A New Real Snowflake

The patterns for all my real snowflakes should be available on Ravelry in a few weeks time. (Edited 9th June 2017)

Those of you who have been following this blog for a long time may remember when I collected a number of photographs of actual snowflakes and created crochet versions for seven of them.At the time I decided that the snowflake in the top left of the picture would be too hard for me to make. (As an aside: I also decided that the eighth snowflake (bottom middle) was too textured to be able to do justice to it in three or four rows.)

This was for two main reasons.

1. It would have to involve using picot type stitches and I had been unable to make satisfactory picots.
2. I was afraid that the arms would end up floppy.

However since then I have discovered where I was going wrong and how to make picots that lie flat. I also saw some snowflakes with a similar style of points in this book: which gave me encouragementand I have been making some snowflakes to be sold in a local charity shop using acrylic yarn and a 2.5mm hook and found that with that size hook, even acrylic snowflakes can end up very firm.

I started off using that size hook rather than a more obvious choice of 3.5mm because I had been given a Clover Armour hook of that size and was really enjoying using it , so was reluctant to use an ordinary hook. And here is a comparison with the original photograph. You can see that even with my crochet not being 100% even it is still more symmetrical than the original!

Note that whereas the other snowflakes for which I created the earlier patterns all end up a similar size this one is necessarily a little larger.

It does benefit from a bit of blocking!Here is a photograph of the snowflake suspended. As you can see the points really do stay stiff!