The Suggestion of Petals

Hello, Subscriber First Name,

The wildflower fun continues! This week, I’m sharing the design journey behind the Daisy applique and motif. If you’ve been following this project from the beginning, I want to take a moment to thank you. Your continued support means the world to me. This is one of those projects that has experienced a great deal of fits and starts, and I hope you’re as excited as I am to see it all finally come together.

Like the Sky Pilot motif I shared with you last week, the Daisy design has been in progress since 2022. The original design featured a 12-petaled flower with a small yellow circle in the center. Each petal is created by making a long chain and then working gradually larger stitches into each chain back down to the circle. It was a really simple design, but I remember being proud when I discovered that working in the back bar of each chain created such a clean edge on both sides of the petal.

The plan for my original applique blanket had been to sew each of these daisies onto the base fabric. What was I thinking?

I quickly discovered that for the petals to lay flat, I would have to sew down each individual one. And it wasn’t good enough to just tack down the ends. That would leave the rest of the petal free to catch on things and get pulled out of shape. Nope, I would have to sew around every single petal.

When I look at the in-progress applique blanket now, I can see that all of the daisies have not been sewn down yet. They’re all floppy and out of shape. It’s a rather depressing sight! I’m fairly certain this applique is one of the reasons I abandoned the project four years ago. I don’t blame myself. The prospect of sewing down all those petals is daunting!

Fast forward to the present, and my goals for the blanket have, of course, changed. Now each wildflower will be made into a motif that can be easily joined to form the blanket instead of being sewn onto a base.

So, to bring the daisy into my present plans, I had to decide how to turn the 12-petaled flower into a motif. The easiest approach seemed to be joining the petals together one at a time with chains, then continuing the motif outward by working into the chain spaces between them.

The tricky part was deciding where to join each petal. Join closer to the center and you’d have to tack down the outer tip in a later round. Join at the very end and the rest of the petal would become a loop that could catch on things, much like the problem I had with the applique version. Joining in the middle of each petal might work out well.

But to be honest, we may never know, because I quickly abandoned this approach. The more I looked at the daisy and considered how to turn it into a motif, the more I got the sense that there had to be a simpler way!

And then it dawned on me. The original daisy design is beautiful because it has such a distinctive daisy shape, but a daisy doesn’t have to have a specific number of clearly defined petals. You could create a daisy with just the suggestion of petals.

So I got out my sketchbook and started brainstorming.

I focused on two methods.

The first is one I’ve seen used often as a quick and easy way to make daisies: working around a circle center, make a series of large chains, joining each one back to the center circle. I liked this approach, but because the motif will only be 3 inches square, I won’t have a lot of room in which to square off the flower. I suspected I’d need several rounds to get all those loops into a neat and tidy order before I ran out of square to work with.

The next method was to work a bunch of very tall stitches around the center circle and top them off with a decorative texture stitch to resemble the ends of the petals.

In my first attempt, I chose to work a front-post slip stitch around each double treble crochet, with a chain 4 between each one.

This created a nice texture at the end of the petals, and I really liked the way it looked. But I soon discovered a major flaw. Because the stitches were worked around the post and the next round was merely decorative, with no other rounds worked into those stitches, there was nothing to hold them up. You could easily pull those front-post stitches down the post.

I immediately had a nightmare of someone trying to wash a blanket made of these motifs. The nubs could easily catch on something and get pulled down. Imagine pulling your blanket out of the wash and finding all the flowers misshapen. I wouldn’t do that to you!

So back to the drawing board I went.

I looked closely at the double treble crochet stitches and noticed that there’s a third loop at the top of the stitch, below the top loops that you typically work into. I did a little more investigating and found that pretty much all crochet stitches have this third loop!

If you’ve ever worked half-double crochet ribbing, for instance, you’ve probably worked into the third loop only. Doing so pulls the top loops forward and gives the fabric a knit-look ribbing.

All I’d have to do to fix my daisy was work the front-post stitch around the post, above that third loop!

For my next attempt, I did the same front-post slip stitch followed by a chain 4 around each post. The resulting daisy was nice, but it looked a little messy to me. I figured I could do better.

So this time, I tried a front-post single crochet around each double treble crochet and worked a picot instead of a chain 4.

And the daisy this created was just right!

The best part about working that front-post single crochet around each double treble crochet is that it leaves the top loops available so you can work into them to create the motif border.

Easy peasy, lemon squeezy!

I’m really glad I didn’t settle for the original daisy design and kept pushing until I found a design that captured the look I was going for while still being easy and fun to make.

What do you think of my daisy design? Have you ever made a flower using only tall stitches? If you have, I’d love to hear from you! Just reply to this email to share your thoughts.

Next week’s flower was a bit of a troublemaker! The rosette is a five-petaled flower pattern that I’ll be using to create a few different varieties of wildflowers. Its pentagon shape proved a challenge to square off, especially when I only had a 1/4 inch to work with.

Join me next time to see how I handled this very tricky flower situation.

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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