Knit a Field of Flowers in Your Knitting Projects

I know it’s said April showers bring May flowers, but we already have plenty of flowers in bloom where I live, and it’s got me in the mood to knit some projects with flowers on them. Or at least talk about knitting projects with flowers on them, LOL. Let’s take a look.

I love the bold, folk art flowers on the Harvest Flowers Sweater from Jessie Mead Designs. This project uses DK weight yarn and comes in nine sizes, with a fit range of 28 to 60 inches, or 71 to 152.5 cm. There’s 6-8 inches (15-20.5 cm) of ease built into the pattern, so the actual smallest finished circumference is 36 inches/91.5 cm. It uses four colors of yarn and has two chart options. The charts indicate where you should catch the long floats, which is super helpful for those with less colorwork knitting experience. Get the pattern on Ravelry.

Another pretty floral sweater is the appropriately named Rosie Sweater from LE KNIT by Lene Holme Samsøe. This one uses a lace and a fingering weight yarn held together to make a DK weight (you could also just use a DK weight if you don’t want to use a mohair carryalong). It has six size options, with an actual chest circumference ranging from 40.5 to 63 inches, or 103 to 160 cm. It’s meant to have 7.75 to 12.25 inches, or 20-32 cm of positive ease. This one is also on Ravelry.

Maybe you don’t feel like knitting a giant sweater right now (I know I don’t!). So how about a pretty floral cowl instead? This one, by Daphne Knits, is called the spring cowl, though you could make the flowers a different color if you want it to look a little less spring. You can make the pattern as a cowl, a double loop, a triple loop or a scarf. Either way it uses three colors of sock yarn and features a pretty lace edging.

I also love this floral patchwork knit blanket from Yarnspirations. The Meadow Mosaic Knit Blanket calls for seven colors of super bulky yarn, but you can use as many or as few as you like. The flowers are actually worked in duplicate stitch so this is an easy knit (but admittedly has a lot of finishing work). If you wanted to make a little less work, make the squares in panels instead of knitting each one individually, and don’t put flowers on all the patches.

For the past few years I’ve taken part in a Christmas in July blog hop that encourages people to get a jump on their making for holiday gifts.

I love to use yarn I already have for these projects in the hope that people will consider what they already have that they can use to make projects for themselves or to give as gifts.

This year it was a couple of knit baskets made using partial balls of yarn left in my stash from other projects.

They use the same basic pattern but the first one is made with two colors of bulky yarn, and the second used two strands of worsted weight yarn held together, which made the gauge about the same, but I cast on fewer stitches to make a smaller version.

The bottom of the basket is square, though you can make them rectangular if you’d rather. Then I just knit up the sides in rounds until I was about to run out of yarn. This gave both baskets rather short sides — maybe more like a tray than a basket — but you can keep knitting as long as you like to make the sides of your basket as tall as you want.

They’re worked in seed stitch, which keeps the edges from curling and adds a nice texture to the baskets.

Of course this also allows you to use even more odd balls from your stash. I’d love to make a big one someday combining lots of different yarn. I mean, I’d probably use it to store more yarn, but that’s a fine thing to do.

As it is, these little trays are great for sitting on your desk or bedside table to hold little things that always seem to appear there. I like to use one to hold the supplies for whatever project I’m working on, things like little scissors, my tape measure, a crochet hook, etc.

And they would make good gifts on their own or as a container to hold some other goodies if you like.

You can find the free pattern for these stash busting baskets over at Our Daily Craft.

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