed the cat, make lunch and be out the door by 7:00.
3) 7:20, arrive at work. Potter around getting ready for lessons.
4) 8:00 staff briefing – the day begins!
5) Between 8:20 and 14:55 meet many, many children, all clammering for attention and/or refusing to do Textiles because ‘it’s boring’ (well, you’d know that from the three second glance you gave the task wouldn’t you? Thank god for good kids!)
6) 14:55 to around 16:30 various meetings and/or getting prepped for the next day of work before I leave and go home.
7) 16:30 to 17:00 drive home, try to stay awake to avoid firey car crash of death. Thankfully there’s just enough traffic to stop me actually driving more than five meters before coming to a stop at a traffic light before I really got going anyway. Realise I forgot to eat lunch at this point. Feel hungry.
8) Arrive home at 17:00. Try to get up the enthusiasm to eat/ tidy house/ converse with the boyfriend.
9) Get to 18:00 and FALL ASLEEP DRAMATICALLY..
10) Wake up around 20:00 and decide ‘sod it – I’m going to bed’. Get in bed, expecting oblivious in three, two, one… Despite being too tired to move, finally fall asleep properly around 1:00 because naps bring back the insomnia!

Ok, so I might be exaggerating a little, but it’s definitely been long days and super tiredness, hence a distinct lack of crochet in my life. apparently it’ll get easier as I get used to it, so I’m not complaining per say, just venting lol.

Anyway, since I don’t have a pattern for you this week because of all this, I thought I’d do a bit on how I go about designing. I saw some people talking about it on Facebook and found it really interesting how differently everyone works.

My designing starts with a cat.

Squeak is one of those cats who will ignore you until she realises that you have found a comfortable, feet under the butt ‘could sit here for hours’ position in which to work. Then she comes and slams herself down on your lap, adding just enough extra weight that you THINK it’ll be ok, only to realise ten minutes later that various bones in your body will never be quite right again. Designing starts with the age old question ‘Do I move or work around the cat?’ a debate which could be a blog post all of its own.

She usually wins and I work round her by the way.

Ok, so designing for me actually starts with a notebook.

 

I like to used small squared paper because it helps keep my notes neat and if I need to I can count squares as stitches and try to build a shape pixel style. Usually I’ll do a quick sketch to work out shapes and positions – above you can see my Panda doodles. I’ll look at photos or watch videos if I’m going for a specific shape like with this project, but if I’m just designing something new (ie – not based on a existing character or animal) then I’ll just doodle and see where I get to. Or sometimes I don’t even doodle – I just crochet and see what falls off the hook.

After I’ve doodled, I start to improvise with the yarn. I’m terrible in that I hate frogging so much I will actively not do it if I can at all get away with it, so I tend to go straight into it with a cast iron belief that my ami will be perfect. You’d be amazed how well this works – to avoid frogging I’ve come up with some things that I would never have done before (such as the Jelly Tot Sprite, who started life as a Clanger). Usually because I believe it’ll be right, it is. Positive thinking for the win? I probably more usually think of it as working with any faults to correct on the go. Plus since I tend to stick to an increase in sixes format I tend to know what the outcome will look like before it happens. It’s only when I try to shape things specifically that I have to give up and admit that sometimes frogging is an inescapable part of crochet!

As I improvise, I write down everything.

 

I only ever write down the end of round count, because like I said I tend to repeat a six increase pattern. It’s only if I do something unexpected that I have to write in long hand. There’s usually lots of crossing out and revision as I work, then once I’m done I type it up straight to the blog, copy and pasting lines from other patterns if I can to save time.

I tend to photograph everything I intend to blog too (unless I get really excited and forget, which usually happens as I get towards the end of an ami). Sometimes I won’t intend to blog a pattern but then I change my mind and have no photos for it. If it’s a small pattern I might remake it, but if it’s something complicated I rely on you readers being good enough to follow without photos. I do prefer image based patterns myself though, so I always try to include some in my own patterns. I take WAY more photos than you see, because some invariably end up blurry or unclear or just unnecessary.

That’s sort of it for how I work, except to just show you my sofa:

 

I like to be neat and tidy when plan my lessons for school, sat at a desk in a clean classroom. When I crochet however, it’s in a mess. Half finished projects, random crap a plenty and a general feeling of ‘where the hell is.. oh wait, found it’. Maybe it’d be easier to have a clean crochet area. But it wouldn’t be me lol. I find I need to be sat cross legged, in the middle of all my stuff, on my squishy, old, falling to bits sofa, usually with something playing on the laptop (‘How I Met Your Mother’ usually, since I’ve seen them all so many times that I don’t even need to look at the screen anymore).

And this is my yarn stash:

Ha! No it isn’t. That’s the wonderful Twinkie Chan‘s stash. I’m just totally envious of it.

No, this is my actual stash:

 

It’s just in a big tub behind my sofa. Since I make amis I tend to just have a lot of little balls rather than big skeins, so my stash doesn’t actually take up much room. I do have a couple more small baskets in my spare room, but they hold my lesser used yarn, like the eyelash or the mixed colours or the just plain weird which don’t get as much use as the plain coloured DK which is my yarny bread and butter.

The round pink tube has embroidery threads, and the small rectangle blue tub holds safety eyes. Apologies at my curtain’s photo bombing…

How do you design?

Five things that annoy me about crochet

This week hasn’t been a great one for me. I’ve not had anything particularly wrong, just been really tired and unmotivated, so I’ve not really picked up the hooks (although I did attempt Croshame’s Spock Ears, but my wool wasn’t thick enough so they turned out too small and I couldn’t be bothered frogging them to add in an extra row of increases. Excellent pattern though, go check it out, great for Star Trek or any elf based cosplay).

So instead, I thought I’d rant at you.

This post is inspired by a conversation on Facebook. I recently took part in Mad Crochet Lab’s Minion Experiment as you’ll have seen a couple of weeks ago and the ladies are still all in touch. I’m in a different time zone from probably all of them being UK based, so I don’t manage to get in on quite as much of the chatter as I’d like, but I did find myself in a long conversation which started with Miss Mad herself asking about point one on my list. A couple of the other things also stemmed from there, and some are purely from my own rant filled brain. And of course, this list doesn’t include stealing designs or the whole selling issue.

Disclaimer: This is a ‘no offense’ post. You may be offended, but be assured it isn’t my intention. Nothing is aimed at any particular people, it’s just general observation. I love the cro-mmunity, so feel free to hit me upside the head and tell me to get over myself if the need arises in you. I possibly need it this week lol. 

1. Owls

An odd start, considering that only this week I have posted my own knitted Oscar the Owl. This annoyance isn’t as specific as just owls in general, more the fact that there are bloody hundreds of patterns for them out there. Some, probably most, are excellent and gorgeous and I think everyone should make one (a particular favourite is A Morning Cup of Jo Creation’s Baby Owl Ornament, which is cute as heck). But if you search ‘owl’ on Ravelry, in JUST crochet, not including knitting, there are 936 results (if you do add in knitting you get a further 873 results – that’s 1809 owl patterns!). You can’t tell me that all those owls are unique and different. I’ll accept that some are, and even the ones that aren’t are well designed, but by gosh I’m sick of owl patterns – just use one that’s already out there because I can guarantee there’s already something pretty much exactly the same. Especially if it’s in hat form. This annoyance is starting to spread to minions too, and I love minions. But there’s only 83 crochet results on Ravelry for them, so they don’t win the title just yet.

This conversation also lead onto what animals we’d like to see. I want a realistic rhino and a realistic panda, and llamas, otters and a variety of birds were suggested too. Most of which are out there so I’m going to have a dig at some point. The blobfish was also suggested. What do you think?

Maybe not…

2. Frogging

One everyone can relate to. I hate frogging. I will go out my way to not frog something, to the point where I’ll finish an ami, look at it and go ‘crud, should’ve take out those three rows in the middle and continued increasing for a bit instead’. Or similar. Sometimes when I share the pattern, I’ll actually tell you this, or if it’s a change only I would notice from the photo then I’ll use what I would’ve done instead of what I did anyway (this is usually only the case when it’s adding in an extra row, or taking something out that won’t make much difference but makes the work smoother either physically or to actually follow the pattern). In extreme cases I will of course frog and restart (the amount of Giant Rubber Duck based frogging was heart breaking!).

Frogging is something that will never go away, but I think we can all admit that it’s annoying!

3. Baby photos

Another from the conversation on Facebook. My point is that if you’re selling me a hat or booties pattern, or one of those strange photo prop things that I don’t really understand because I’m not a mother, then why does the photo you select for Ravelry have to be one of your child, in the nude, with the product obviously secondary to it being a good photo of your baby (or whoever’s baby you have borrowed)? Yes, I know you want to show it in action, and yes it’s a very cute photo, but surely that’s more relevant to heading the blog post or gracing the front of the pattern download, and for the actual preview pic you want to show a nicely centred, cropped down image of what it is you’ve actually made. I can’t SEE the booties tucked away in the corner of the photo, but I sure can see you son’s butt and I’ll bet that when he’s old enough to access the internet, he won’t be please about it either…

The secondary response to this was about why all the babies look the same – curled up, asleep, in that ‘still in the womb’ sort of pose. The lady asking suggested they all look like those creepily realistic dolls. I’ll let you argue that one amongst yourselves!

4. Afghan charts

I’d love to have the patience to make an Afghan. As it is, making granny squares genuinely confuses me, because I’ve never really devoted the time to sitting down and making one (I know – a crime! I started with crocheting ami’s in the round and haven’t branched out much from there, because flat work takes forever and has to really appeal to me before I’ll try it). Some Afghans I’ve seen are awe-inspiringly gorgeous, and I actually like seeing the photos of them. Which is why sellers who only show a chart get to me. Ok, lovely design work, and I can bet it took ages filling in all those squares on MS Paint or wherever, but what does it actually look like when it’s finished? Show me a photo as well as the chart and I’ll be mightily impressed. Just show me the chart and I’ll assume it’s never been tested and I’ll go looking for something else that has.

5. UK vs US

I just don’t understand why there’re two versions! I’m normally one of those annoying English people who resist the whole Americanisation of my language (it’s trousers! Pants are underwear and if you compliment me on them I’ll wonder if you were spying on me when I got dressed!) but I must say, the US terms for crochet make so much more sense. Sc doesn’t exist in the UK terminology, because UK terminology counts the number of loops on the hook whereas US terminology counts the number of stitches made. It’s just more logical to me.

Anyway, thanks for letting me rant at you. Feel free to comment on any of my annoyances, either to agree or shout me down, or even add your own annoyances to the list.

I’m sorry if you’ve just designed an owl…

On designing…

Howdy y’all. Firstly, I want to say a huge thank you for the positive reaction to my Giant Rubber Duck. I’ve already got photos of one winging (see what I did there?) their way to me from Ravelry user Pamvdz, who has been invaluable about reporting back a few errors in my pattern. These have been fixed now, so if you were gonna make one and were put off then rest assured you can retry without hassle now. If anyone finds a pattern error in any of my patterns please do tell me! Since they’re given away free I don’t tend to pattern test (although usually I’m a much better editor as I write lol). If I were to ever get into selling I would be pattern testing to avoid errors.

Which segues me rather nicely into today’s topic, designing patterns. (Sorry, no free pattern today, I’m fiddling a few things on what I expected to post so hopefully next weekend). A few weeks back I posted a stream of thought on selling products made from other peoples patterns. Basically, I’m not jumping on the ‘grr, how dare the designer ask you not to sell their products?’ anger band wagon, but my post basically boiled down to respect their wishes, play nice, and go find a pattern you can sell. Everyone is happy, noone gets angry, and on a strictly business level, you and the sellable pattern designer get money, credit and promotion, and the non-sellable pattern designer doesn’t. It was basically a call to hippydom – give peace a chance rather than getting pissy etc.

As a follow up though, I’ve seen a lot of other posts about this topic in the last couple of weeks (it seems to be a current big issue) which then go on to address a topic that DOES anger me – pattern stealing.

It goes without saying that designing a good pattern takes a lot of work. Some of my early efforts suffered from me thinking I could just wing it and it’d be fine, which lead to me accepting some subpar results. These days I’m more open to frogging* my work to make sure it’s exactly what I want to put out there. I want people to send me photos of what they’ve made from my patterns, and I can’t expect people to make ugly amis can I? (Although I have seen some patterns out there for sale that need some additional TLC to fully realise the creators dream in a more profitable way. In my opinion anyway – of course if they like it, and are proud of it, then I’ll be the first one cheering them on.)

*Frogging is pulling the work apart and redoing it by the way – it took me months to work that out!

So when someone takes your design and publishes it as their own, it sucks. And the resulting anger is righteous and supported. Luckily this has never happened to me (which often leads me to joke that I must not be good enough yet. This is 100% a joke – if it ever actually did happen I’d be on the warpath!). That’s out and out stealing and is wrong, even if some countries are in a moral grey area about it’s wrongness (apparently in some countries a pattern is not copywriteable because you didn’t invent crochet. Who knew?!). But the average person can see this as stealing right?

So what about if you take one of my patterns, and change a few stitches, or give it different hair? How about if you take my Basic Human Base Pattern, dress it and bequiff it? Well, then surely you can call the new pattern your own!

Except, no, you can’t.

If you’ve even slightly followed my pattern, then it’s not yours. It’s not new, it’s an edit. Just because Coke change the recipe, did it all of a sudden became the all new product Coak? No, it’s still Coke. Same with crochet patterns. Changing the colour wouldn’t make it yours, so changing the shape of the feet slightly doesn’t either. Sure, it makes those edits yours, and feel free to publish them, but don’t repost my pattern. Link to mine and say ‘I changed row x to read’, or ‘I decided I didn’t like the hands and did this instead’. If you only used my head shape and put your own body onto it, then you’re free to post everything except my head pattern.

But my patterns are free! Surely reposting is not hurting anything?! But it DOES. It hurts my blog hits, it hurts the integrity of the crochet community, and it hurts my feelings. Just because I’m not making money from it doesn’t make it suddenly ok. Especially if you then go on to sell yours – all my hard work will line your pockets, when I’ve been generous enough to put it out there for everyone? Erm, no! Making your version and selling the finished product is all about your talent as a crocheter so sell away, but copying and pasting my pattern and swapping some stuff does not make you a pattern designer.

Aaaand breathe.

I think the problem here comes from the use of basic shapes in amigurumi. You’ll notice a lot of my patterns follow a hexagonal shaping rule – generally stitch patterns are repeated six times a round, and rounds increase in multiples of six. It’s a common way of working, although other designers work in fives, more others have no set rule. I find it easiest to come back to standard shapes for basic creations because I can guarantee how it will turn out with no frogging related stress. I’m not for one second saying that because I do that, noone else can do that, and that if you published a ball pattern using hexagonal shaping then I’d be flaming down on your for stealing my designs. The additional twiddly bits, colour changes and overall combination of the shapes is what makes it mine. Now, you very possibly could come up with a design, completely by yourself, and it look like one of mine with never having seen mine (I actually tackled someone on this once and they claim to never have seen the design of mine I was concerned about having been copied. I tend to assume the best of people, and because the person in question was clearly a young teenager and wasn’t selling the pattern I chose to believe her). But, as KreepyKim says in her blog post on this topic, do your homework. If you’re going to publish a pattern, be it on a blog, on Ravelry or Etsy, or basically anywhere online or off, do a quick search to see what else is out there. Currently there are about a million Despicable Me Minion related items out. Excellent, I bloody love Minions, but so many of the hats looks exactly the same, and there are so many ami patterns that look exactly the same. I’m not saying don’t make a Minion (or whatever) if there’s one already out there, but put your personal stamp on it. Make it bigger, small, more expressive, add arms or a particular costume or face – something to make it stand out. Otherwise not only do you run the risk of being accused of copying, you’re also just going to fade away into the crowd, and cause others to do the same.

Last little comment, just to finish up. If you think about it, really think about it, there’s no reason to edit others patterns to pass off as yours. If you’re clever enough to spot something that could be changed for the better, and able to drop it in there and make it look seamless, then why the hell are you not exploiting that talent and making your own designs?