Tunisian Crochet Flower Series – Poppy

The poppy! A beautiful flowering plant that is part of the Papaveraceae family. We often see fields covered in poppies and they can be found in many gardens.

Many of us see the poppy being used on Armistice Day on the 11th November as it is the symbol of remembrance of the First World War.

This is my poppy worked in Tunisian Crochet. Another addition to my Tunisian Crochet Flower Series.

I really enjoy the designing process when it comes to designing my flowers and I try my hardest to get them to look as good as the flower itself. I put a lot of time into the research of each flower.

My process on designing my flowers is that I decide on the flower that I want to design and then I inspect the flower itself and look at how it’s formed. It is impossible to get all the detail into a flower that I make using Tunisian crochet but I try to get as much detail as I can in my finished designs.

Here are only a few of my petal samples. I can spend hours on getting the shape of the petal right and deciding on what stitches to use so as to get the petal as close to the real flower petal as possible.

I start by working the flower centre. Many a time I unravel what I have done and redo until I am completely happy. I then work each individual petal onto my centre piece. Again, if I’m not happy with how they look, I undo and start again.

I didn’t actually realise that poppies only have 4 to 6 petals. This is where doing the research before I start to design, comes in handy.

I worked my poppy using a 5mm Tunisian Crochet hook and Double Knit yarn. The Tunisian Crochet Simple Stitch and Tunisian Crochet Purl Stitch were used and in some areas of the flower I combined the simple stitch and the purl stitch. This is sometimes known as the Tunisian Crochet Honeycomb stitch when both the purl and simple stitch are used in the same row.

I wanted my petals to curl at the tops as I had seen this in some of the poppies when the petals give the impression of curling into the centre of the flower.

I’m happy with my design and I think it looks like a poppy!