Are you ready for the 2009 Mochimochi Photo Contest? It’s coming soon!

The official announcement with full details and dates will come next month, but you can start entering right now by uploading your photos of Mochimochi Land toys to the Mochimochi Friends group on Flickr. All photos uploaded since August 1st of 2008 will be considered for this year’s contest.

Here’s a glimpse at some of the photos that are already entered!

Like the past two years, first prize will be a big boxful of cute and crafty goodies straight from Japan! John will procure them later this month, so I’ll post sneak peeks at what’s in store for the winner next month.

If you missed the Mochimochi Photo Contests in 2007 and 2008, check out the contest details from last year (this year’s details will probably differ a little) and the amazing winners from last year.

You can now find me tweeting on Twitter, as mochimochiland. Some of my tweets will be related to knitting and cute stuff. Other topics include dental floss, Starbucks, and funny names for generic cereals.

That’s right—The new pattern for Campy and the Mallows comes FREE with any purchase from the Mochimochi Shop through August 14th!

After you make a purchase, a link to download the pattern will be emailed to you within 24 hours. (The pattern will be available for $5 through the Mochimochi Shop starting August 15th.)

If you missed it, I just spent the month of July knitting tiny things—one for every weekday, for 23 tiny things in total!

I spent a lot of time on these, but it was so satisfying to have a big collection of them in the end. Some were easier than others—I remember whipping up the Tiny Ice Cream in very little time, while the Tiny Vacuum Cleaner was one of the hardest for me to design. I had fun with them all, but some of my personal favorites are the Tiny Forest, Tiny Lion, Tiny Cheeseburger, and Tiny Computer. What are your favorites?

As I think I’ve mentioned in the comments, I would like to make some of these available as patterns, but I haven’t yet decided in what form to publish them. (And I have a ton of other projects going on that I need to finish up first!) I’m really happy to see the great response these guys have gotten and it’s wonderful to know that there is interest in patterns.

I’m going to try to keep up the series with one new tiny thing each week. In the meantime, I’m adding a new (non-tiny) summertime pattern to the Mochimochi Shop later this week. More to come on that soon!

Update: Thank you to Super Cute Kawaii for posting about the tinys!