#you are only obligated to reblog the post with your quiz results flower

[crochetysquare]

Garden Variety, part ii: the rest of them

All of the flowers below in this post are original patterns! None of them are written down for your consumption, but if you’re really serious about crocheting, you can deduce them out yourself or take what you like and recreate it in a way that is so uniquely yours that you’ll never be able to look at mine without feeling like there’s something wrong with them. And though I’ll admire yours, I’ll look at them and feel the same way.

All of these are options on my uquiz “Which crocheted flower embodies your Spirit?” but there are bonus pics below this cut right here:

Let’s start early in my flower-growing process. Please be kind.

Mountain Flower

[image description: a green sparkling square border around a flower with 8 large petals, two on each side of the square, so there are nearly triangular holes in the corners. The petals are a predominantly brown yarn with speckles of light blue and beige. end ID]

An early pattern-free flower. As you can see, there’s some experimentation with bulging double crochet petals built on rows of chains. You’ll be seeing that stitch combo quite a bit. It’s simple, it’s effective. Highly recommend the ol’ [8 dc in 5 ch space]*. Here’s your uquiz description: “I wondered what to call you to distinguish you from the others. You're a brown flower with flecks of blue and beige. One of the first attempted without a pattern. The petals bulge up like mountains, and they are the color of earth and sky. Grounded and dreamy.”

*I made these numbers up; I have no idea what the counting was here.

This flower, and what we’re calling The Nest, and The Sunflower were featured on this post at my real blog. Here’s some more pics of the Nest:

[image description: a very furry, green square with a ring of bubbly yellow stitches around a light blue flower with 8 petals. Second image: a close up of the same square where one furry corner is at the top of the image, and wisps of fur are seen crossing over the yellow flower. Close up, you can see that the yellow petals are cluster stitches around light blue posts. You can also see that there is a non-furry green camo yarn making similarly clustered stitches around the yellow ring. end ID]

To be honest, I don’t know how I feel about this one. The uquiz description is basically: “You’re chaotic,” and will probably be the description that gets changed the most retrospectively. What do you think of it? Is it alright? Is it awful and I should have pretended it never happened? Well, let me remind you that the point of the Quilt in which this resides is partially to explore texture, and there are some textures happening here.

The Sunflower

[image ID: an 8 petaled yellow sunflower with brown and blue speckled seeds. It sits in a blue square background, almost classic granny square so it looks almost checkered on the black background. end description]

It is actually only younger sunflowers which follow the sun (in a circadian rhythm similar to our own), while the older flowers generally face the east, which helps attract pollinators with their warmth. Like the African Flower - pink, there is a reference to Harold and Maude in the uquiz description for this flower because. I mean, it’s a sunflower. “They’re so tall and simple.” Maintaining that simplicity, the border is basically just your classic granny square. That and the Maude associations; hell, I guess this is your granny’s square after all!

[image description: another picture of the sunflower, close up and with slightly different lighting so the yellow looks less washed out by the actual sun. The blue border almost fades into the black background. end ID]

Next we have this white flower I have literally no memory of making:

[image description: a white flower with a circular center and rounded leaves sitting in a dark blue field with a notebook  page background which makes the blue easier to see than the black background featured in the uquiz result. end description]

Moving on.

The Septagon

[image description: a green lacy crocheted septagon sitting on a white background. The inner flower has 7 pink petals in a small circle surrounded by a peach row of thinner petals. This is all one yarn. Second image: a close up where it is set on a black background with the flower taking up much of the right side of the image. The sun hits the yarn in ways that emphasize the fuzz surrounding the wool-blend pink and salmon flower. It looks almost purple in places. End description]

I’m still obsessed with this one. I’m so obsessed my ability to name it eludes me. It will always be only the Septagon to me. The best 7-sided piece in the Quilt. I can’t remember if the 7 sides were deliberate, or if it all just came together like this without my willing it at all. This piece sprung forward from some Fae’s crochet hook, and I merely take credit for hir inspiration.

And finally, The Rose, a piece so finicky it has ended my floral series for now.

[image description: a layered red (almost orange in the lighting) flower. Each layer has 5 petals. 5 little green leaves surround the flower, and it's planted in a brown pentagonal "pot." The crochet pentagon rests on a notebook background to emphasize the rich brown yarn. end description]

It’s a mountain of double crochet/half double crochet petals.

[image description: a close up of the rose part of The Rose. The photo is taken at an angle to showcase how the petals pile up on top of each other. You can tell there is a cat in the house because there are so many hairs clinging to the red flower, and only some of them are yarn-related wisps. end ID]

Let me show you the back so you understand why I’m done crocheting flowers for a little bit. If you don’t speak crochet, saying it’s “a mountain of double crochet/half double crochet petals” means nothing to you. If you do crochet, you might also be like, “but what do you mean by that, Clancy?” Here’s what I mean:

[image description: two side-by-side duplicate pictures of the back. In the right image there are blue, purple, and green curved lines indicating roughly where 3/4 of the rows are located in relationships to one another. Two straight purple lines indicate where the triple crochets which anchor the second row (also indicated in purple), showing that these seem to reach all the way through the center hole. A black arrow points to “(beginning I haven’t tucked in yet)” a loose piece of red yarn. In the left image, without text, you can see two distinct bottoms of rows before all the parts obscured by these two top rows. In fact, the green line indicating the 3rd interior row of petals doesn’t look like it corresponds to anything, and in the key, it says “the middle layer cannot be seen from here easily enough to point out.” You can faintly make out the wood grain behind the flower more clearly than the 3rd and 4th rows of petals. End ID]

[crochetysquare]

Garden Variety, part i : other people’s patterns + group shots

[Image description: a mess of 14 crocheted flowers. Many of them are granny squares, but 2 are hexagons, 1 is a pentagon, and 1 is a septagon. Many use either a dark blue yarn or a green yarn with foil which sparkles faintly in the natural lighting. Descriptions of the individual flowers are included in their personal portraits in this post and the next. End image description.]

These flowers are presented as a uquiz, but all the pictures are divided between this post and the next post so there is space for additional pictures. I’ve done my best with photo descriptions, but some of them might be a little, ahem, flowery. Some of the uquiz descriptions will be included, others omitted.

African Flowers - blue and pink

[image description: Top image contains two “African flower” style crocheted hexagons. The one in the upper left is predominantly blue with brown border and center. In the lower right is a predominantly pink flower with a yellow center and white border. In the second picture is just the pink hexagonal flower with a yellow center and pink/purple/white petal edges. The border is white, and the flower rests on a black background which makes the colors more vibrant. End image description]

Pink uquiz description: “There are so many "African flower" patterns it's hard to say where I learned this one initially. Do you remember when Maude asks Harold what flower he would be, and he says "One of these, because they're all the same." But they're not all the same at all, and Maude points this out to him and shows him how some droop to the left or are missing petals, etc. The pink/purple/white yarn at the edges of your petals align with the white border in one place, bringing the border into your heart. Two petals clockwise (at 9 o’clock) from this is the spot you can tell the rows all started, because yellow cotton filaments break from one another and you can tell one of them is a row of chains rather than a true double crochet.”

“Crochet Bobble Drops Flower Granny Square” comes to us from crochetforyourblog.com and, will you look at that? it’s on some joker’s blog! (mine, i’m not making fun of the pattern maker, thank you for this lovely pattern)

[image description: First image: blue square. A dark blue flower with 16 bulging, teardrop shaped petals. Every 4th petal cuts up through a pale blue to the think dark blue border. It sits on a black background. Second image: a crocheted square with a blue border. The same blue yarn makes a 16-pointed flower. Every 4th point or petal reaches through a sparkly green space toward the border. An errant strand of foil sparkles on the blue flower. The square is sitting on a black background. End ID]

I made two because I really loved how the first (the top, all-blue) one turned out, and because it had a wintry vibe, I used a yarn bought from a Xmas display for a Yule mask last year.

Nick’s Series - original pattern

[image description: a small brown and blue speckled square held in a white hand. One corner is gently nudged forward at the top by my index finger. In the middle of the square is a blue flower with six petals. They cast a blue shadow on the flower's circular center. end ID]

Blue uquiz description: “I made you, and Nick said he liked you, which resulted in 3 more in rapid succession before I lost the impromptu pattern. It's since lost, but you remain. A hand-sized square intended initially as a way to explore pulling yarn through lower rows, or through the center over other layers, hiding them deep inside you, you would have made it difficult to be written, anyway. This one remains my favorite out of the four flowers in Nick's Series, and it is the only of the flowers photographed in my hand for this quiz.”

This is, in fact, the result the series’ namesake got when I had him test the quiz, so I think the quiz is rather accurate for that reason alone. In the quiz, you can also get the white flower, or Nick’s favorites (which we might call sherbet and purple to distinguish them) as options.

[image description: a green square arranged as a diamond on a black background. There is a white flower in the middle with 6 petals like squiggles. end description]

[image description: 2 squares matching in construction but not color. They're arranged vertically on a black background. The flowers have 6 petals each. The top has a purple/pink/white flower on a brown background with pale blue speckles. Its corners are more defined than the slightly rounder one below which has a green background and a blue/green/pink/orange/red flower.]

[image description: all 4 of the previous flowers arranged in a square on a black background with the blue and sherbet flowers on top and white and purple on the bottom. End ID.]

To be honest, they look best together where you can see that half are solid flowers, and half are speckled borders, and these halves overlap. If the pattern was to be duplicated, there had to be 4 in the end, not 2 or 3. What I loved about the first one of these was honestly how the back looks:

[image description: the backs of two crocheted squares: sherbet with its green border on the right and blue with its brown and blue border on the left. From behind, you can see that the sherbet or blue “flower” is a circle of tightly packed stitches surrounding a circular hole against the black background. End ID.]

Sherbet and Blue are my favorites, if you were wondering.