Neko Knits: Spring has sprung....

"Spring has sprung,

The grass has riz,

I wonder where them birdies is."
-Annonymous

Spring has sprung in the desert (sorry to all you folks on in the heartland and east coast!) I can tell because the grass has definately "riz" and my little garden is looking like it is recovering from that freak frost we had a couple weeks ago. Yes we actually had three days of freezing temps and got ice on the fountains, ICE! I digress and will share the pictures of the ice another time. Right now the sublime 78 degrees and bright wild flowers blooming is enough to have me singing "Here Comes the Sun".

Now my garden is saddly still a little bare and no blossom's in sight. So, not to be out done by those brazen little wild flowers I decided it was time to make my own flowers. I have a ton brightly coloured crochet cotton and my husband is ready to declare war on my yarn stash, so I figured this was a great way to use the scraps of cotton left over from previous projects. And this is what I ended up with....

My very own rose garden!

The large roses were made using size 3 with crochet cotton with a 2.75 mm steel hook, the small yellows and purple were made using size 10 crochet cotton and the blue and pink were made with nylon Cro-Sheen that was sent to me from a friend who gave up on knitting (thanks Lacy!). All the small ones were made with a 2.25 mm steel hook.

There are a number of free patterns for roses and other flowers out there, check through my links for free pattern sites. I tend to use this pattern from Crochet Spot as it is the best one I have met yet and as a bonus they even have a great step by step tutorial for how to roll up your roses, believe me it is not as easy as you think!

Ok so now that I have a veritable rose garden the next question is what the heck am I going to do with them? I have a tolerant hubby but he is not going to want them hanging around so I needed to find something to do with these little guys. Well while cruising a friends fashion blog I noticed that flowers are HOT this year. Take a look!

Tasha Chiffon Flower Clip at Nordstroms

So I figured I could follow the trend and make some cute flower hair ties!

I started with a flower and decided that it needed a little something something, so I went through my boxes and some ribbon in a number of shades of green. I like the bright green one on the yellow rose.

I made "leaves" by creating a double twist.

It looks something like this.