Crochet as Art Part 2

The Beauty of Plants

I love plants, not necessarily the hard work that surrounds them, but I love the finished items. One of my favourite plants is the hydrangea. It is so beautiful and gives the most alluring flowers, both in shape and colour and I wanted to try and interpret this into a piece of my own crochet art. I had also been looking in to ways in which to use the box picture frames in my work and the two seemed to fit together perfectly.

We are lucky enough to have a pretty hydrangea in our garden, which gave me my starting point and inspiration for the design.

My aim was to capture the colours and structure of the whole of the plant but also to get across the layers that make up the hydrangea, starting with the leaves as my base.

My starting point was to try and find patterns that I could use as I had never created something quite like this before and I found this in this booklet produced by West Yorkshire Spinners.

Then came the best bit – the yarn! I was able to find everything I needed at my local yarn shop (which very sadly closed during the pandemic lockdown). I chose a range of textures, fibres, colours and thickness of yarn to ensure that the finished item would look as 3D as possible – using all of the same yarn, I felt, would make it too flat and ‘samey’.

Then onto the crocheting of many leaves and flowers, all the time, thinking how these would be secured into the frame. Construction came next – putting everything into place and making more leaves and flowers where needed, changing and tweaking the positioning until I was happy.

Using a mixture of sewing, glue and good old-fashioned double-sided sticky tape, I secured everything into place and then put the finished item into the box frame.

What do you think? I have to say that I am really pleased with the finished piece of crochet art. I have tried to capture the layers, depth and colours in the photos but it was quite tricky to do – it looks much better in real life. A bit like a hydrangea, really!