I’ve been playing with my crochet hooks again… trying to come up with different ways to create hanging vines and lianas that can fall over the edge of the platform. It’s fun, and a bit addictive. Basically, I took a sturdy yarn and worked a couple of rows of single crochet to serve as a foundation, and now I’m starting a vine from every stitch in the row. The foundation is the light brown piece in the pictures below. It has a tendency to curl, but it will be easy to pin down straight when I’m finished.

Here’s the first variation:

I took a dark brown and a variegated green sock yarn together and made a chain using a 3mm hook. Periodically, I made a pair of leaves only using the green and a 2mm hook. The leaves are the same ones as in my last post, just worked with thicker yarn. They do curl up a bit, which isn’t a problem since in the end this will all just be a thick tangle of vines and leaves. You can also see that I just looped back to the foundation at the end rather then cutting my thread and starting new. Even if that’s not like nature would do it, it does give me two lianas for the price of one, and the thread ends up where I need it next, for the second variation:

This is the simplest vine I made – I dropped the brown yarn and only used the green. As before, I started chaining, and added simple leaves by making more chain stitches and connecting them into a loop with a slip stitch – basically an oversized picot. I eventually looped back towards the top again, this time periodically attaching my chain with a few slip stitches to the downward leg and working a few smaller loops to make things more dense. This is a pretty simple way to get some satisfying results!

And because I just couldn’t resist, here’s a binary tree liana:

In fact, this is a perfectly balanced complete binary tree directly from the textbook. Again I used the brown and green together for the stem. I started with four chain stitches for each section, and the tree is four sections deep. So there’s 16 chain stitches to start, then I worked two leaves – again following the recipe in this post – worked four slip stitches up the previous chain, another four chain stitches down to the next set of leaves, then 8 slip stitches up to the next division, 8 chain stitches down and so on, until I had a complete tree. This was done completely regularly, but of course you could play with making the branches different lengths, or leaving some branches out, to get a more natural result.

There’s quite a few more foundation stitches left, let’s see what happens next! I think just playing with using different yarns and the same ideas could give enough variety to keep my entertained for a while!