Making the Pieces Fit

Hello, Subscriber First Name,

This week, I’m moving on to the last of the four “universal patterns” in my wildflower collection. Each of these patterns will be used to create two to four different wildflower varieties, and this final one is a rosette design that will become four flowers in my wildflower blanket: American Globeflower, Scarlet Globemallow, Woods’ Rose, and Prairie Flax.

I actually designed this flower way back in 2022 and even created a granny square version of it. But I wasn’t happy with the result. The flower looked flat and lifeless in a sea of granny stitch.

For this new version, I wanted to place the flower in the smaller 3-inch square motif so that it would reach all the way to the edges with very little background showing. I also wanted to keep those five petals looking perky, so I decided to work the second to last round of the petals in the front loop only. That would leave the back loops available for building the background motif while keeping the petals raised.

It was a good plan. Until I realized I had to turn a five-sided flower into a four-sided square in just two rounds.

A 5-petaled puzzle, indeed!

My first attempt was to simply stick to the math. I divided the stitches in the round into four sections and worked the increases needed to create four corners. It worked reasonably well, but it put a lot of stress on some of the back loops, particularly the corner loops.

That worried me. Crochet stitches are pretty forgiving, but those little loops are not indestructible!

So for my second attempt, I redistributed some of the stitches. Instead of putting three double crochets on either side of each corner, I moved some of those stitches into the adjoining sides. From the front, it looked okay, but when I examined the back, I could still see that some loops were being stretched while others were compressed.

I realized that by spacing the stitches evenly this way, I was trying to treat a pentagon as though it were a circle, and it doesn’t really work that way. You can’t simply use the same stitches all the way around and expect everything to fit neatly into a square.

That led me to my third idea: what if I turned the pentagon into a circle first, and then turned the circle into a square? I could use stitches of different heights to gradually change the shape.

It was a sound idea, but I didn’t have enough space for it.

So, frustrated, I tried something completely different for sample four. I started building the background one round earlier, hoping that extra space would make it easier to achieve a square shape.

Instead, I lost the definition of the petals. They were sticking up too high and looked floppy.

Clearly, that wasn’t going to work either.

For my fifth attempt, I went back to the approach I had started with: working outward from the back loops of the next to last petal round. But this time, instead of relying on the math alone, I actually sketched out the pentagon inside a square (as in the diagram above) and mapped out every stitch, corner, and increase.

That did the trick.

The finished motif lies flat, has the correct stitch count, and looks like a square. It does require blocking to set everything straight, and the variety of stitch heights looks a little unusual to my eye. But I don’t think those little oddities will be noticeable once the motifs are joined together in the blanket.

And here’s the part I really love: this one little motif can now become four completely different wildflowers. Just by changing the colors, the same basic pattern becomes the Scarlet Globemallow, American Globeflower, Prairie Flax, and Woods’ Rose. Here they are alongside the flowers that inspired them.

I think I learned something important from designing this flower. As much as I would like for the easiest or most elegant solution to always be the best one, sometimes you just have to put the crochet hook down and accept that the best solution is simply the one that works.

That’s when I finally figured out how to make the pieces fit. And I think this little 5-petaled puzzle is finally solved!

Until next time, 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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