Category: Crochet

I recently got this sketchbook to use while filming some new Creativebug classes next week. I liked the pink cover and that the cover was stiff. I also liked the gold spiral, but I did not like the text that was on the cover. I decided to crochet a patch or appliqué to cover up the text. It was hard to decide what to make! At first I was going to crochet a strawberry, then I decided to do a multi-scoop ice cream cone, then I thought I might do a crochet Burn Book… and somehow I ended up with a happy little frog. It’s a super easy pattern. It’s basically a circle with some eyes and legs. I loved how it turned out, and I know you’ll find a lot of fun uses for this pattern, too.

Jenny Lemons, one of my favorite shops in San Francisco, is celebrating its 4th birthday this month. You know how much I love to crochet cake, so I was excited to crochet some scrumptious bday cake for the store. I whipped up 4 new, one of a kind cakes, plus 1 cake that I had made for my own birthday last year. You can buy them at Jenny Lemons and also online at JennyLemons.com. This one is inspired by classic birthday sheet cake and is perfect for anyone, especially your favorite person, (insert name here). This cake is inspired by a birthday cake I recently crocheted for my mom! It seemed like a relatively fancy cake compared to the others, which is why it’s 100% gucci. I don’t know if the clown cake is exactly a memory from my own childhood, but it just FEELS like it is! A little bit wacky and a little bit tacky, this cake definitely went the way of more is more. I have a lot of heart-shaped cake forms left over from this year’s heart cake pattern launch, so I gave the same shape a little twist with a goofy happy face and lots and lots of frosting ruffles. Last but not least, my birthday cake! Because crocheting fake cakes is obviously hot girl shit. My elbow has been super painful lately and I need to take a break from crocheting, but I have so many cakes I want to make!

I’m excited to start sharing patterns from my crochet bakery installation Sucre Fleuf! This is the Bunny Baguette. You can pretty much make the baguette as long or as short as you like, and I also include the instructions for finishing the baguette without ears. You can find the pattern in my Etsy shop and Ravelry shop. You can also find it in an amazing spring-themed amigurumi pattern bundle where you’ll get 32 amigurumi patterns for just $14.99 from designers all over the world. This is a very limited offering, and it expires at 9:59am EST, February 16th (just 2 days!). Check out the bundle here!

The first time I posted the avocado scarf on my blog was 2009! And I never wrote the pattern until now. You can find it in my Etsy shop and also my Ravelry shop. If you ever made the pear scarf from my first book, you’ll find that these patterns are very similar. This is one of the main reasons I waited to so long to prep this pattern. I felt that it mostly already existed. However, I keep receiving requests to release the avocado, so here it is!

This isn’t exactly a NEW crochet pattern, since I made finished strawberry scarves for my Etsy shop many many years ago, but this is the first time I’ve posted the pattern for sale. You can find it in my Etsy shop and Ravelry shop. I used heart-shaped pony beads as strawberry seeds, but you are free to skip the beaded crochet stitches and use whatever you like for seeds. I also love this scarf in pink. I can’t wait to see yours!

In August, I was the featured artist at Jenny Lemons, which is an amazing art supply store, gift shop, and DIY teaching space in San Francisco. I hosted a craft party via Zoom where we made beaded mushroom pins to go with the neon mushroom theme that I created in the shop window. All of the mushroom and froggy friends were for sale, and they all sold out! Before you ask, you can definitely purchase patterns for them in my Etsy shop: frog crochet pattern and mushrooms and frogs crochet pattern bundle. Taking photos of a window display is tough because of the reflections on the glass, but here are a few snaps from installation day.

I’m extra excited to release this crochet pattern for a heart-shaped cake, because I know you all will get super creative with it! It’s fairly small at 6 inches wide and 3 inches tall, so there’s not a lot of room for lots of text, but even with that small space, I can’t stop thinking about funny or sweet words to add. You can also skip lettering all together and just cover the top of your cake with lots of luscious frosting. The pattern in clouds a bunch of different kinds of piped frosting and frosting blobs to customize your cake. I include links to all my favorite materials, including these magical cherries everyone always asks me about. Start practicing that piping! [Heart-shaped crochet cake pattern in my Etsy shop.]

Here’s an oldie but a goodie. Are wearable pretzels cool anymore? I remember when I first started making these for my craft shows, they were really really popular! The pattern is so easy that I never posted it anywhere. It did appear in Simply Crochet Magazine Issue 30 which was many many years ago! A few people have asked about it recently, so I dug up some photos and notes and put a pattern together for you. Please enjoy, and I expect to see lots of cute outfits with your new crocheted pretzel brooches! Printer-friendly version is available in my Etsy shop for just $2.00.

Let’s knock out 2020 with THE BEST CROCHET PROJECT OF THE YEAR!!! It’s 100% Soft‘s Dumpster Fire!!! Truck asked if I wanted to translate his iconic and super popular Dumpster Fire into a crocheted plush, and I said OF COURSE. I stayed as true as I could to his original vinyl toy. I didn’t want y’all just crocheting a box with some weak flames inside. This means that the construction is a little bit more involved than with some of my other projects, but I truly feel the results are worth it. I mean, just look at this dude! I have a YouTube tutorial for you also. It’s my longest yet at 2 hours and 15 minutes long. Get ready to hunker down with me. If you don’t need the video, you can find the free pattern below, and also a more gorgeous, printer-friendly PDF in my Etsy shop. I can’t wait to see all of your lil dumps!

I know that I’ve been a terrible blogger and haven’t written here since December, but I spent Nov 2019 – June 2020 developing and working on my first crochet installation. I also left my job in social media and now work full time helping a company create video content for artists and makers. But let me tell you all about the installation “Sucre Fleuf!” now on exhibition at Sweet Tooth Hotel in Dallas, TX as part of a group fiber art show called Intangible. This is the first year that the Craft Yarn Council has offered an artist in residency for a handful of amazing female fiber artists to unleash their dreams and creativity in yarn. I’m so honored to be part of this! As I mentioned, we have all been working on our spaces since late 2019. We then met up in Dallas in March for a week to install our pieces, get to know each other, and check out each other’s works in progress. In the show, you’ll find crocheting, knitting, tufting, weaving, latch-hooking, all manner of art in yarn form! It is truly a one-of-a-kind experience. I’ll share photos of the other artists spaces later (check out Sweet Tooth’s Instagram), but for now, I thought I’d let you know what I worked on for 8-9 months. I know you will ask if the patterns will be available, and yes, that is my next project. I want to try self-publishing a little book of crochet patterns filled with bread, cakes, and pastries. Right now my patterns are in a really rough form with not-so-great photography. It’s really re-making the projects and taking photos that makes pattern-writing a whole time-consuming production! Here’s a little video walk-through I made on my phone when Manda and I visited the show in June. Due to Covid 19, we were very careful, and were only in Dallas for less than 24 hours before coming home. I felt very lucky she was able to travel with me. It made the trip much less scary! View this post on Instagram A post shared by Twinkie Chan (@twinkiechan) on Jun 22, 2020 at 2:08pm PDT When I was first asked to participate, I kept thinking that I had to work BIG, on a large scale. However, since I live in California and the show is in Dallas, the idea of shipping something very large also seemed daunting. I sketched a few different proposals for the gallery, and ultimately I realized that my creative wheelhouse is in scarves and amigurumi, and then the idea for Sucre Fleuf! was born. “Sucre” means sugar and “Fleuf” is a a word I sort of made-up that sounds French-ish and refers to the fluff of the stuffing I use and the fluff of a delicious cake. It’s also a bit of a riff on “Sacre Bleu!” It was quite an experience to sketch something out in Photoshop and to see it come to life in reality. Everyone at Sweet Tooth was […]

McDonald’s (!!!) approached me to help promote global #McDelivery Day, which is this Thursday, July 19! Order McDonald’s via UberEats on Thursday whenever lunch starts (10:30am or 11:30am depending on where you live), and you’ll get the chance to order FREE McDonald’s swag while supplies last at participating locations! I’m particularly into the bandana, socks, and t-shirts, and I’m running an enamel pin giveaway on my Instagram! To celebrate, I decided to make myself a french fry purse, because I still believe that McDonald’s fries are THE BEST FRIES. You can either make this a handbag or a cross body. I had people vote on Instagram, and the cross body won. Basically you can make the strap what ever length you want ;). If you end up getting goodies on McDelivery Day, let me know what you picked! (P.S. This jean jacket is rad! Thank you, Ronald!)

I have a new guest column in Issue 60 of Simply Crochet Magazine! I talk about how I learned to embrace a trend when my instinct has always been to avoid them because I never just want to do what everyone else is doing. I’m definitely late to the cactus train. Like, really really really late. But once I started thinking about how to do it my way… I fell in love! Read more about it :). If you want to check out my first Simply Crochet guest column, it was about finding inspiration in Japan! p.s. for those wondering, YES, I will be releasing my cactus patterns. I just need time to prep them!

When Creativebug asked me to come in and shoot an Easter-themed project on their Facebook livestream, I wanted to bring something just a little bit unconventional. I have a tiny love/hate relationship with the cactus/succulent trend in the craft world, so I decided to embrace it and make some cactus-themed egg cozies. I love how they turned out, and the pattern is so easy! It’s a colorful cactus egg-stravaganza (and really the perfect hiding spot for your Easter egg hunt)! I totally can’t wait to see all your individual takes on this project. I know you’ll have a lot of fun with it! You can also easily use this pattern to make a lil cactus that doesn’t have to have an egg inside. I made a PDF for you, and here’s the link! Pattern and photos are below, too! If you want to watch me do this live and be totally dorky at Creativebug HQ… here is the link! (I think?!)

I’m excited to announce that I wrote two new crochet patterns to be taught in Michaels Stores! The Craft Yarn Council asked if I could create some beginner amigurumi projects for their CYC Discover program, and we decided on a little teddy bear and a little potted cactus. If you search your local Michaels Store and neither of these classes is listed, please call or visit your store to put in a request! These patterns are available only in these classes, and I cannot release them anywhere else. If you get a chance to take one of these classes, I hope you have a super fun time and learn some new crochet skills! Hopefully, I’ll be able to see some of the projects you’ve created!

“Crochet books don’t sell as well as knitting books.” “Crocheters don’t spend as much money as knitters.” “Crocheters don’t spend as much money on yarn.” “Crocheters don’t want to spend money, period.” Do you find any of these statements to be true, as a crocheter? When I first started to get more into crocheting in 2005, I would hear things like, “Knitters are snobby toward crocheters,” or that local yarn shops cater to knitters more than crocheters (i.e. not carrying as many crochet hooks or crochet books). What at first seems like elitism or snobbery becomes more interesting when you talk to a store-owner about it. “In general, crocheting a scarf takes up more yarn than knitting a scarf, and the yarn-expense turns off crocheters from spending money on more high-end yarn.” I have to remove myself from this equation because I LOVE YARN. I love to look at yarn and touch yarn and buy yarn and hoard yarn (obviously, if you have seen my yarn wall). There is some yarn that I consider a prize, or art, and I just like to possess it and look at it and be happy that I own it (creepy?). But I know not everyone is like that. A lot of people are more practical, and if they want to make a blanket for a newborn baby that a baby will probably barf all over, chew up, and get poop on, they don’t want it to cost $100+ in yarn only. I get that completely. As a crocheter who sells her crochet goods, I do have to try to keep the cost of my supplies down since the cost/time of labor is so high, and usually that means you can’t crochet with the fancy stuff. In my journey to publish my second crochet book, my agent and I encountered a lot of the statements that I started this blog entry with: crocheters don’t spend money, i.e. nobody wants to buy your crochet book. Or, if a publisher is looking for crochet books, they want stuff that is less weird than my stuff, like “25 striped hats for your kids,” or “25 kinda okay scarves for the average 25 – 45 year old lady,” etc. Because, this is what people buy, and this is what makes money for publishers. I totally get it. Even though my audience had grown substantially since selling my first book, my numbers were not enough to sway many of the publishers we approached. It was an extreme uphill battle that I never blogged about. Now, I’m really only talking about big/traditional publishing, and they are businesses, and they have a bottom line, and they want to make money, and they can’t really be bothered with much else, like, championing the unique or the underdog. That ain’t their problem. So we have places like Etsy, or Ravelry, or Craftsy, to sell our patterns or e-books or self-pubbed books, and the books can be as weird and wacky as we want them […]

Oh hey, I nearly forgot to blog about my first published guest column, in Simply Crochet Magazine, Issue 52! Simply Crochet is based out of the UK, so I just downloaded my electronic copy via iTunes. Here’s a picture of the front cover and a lil peek at my column: Simply Crochet basically gave me free rein to write about whatever, so we decided I’d write about getting inspired in 2017. At the time of writing the article, I was in Japan with IggyStarpup, snapping photos of all the things I thought were cute and amazing. This was the perfect opportunity for me to personally gather some international inspiration while also gathering snaps for this article! I hope you check it out and enjoy it! I may be writing more guest columns for Simply Crochet soon, so if there are crochet topics you’d like me to talk about, just let me know!  Oh, don’t forget about my cute cupcake pencil-topper pattern from Issue 51!

Ask (for cake) and you shall receive! A lot of people have asked me if I could release the Strawberry Cake Scarf pattern that I put together for classes taught at Michaels in 2014. Here is my original blog post about it. The Craft Yarn Council owns the rights to the pattern now, but since the class is no longer available at Michaels, I asked if I could share the pattern here, and they said yes! Yay! This Strawberry Cake Scarf is super sweet, fun to wear, easily customizable to your favorite cake colors and flavors, and perfect for crocheters of all skill levels – even beginners! So let’s eat our cake and wear it, too! I made my first cake scarf back in 2007, and it looked like this: I didn’t change much except for the strawberry. (Should I cut my hair again!?) Unfortunately, both of the yarns I used in 2007 do not exist anymore, but I’m sure you could find similar if you wanted to. The cool thing about this pattern is how flexible it is. Pretty much any worsted weight yarn will work, and you’re basically just crocheting a bunch of rectangles :).  If you’re not inclined to crochet your own, I’m also selling a finished version of the scarf in my Etsy shop.

I have a cute little pattern available now in Issue 51 of Simply Crochet magazine! It’s a  cupcake pencil topper, and it’s perfect for a stocking-stuffer or a “just thinking of you.” I don’t usually crochet tiny things, so this is probably the smallest cupcake I’ve ever worked on. I hope to see some of your cupcake pencil toppers out there!! It’s a great stash-buster and so adorably sweet!

This holiday season, Lion Brand Yarn and an awesome team of crochet/knit/yarn bloggers are combining their super powers to form the Yarn Heroes and encourage all of you to craft for your favorite charitable causes! My Yarn Hero name is Captain Candy! I use my crochet powers to bring sweetness, color, and light to the world. As you may know, I have my Tissue Box Bakery site with free patterns and a small shop to help benefit one of my local charities called Food Runners. For this Yarn Heroes campaign, LB is helping me introduce you guys to two more amazing organizations: Mittens for Detroit and Bow Dazzling. LB challenged the Yarn Heroes to create fun super-hero outfits and characters using fairly basic patterns to share with all of you, so that you can create your very own super-hero characters and also use the patterns to help out your favorite charities. People have asked me for the Candy Cane Wrist Warmer pattern for years, and I felt like this was the perfect opportunity to give it to you. There are so many deliciously cute color combos you could use and so much warmth and color you could spread to your friends, family, and hopefully a cause such as Mittens for Detroit. Don’t forget to tag #YarnHeroes on your social media if you make my project or any charitable project for the season. AAALLLLSOOOOOOOO, Lion Brand is offering $5 off every purchase at or above $20 of yarn for your charitable projects using the code YARNHEROES2016 in their online store from November 15 – December 15. Show me photos of your Candy Cane Wrist Warmers, and I’ll make a blog post with a cool collage! Coming soon: I’ll post some cute patterns for crocheted bows AAAAANNNNDDDDD………….. LB and I are teaming up to bring you a cool giveaway. Stay tuned! EDIT: Here’s the link to the crocheted bows pattern and giveaway! Pattern for wrist warmers below!

Burger Scarf crochet pattern is now FreeFor24Hrs until I put it in my Etsy shop for sale! Again, I like to offer some patterns free for 24 hours to say thank you to those of you who support me on my blog and on social media :). Click here to get the PDF! Edit: Burger Scarf crochet pattern is now listed in my Etsy shop :). P.S. I am always open to feedback about my patterns. For instance, I have been keeping the resolution on the photos fairly low in order to keep the files small, but do you prefer higher quality photos and a larger file? Let me know!

Halloween crocheters: I have a new Creativebug class for you! Crochet a black cat with me as part of Creativebug’s Critter of the Month series! You’ll learn how to work in the round using basic stitches, whipstitch everything together, and most importantly, embroider the cute lil face! This black cat is perfect for Halloween décor – or switch up the yarn colors and make it look just like your favorite kitty!  Now you can have your familiar with you wherever you go…. Can’t wait to see all your new crocheted friends!

My crocheted tomato class is now live on Creativebug.com! You can switch up the colors for heirloom tomatoes AND also use orange for baby pumpkins!! I am going to do the latter for a liveshoot next week and post some photos later :).

My watermelon wedge crochet class is now live on Creativebug! Have you been joining the crochet-along? Don’t forget to tag me on social media so I can see your projects! 🙂

My crochet apple class is live today on Creativebug! Do they look good enough to eat? I might have tried to eat one on camera…. 😛 Remember, you can use code LION to get a free month of Creativebug classes!