Crochet Flower Gift Wrap and a Romantic Papercut

I learnt to crochet years ago especially so I could make flowers! 

Fortunately I discovered you can crochet all sorts of other things but sometimes I still like to rustle up a heap of crocheted flowers.

Find the pattern for these little flowers is on my Crochet Flower Garland tutorial.

These flowers are so quick and easy, each one takes about 10 minutes. You make them with just 3 rounds and then the middle petals are turned in through the centre hole which makes them sit forward nicely.

I've made mine with DMC Natura Medium yarn which is a lovely soft cotton that is an equivalent to an aran weight I think and I used a 4mm hook. 

My flowers have ended up approx 5cm or 2" in diameter.

This is another fabulous stash buster project, you can just use up whatever little bits you have left over from other projects.

I made these flowers for a crochet garland but made a few extra as I needed a pretty pastel gift wrap idea for a wedding gift. We are having a summer of weddings this year, 4 in all! (I've been sharing bit from all these weddings over on Instagram and trying REALLY hard not to overdo it!). This was for wedding no.1 and the bride is a person who enjoys all sorts of crafts so I knew she would appreciate some crochet flowers (Is it bad that I wouldn't waste them on someone who wouldn't appreciate them?!)

For the gift wrap I made the crochet flowers in the same way as the pattern but left a long tail of yarn at the beginning and again at the end, about 25" or so. You would have to vary that depending on the size of the gift.

When you finish one of these flowers the ends are both in pretty much the same place, the back looks like this:

To use these for gift wrapping I wanted the flowers to lay flat and the ends to be opposite each other, so I simply threaded one end onto a needle and through some of the loops on the back like so:

Then it was just a case of wrapping them twice round the wrapped gift and securing each one in a bow on the back. I did these one at a time, the ends are pretty long and it would be easy to get in a tangle it you tried to do them all at once!

We gave a jar of sweets too with a roll of card in the middle with money inside (which was the main present) so to coordinate everything I added a flower to the jar too.

The original idea of the sweets and roll of cash is one I saw on pinterest here years ago.

The card is just a little doodled thing inspired by several pretty doodles and designs l've pinned recently.

The gift wrap paper I used was just white tissue paper so it has creased a little at the edges, if I were doing this again I would try to find a thicker, crisp wrapping paper.

The present inside was this papercut. 

Anyone who follows on Instagram will have had a sneaky peek of this already. It's the bride and groom's favourite line from the song "Home" by Edward Sharp and the Magnetic Zeros, with their initials and the wedding date tucked in at the bottom.

It's not perfect by any means but it was made with love.

This wedding had so much prettiness going on, with a pastel colour scheme which I'd tried to match with the crochet flowers and sweets. So I'll finish with just a tiny glimpse of some of the loveliness from the day:

Julie

I'll be sharing over at these Link Parties