Happiness in Crochet - little flower tutorial

I absolutely love these little flowers, they are fairly simple, but they are fiddly and need good light. The pattern and instructions can be found here, but that link will then send you on to a Japanese website and it takes some searching to find it there. I would have linked it directly, but it does occasionally go offline (like today), so I thought I share this little photo tutorial :-)

It doesn't require a lot of yarn, but I think these work better with a clear cut yarn rather then a fuzzy wooly one (sorry for the lack of technical terms there).

1, make a slip knot leaving about 8-10 cm of 'tail'

2, chain 5

3, attach the last stitch to the first one with a slip stitch (pull the yarn through both stitches in one go), so it forms a nice little circle (with 5 chains - one for each petal of the flower)

4, chain 3

5, make a double crochet (in the UK that would be a trebble I believe) into the circle

6, chain 3

7, attach the chain with a slip stitch to the chain of the circle. You might need to wriggle the chain and the double crochet to the side a bit so the the chain stitch where the petal attached becomes visible - this is the afore mentioned fiddly bit. I found it helped if I used my left hand (thumb and pointer) to 'hold' the space whilst crochting the petal with my right hand. Sadly I couldn't photograph this bit, because I was out of hands :-)

8, this is one petal finished. You now repeat these steps another 4 times until you have 5 petals in total. Once you attached the last petal, you do another (one) chain stitch then cut the yarn leaving a tail of about 8-10 cm and pull it through the last chain. The first 'tail' should be right underneath the second tail so I usually double knotted them, because that tightened up the flower ring a little and made it prettier.

9, To attach a second flower:

you finish the first petal and start on the second one by chaining 3 and making one double crochet into the circle. Then you remove the needle and put it through the top of a double crochet of the flower you want to attach it to.

Next you simply pull the loop through.

Then you chain 3 and attach the chain to the circle. After that you continue with the rest of the petals. As my scarf had 2 rows I also attached a flower to the 3rd petal.

Here are the two flowers finished with the tails knotted

To finish off: usually I just weave the yarn in with my crochet hook, but I thought it would look prettier if I use a yarn needle (they are the big ones that don't have a sharp point) and thus reinforce the circle as well. So, with one end I went around clockwise and with the other end I went around anti-clockwise.

I think it tightened it up rather nicely in the end.

 add a few more flowers in lots of different colours and you end up with a very cheerful scarf.

Happiness in Crochet :-)