Jane loves botanical drawings and recently purchased a fabulous book from Kew Gardens with the most wonderful illustrations. There is a page within the book that features sunflowers, hellebores and opium poppy seed heads and it made her think of the fields of sunflowers walked through on a lovely French holiday a few years ago.

Jane has always loved sunflowers with all of their connotations to heat and sunshine and Vincent Van Gogh, whose series of sunflower still life studies are infamous, saw these stunning flowers as a symbol of friendship and gratitude, so using them as the inspiration for a new design was inevitable, and as wild poppies are commonplace in fields of sunflowers, it was logical that this design should feature them too.

Stitches used in this project are ch, ss, dc, htr, tr, dtr, tr2tog, tr3tog, dtr4tog and dtr5tog.

A new colourway of this blanket called Fiori was released by Lucia Dunn. The yarn substitution document is available from Lucia’s website at www.luciasfigtree.com.