Red Vases with Crocheted Flowers
This is Red Vases, my latest crocheted flower wall hanging.
How many flowers and leaves from Crochet Bouquet and Crochet Garden can you spot? Many are the samples that appeared in the books. I’m glad to finally find a place for them.
My friend Peggy suggested adding beads to the Bluebells from Crochet Garden. What a great idea!
Read more about the making of Red Vases at Suzann’s TextileFusion (update 2024: now the TextileFusion blog), beginning, middle, and finished.
What are you doing with your crocheted flowers?
Red Vases Complete
Four a day flower sewing worked well for Firewheel Meadow, so I started with that regimen until a more urgent project distracted me.
While appliqueing flowers (not my absolute favorite job in a wall hanging), I listened to an audiobook. Listening helps me stay focused, because I really want to hear the next chapter and so I have to keep on sewing. The book was The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin.
At last, all the flowers were sewn in place. My friend Peggy said, “Those bluebells need something. How about beads?” Again, a different perspective helped. I added the beads.
The wall hanging rejected all but a few of my attempts to add buttons. A Gail Hughes green button nestled comfortably among leaves, a button I made was a good flower center. But mostly, the buttons were mostly too showy and detracted from the flowers.
Okay, so….less showy buttons?
Yes!! I hid small tan buttons among the flowers, adding texture and interest, without drawing too much attention.
Red Vases is finished, and it will make its debut at the Town and Country Quilt Guild Show in October.
Peggy said, “It will win a ribbon.” That would be nice!
Tell Me About Your Doilies!
I’m collecting photos of doilies and stories about them and the people who made them for an exhibit I’m doing next year at the Cross Timbers Fine Arts Council, River North Gallery, in Stephenville, Texas (and beyond, I hope!).
Please join me in celebrating doilies by sharing the stories of doilies in your collection. Maybe you make doilies, or maybe your ancestors made them. Whichever it is, other people will love to read about it.
To learn how you can join in this project, go to Doily Heritage Project information.
See a sample doily story here. www.textilefusion.com/DoilySamplePoster.pdf
The doily shown here was crocheted by my grandmother, Charles Etta Dunlap Thompson. I never met her, but my dad told me she found time to crochet and quilt, even when she was taking care of a household of nine.
By the time she made this doily, my dad and my Aunt Sue may have been the only children left at home. The pattern was published in 1949, when they still would have been in high school.
Finding the publication date was a job for the Doily Detective (me). First I searched “daisy doily crochet pattern.” This returned lots of beautiful doilies, but not this one.
Well…the flowers might be sunflowers, I thought. A search of “sunflower doily crochet” turned up another batch of lovely pieces and hey! There was an image similar to my grandmother’s doily!
A few more clicks took me to a site that offers free vintage crochet patterns. That’s where I learned this doily is called the Black-Eyed Susan Doily.
I searched Ravelry, an online knitting and crochet community, for the Black-Eyed Susan Doily, and found it was published in January 1949 in Coats & Clark O. N. T. #258 Floral Doilies leaflet (pattern #D-207). The pattern also appeared in a leaflet called Floral Doilies for Crocheting.
Like quilts, doilies are an important part of our heritage. Quilts have been studied and written about extensively, but doilies have not. Let’s do something about this!
Flower Arranging for Red Vases
When I’m arranging embellishments for a wall hanging, I really like to get other peoples’ input. It helps me see things from a different perspective.
In the past, my daughters helped me out (and here, too). In April, participants in the International Quilt Festival (Chicago) Open Studios event arranged and rearranged flowers for Red Vases. We discussed the merits of different color combinations, flower shapes, and number of flowers.
Here are a few options we came up with:
Back at home, I consulted these photos while making the final arrangement for Red Vases, and this is it:
Wait! On second thought, this became the really, really final arrangement.
Now to sew all those flowers in place.
Mama Lion Roars Again
Mama Lion, which debuted in a big way last year on World Lion Day, was featured during June 2016 at the Light Space & Time Online Art Gallery, as part of the Animals Art Exhibition, Special Merit Award Category.
I’m pleased to share (or show off, if you want to be truly accurate) the ribbon and certificate I received for having one of my wall hangings in the show.
See Mama Lion in the Animals exhibit at https://www.lightspacetime.com/animals-2016-art-exhibition-special-merit-kr-thru-z/.
You can also see a slide presentation of the show at YouTube (Mama Lion is at 10:30).
Light Space Time encourages entries of all artistic media, but few textile works are shown among the many painted or drawn entries. I can only guess that this is because few fiber artists enter their work. So Fiber Artists, please enter! Light Space & Time posts a new show every month AND the site provides a lot of information for artists who want to show their work to its best advantage.
How Red Vases Began
Quilters and other crafters are generous people! I picked up this long, skinny seed packet panel at a quilt guild meeting—someone was cleaning out old projects and brought it to the giveaway table. The panel was about 11 inches wide and 37.5 inches long.
It lay in my fabric stack for several years, while I contemplated how to incorporate it into a project. Finally it challenged me to design a long, skinny quilt and use it as the backing fabric.
That was the beginning of Red Vases, only they didn’t start out red. Originally I was going to recycle a tan lace sweater. You would be able to see green stems behind the lace and it was going to be great!
Only, as you can see, it wasn’t very great. It was boring.
I dug out some red and red and white checked knitting left over from another project. (Here, too.) Much better!
Luckily this change of vase didn’t set me back too far, because the wall hanging had to be pieced, quilted, and bound in time for the International Quilt Festival in Chicago in April, and time was growing short.
At the Open Studios event at the International Quilt Festival in Chicago, various people joined me in arranging flowers on Red Vases. Our first major decision, unanimously approved, was the choice of Edelweiss over Van Wyk Roses in the little vase.
Patterns for the crocheted Edelweiss and Van Wyk Roses are from Crochet Garden: Bunches of Flowers, Leaves, and Other Delights.
Autumn Leaf Wrap in Love of Crochet
I’m so pleased to have Cute Crochet World’s Horse Chestnut Leaf featured in this lovely wrap! Instructions are in the Fall 2016 issue of Love of Crochet magazine, which will be on the newsstands in August. If you can’t wait that long, you can purchase the digital edition now at www.interweavestore.com/love-of-crochet-magazine-fall-2016-digital-edition.
We don’t have room for step-by-step photos in most magazine instructions, so I’m posting some here. If you’d like some help visualizing the instructions, the following photos should help.
Use your markers! They will help you find your place.
When you join the leaves, place them wrong sides together. You’ll be glad of the markers at this point.
Here’s another view of the leaf join.
After the join, finish the leaf in progress.
The Leafy Trim on the Autumn Leaf Wrap has 24 joined Horse Chestnut Leaves.
The first row of the wrap joins directly to the Leafy Trim.
Row 3 of the wrap joins to the stems and creates their attractive curve.
You can see the join up-close in the photo above. Below, Row 3 is finished.
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For step-by-step photos of the Horse Chestnut Leaf, visit the previous blog post here on Curious and Crafty Readers. (In 2024, there’s only one TextileFusion blog and this is it 😊)
Hints for Crocheting the Horse Chestnut Leaf
Horse chestnuts! They’re such cool trees, and I would never have known about them if we hadn’t moved to England. Their flowers are fancy and frilly, and they produce very hard nuts. Their leaves inspired the “Horse Chestnut Leaf” design in Cute Crochet World (pages 74-75).
The pretty “Chestnut Wrap” in the Fall 2016 issue of Love of Crochet features a trim made with joined Horse Chestnut Leaves. The magazine will be available on the newsstand in August 2016. You can purchase the digital edition now at www.interweavestore.com/love-of-crochet-magazine-fall-2016-digital-edition.
Here are some step-by-step photos to help you visualize the instructions in the book. I’ve made two small improvements that will make the leaf easier to make.
Row 1 of the Horse Chestnut Leaf sets up the central veins for the five leaflets or lobes. Very easy. When you’re done, ch 1 and turn. In the original pattern, I didn’t include the ch-1, because you don’t really need it. However, the ch-1 makes it slightly easier to turn.
On Row 2, you’ll run into two unusual stitches. Find instructions for the htr (UK half double treble or hdtr) here. The other is the stitch-top picot. I believe it leaves less of a gap between the stitches on either side of it. To make the st-top picot, ch 3,
…insert hook into the Front Loop of the previous stitch and under the loop that lies just next to it as in the photo above, yo and draw through all lps on hook.
St-top picot complete.
In Cute Crochet World, at the end of the first four lobes, the instructions say “rotate piece so you are looking at the base of the lobe, sl st around the sl st at ase of lobe,…” Instead of doing that, simply sl st in the space between the lobe you just finished and the next lobe. The photo above shows where to place the hook.
Row 3 is worked along the base of the lobes. The instructions take you through how to do each stitch. If it helps, think of it this way, sc-3dc-sc-together.
After the final yo and pull through all loops on hook, the base of the leaf pulls together and looks like this.
The very best way to finish the leaf is to needle-join the stem to the base of Lobe 5. After the last stitch of the stem, cut the yarn and pull the hook straight up from the last stitch. The end of the yarn will pull out of the top of the last stitch.
Thread the yarn end into a needle. Take the needle under the first sl st of Lobe 5, Row 2.
Then take the needle back into the top of the final stem stitch (the yarn is coming out of this stitch).
On the needle’s way down, catch the loop at the back of the leaf–see the photo above. Pull the thread through, adjust the new loop to a good tension, and weave in the end.
Upcycled Backpack for Ella
A couple of flowers and some buttons dressed up this backpack to the point where my 13-year-old daughter was willing to use it for her recent trip to the state of New York (as opposed to driving into town and buying a new one).
We carefully removed the backpack’s logo, using a seam ripper and pulling out one stitch at a time. This gave us a clean canvas for our design–a clean, very orange canvas.
After testing quite a few different flower and leaf combinations, she chose “Ray Flower” from Crochet Bouquet and the Little Flower from “Curly Curlicues” of Crochet Garden. We added buttons from our stash.
Here’s how to put it all together:
- Arrange flowers and buttons as desired.
- With pencil, mark flower and button centers on the backpack, to help with placement later.
- Use fabric adhesive to glue flowers in place. Let glue dry.
- With sewing thread and needle, sew invisibly around edges of flowers. In addition, for larger flowers like the Ray Flower, stitch around one of the rounds close to the center.
- Sew on buttons.
Flower and Button Arranging for Afternoon
Blue and orange “Czech Festival Flowers” from Crochet Garden made me think of hollyhocks and other tall flower stalks. For ideas on how to arrange with tall flowers, I typed “tall flower arrangements” into Google Images. The computer screen filled with interesting, beautiful examples.
My favorite type of arrangement was where the tall flower stalks were surrounded at the top of the vase by a ring of different flowers. It was like they had a collar of smaller flowers.
Once all the flowers were crocheted and blocked, I tried several arrangements, photographing each one. I chose the best arrangement and started sewing flowers in place. Even then, I continued to fiddle with leaf placement and filler flowers.
Then there was the matter of buttons. Once again I photographed different button placements so I could compare and choose the best, which was the one at left. I was very pleased with the black button centers on the yellow flowers (“Aster-oid” from Crochet Bouquet).
My personal rule for this wall hanging was “no pink.” But I couldn’t resist sprinkling dayglow pink buttons across the flower arrangement. They looked so wonderful, so delicious, so mouth-watering (as my mom would say), the no-pink rule went by the wayside.
Afternoon was finished in time to hang at the Town & Country Quilt Guild’s exhibit at the Cross Timbers Fine Arts Council (Stephenville, TX) in the final months of 2015 and in the TextileFusion exhibit at the International Quilt Festival (Chicago, IL) in April 2016.
