Crochet Flowers!

I've been wanting to take up crocheting for some time now, once I discovered how versatile it is, compared to knitting. I especially want to learn how to do all the borders and embellishments, and though I have attempted to learn by myself before, this week, I actually had some success. My buddy Mel came down to keep me company while Jay was away (he finally gets home tonight! Yay!) and brought an amazing book with her: Stitch 'N Bitch Crochet: The Happy Hooker. Despite the risque title, this gem really knows how to teach you to crochet, as if your good friend is explaining it to you. The pictures are great, and there are a lot of really cute, simple projects to try. I highly recommend it.

So, I spent that night just working on a practice swatch, learning to do a lot of the basic stitches, and at the end of the night, I even tried a popcorn stitch with great success! Last night, I decided to finally crochet a flower. I found a pattern online, but after step one, I completely didn't know how to read this pattern (note that it wasn't a "real" pattern, it was kind of vague and just from someone's blog). Probably a "real" crocheter would have been fine, but I was totally dumb-founded, so I just kind of winged it (wung it?) and this is what I ended up with.

Not to shabby, if I do say so myself... BUT not really cute enough either. So I pressed on. Making this little experiment taught me a lot about what I wanted from a flower, and so between that and looking at another crochet flower a friend made for me, I just made up a pattern as I went and ended up with this:

I'm so pumped to keep experimenting. I should have learned to crochet long ago!