Meet the Finished Sky Pilot Motif

Hello, Subscriber First Name,

I’m excited to finally share with you the finished Sky Pilot motif! But getting here was quite a journey.

This year, I’ve been revisiting a lot of the original wildflowers that I designed back in 2022, making improvements and preparing the patterns for inclusion in my Crochet Wildflower Field Guide collection eBook. One of the first designs I tackled was Sky Pilot and, boy, was this one a challenge!

I started by digging through all my crochet wildflower boxes and bins, looking for anything that might give me some clues about my original plans for this design: how it evolved and where it was headed. Luckily, I found some old sketches and swatches from when I first started working on it. I thought you might like to see just how far this motif has come and how the design has transformed over time.

Looking back at these first sketches now, it’s fun to see just how much this little motif has changed over the years and how much of the original idea is still there.

When I first designed the applique blanket, it was meant to be a fun experiment just for me. But once I decided to turn the blanket into a pattern, I had to take a much closer look at some of my design choices, and the Sky Pilot motif was one of the ones that needed the most help.

The original motif shown below was made up of eight small flowers, each worked separately and then joined to a central flower and to one another using join-as-you-go in the final round. It was a clever way to build the flower cluster, but there was one rather significant downside: 34 ends to weave in for every motif!

I didn’t want to weave in that many ends myself, much less ask someone else to do it as part of a pattern. So I challenged myself to find a completely different way to construct the motif: one that would preserve the flower cluster I loved while dramatically reducing the amount of finishing work.

In 2024, I spent about a week working and reworking the design before I finally found a solution: instead of making the flowers separately, I could work the entire flower cluster in the round using strategically placed cluster stitches.

This changed everything. The flowers could still have the dimensional, clustered look I wanted, but now the entire motif could be built as one piece rather than assembled from eight individual flowers. And best of all, I reduced the number of ends to weave in from 34 to just 4!

It was a much more elegant solution, and one I knew would make this motif much more enjoyable to crochet.

I’ll save the details of exactly how it works for the pattern, but I was pretty excited when I finally got this version just right!

Also in 2024, I worked out how to turn the flower cluster into a square motif that could be used in the blanket. The tricky part was turning what was essentially a hexagon into a square without losing the pretty scalloped shape of the petals around the edges.

My first thought was to work V-stitches between the petals and then build those V-stitches out into the square background. It worked structurally, but I didn’t like the result. The added stitches made it much harder to see the scalloped edge of the petals, which is one of my favorite parts of the flower cluster.

In the end, I found a solution I liked much better. I worked very tall cluster stitches between the flowers, separating them with chains. In the following rounds, I could work into those chain spaces to gradually expand the motif and square it off, while still letting the individual petals retain their shape.

And then there was the matter of color.

Back in 2024, I used light green for the leaves between the flowers and the first few rounds of the border, with the rest of the background worked in dark green. I loved the contrast this created. The light green leaves between the petals help define where one flower ends and the next begins, making the individual flowers really pop. But since then, I’ve decided to use light green for the background of all the wildflower motifs, and the original color scheme wasn’t going to work quite the same way. When I tried making the entire background light green, the motif lost some of the depth I liked in the 2024 version.

So I tried something new: working the stitches around the petals in dark green and the rest of the motif background in light green. And lo and behold, I got a very similar effect to the one I loved in the 2024 version, while still keeping the light green background I want to use throughout the blanket.

I think this may end up being more than just a solution for Sky Pilot. Including the darker green in the blanket’s color scheme opens up some fun possibilities for incorporating it into future motifs. I could even use the dark green for leaf appliques that can be sewn onto the finished blanket as little three-dimensional accents.

It feels good to finally see this motif take its final form. After all the experimenting, reworking, and problem-solving that went into it, I think I can finally say that Sky Pilot feels finished. It’s a beautiful design, and one that I’m really proud of. I’m excited to see it take its place among the other wildflowers in the blanket.

I hope you’re enjoying this design journey, because I’ve got a lot of wildflowers to share with you! In fact, I can’t wait to show you next week’s flower. The Daisy applique and motif is another wildflower design that took a few unexpected turns of its own.

Until then, happy crocheting!

If you’d like to learn more about the Crochet Wildflower Field Guide and see how these individual flowers will come together in the finished blanket, you can find all the details here.

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