Poppies!

Hi everyone! 

I have been a bit quiet on the blog front for a few weeks - we travelled with my family to the lake house for Christmas and New Years, and I did wayyyyy too much cooking and chatting and game playing. It was great fun, but it led to quite a few fatigue crashes. 

I've been working on a few crochet projects over the holidays, but the one I want to talk about today is - Poppies! 

An incredible group of people put together an exhibition of 5000 for Anzac Day 2015, the 100th anniversary of the original Anzac Day landings at Gallipoli. This group has now been invited to participate in the Chelsea Flower Show in 2016 (sponsored by the Victorian Government), and they needed 20,000 more poppies!! A crochet friend on Facebook put out a call, and I thought I could add a few to the total. 

I used this pattern: https://5000poppies.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/chelsea-patterns-oct-2015.pdf , but you know me - I have to fiddle with every pattern to figure out how to make it easier :P 

Rather than making the green centre with the black eyelash yarn, and the red part separately and then sewing them together, I did the following:

1. Make green centre.

2. Do Round 1 of red petals

3. During Round 2 of red petals, crochet through back loop of green centre on top of red petals. Then, continue red petals to the end of Round 4.

4. Crochet black eyelash yarn to the spare front loops of the green centre, using the same instructions as in the pattern.

Ta dah! Even easier poppies that don't have any sewing!

I made 27 poppies, and my friend Sam made 3, so there are 30 poppies heading off in the mail soon to join their 19,970 friends at the 2016 Chelsea Flower Show :) 

What projects have you been working on over the Christmas break?