A free form experiment

I decided to try out some free form crochet to make a necklace, which I gave to my sister for Christmas last year.  I was fairly pleased with my first attempt at this but I wasn't really sure if she liked it.  I was pretty excited when she wore it over to my house a couple of weeks ago and even more delighted when she told me that she's worn it out a few times and in work.  It gets lots of compliments too.

Obviously, there's no pattern because it's a free form but here's the gist of how I made it:
I got a wire necklace base and fastener thingie in my local craft shop (I have no idea what these things are actually called).  I used thick cotton thread in Red, Orange, and Yellow and a 1.5mm steel hook.  The trickiest bit was working single crochets (sc) the whole way along the length of the necklace wire.  It was insanely fiddly.  Once I got going with it, it did get easier though.  When I got to the end, I did 3-ch and then sl-st in every alternate sc back to the start.  This was fairly dense, but gave the base of the necklace a really pretty scalloped effect.

Next, was the free form bit, starting from the yellow in the centre and working my way to the outside, changing colours as I felt like it.  I did this with a random combination of single, double, and treble crochets to create an undulating pattern.  I also added in some chains of varying lengths and skipped a few stitches beneath to create the gaps in the pattern.  My main concern here was to make sure that the finished product was mainly flat.  I did get some flares by the time I got the the final round, but I liked how these looked so that was okay (they came out a bit like overlapping petals).  Then I used a combination of single crochets and slip stitches to firmly attach the free form piece to the front centre of the necklace triples.  Et voila!

I think I might make a few more of these as they are really quick and easy - I'd say no more than two evenings' worth of effort.  It'd be really simple to change up the combinations of colours and have a huge range of variations of this.  Next time, I think I'll make the centrepiece a little smaller and the second layer of colour a little stronger.  Still, I've got to say I'm very happy with how this little experiment turned out :)