Planted – Crocheted Houseplants – Emma Varnam's blog

You know that my favourite designs are born out of…well laughter. If it amuses me…and make my son smile – it’s a win. Then, if you like it…if you want to make a design all the better.

I could never have dreamed that so many of you loved my first plant book – Crocheted Succulents. The fun we have had making cacti and succulents has been such a bonus.

It never occurred to me to make a sequel and then very slowly ideas started to come to me. The first design finished was the African Violet. A sort of ‘revenge project’…”Yes take that African Violet… you are so hard to look after in real life… I’m going to make a crochet version and that’ll teach you. Never again will me over-watering leave you as a soggy mess.”

Honestly the glorious Poinsettia fits into this category too. I find their falling leaves in early January too hard to bare. It feels like a less festive re-run of autumn. Now I can keep my beautiful red leaf plant for a following Christmas.

There are few new cacti for this book. We love them so much, why wouldn’t I add to the collection. I’ve had quite a lot of fun with flowers this time and even the Auricula which wasn’t meant to be part of the book has snuck in. Often the way. A last minute homework bit of luck.

It is difficult to choose favourites. I have many of the return projects out and about in our house at the moment. They always look incredible when mixed up with real plants… a yarn ‘trompe l’oeil’.

I’m going to be interested to see which ones you choose first to make. I suspect you might start with the cacti and then work up to inserting more wire and canes for gravity defying sturdiness.

In general – this is just so much fun. My great hero – Debbie Bliss told me that one of her first commissions was a knitted houseplant. She made it for a very famous national singer/songwriter. That feels like stepping into the footsteps of a very wise and generally hilarious woman and I am very fine with that.