crochet, chenille or plastic

Three different materials get sold under the same three words — handmade forever flowers — and they behave completely differently once they are in your house. We make one of the three. We are still going to tell you what the other two do better. The crochet vs chenille flower bouquet question comes up constantly, and almost nobody selling either one answers it honestly, because the honest answer involves admitting a limitation.

Crochet — hooked cotton yarn

Made stitch by stitch with a hook, usually from cotton yarn, often stuffed and wired at the stem rather than through the petal.

Better at: softness and texture. A crochet rose has a density and a stitch pattern that reads as craft from across a room. Cotton takes dye beautifully and can usually be gently washed.

Worse at: holding a shape. Without wire through each petal, a crushed crochet flower stays crushed until you reshape it by hand, and fine detail — a lily’s curl, a daisy’s flat face — is hard to hold.

Chenille — pile spun onto a steel wire core

What craft shops sell as pipe cleaners, which is a genuinely terrible name for it. Every petal is built on a wire.

Better at: shape and recovery. Bend it, crush it in a suitcase, open it back out with your fingers and it is the flower again. It also allows thin, precise shapes — a tulip’s point, a gerbera’s spokes — that yarn cannot easily hold.

Worse at: washing. There is steel inside, so it cannot be soaked, only dusted. And the pile is polyester, not cotton, which matters if natural fibre is the point for you.

Plastic — moulded, and sold as the same thing

Injection-moulded petals, sometimes flocked to look like velvet, at ₹90 to ₹399 on the marketplaces. It is not handmade and it is not pretending very hard. Up close the seam line gives it away instantly, and it is the reason so many people assume all artificial flowers look cheap.

Which to buy

• Something that will be handled, posted, or taken to a wedding — chenille. The wire is the whole advantage.
• Something that sits on a shelf and gets looked at — either. Pick on colour and texture.
• You want natural fibre — crochet, and buy from someone who names the yarn.
• Budget under ₹300 — you are buying plastic. That is fine, but buy it knowing.

Ours are chenille, made in Gurgaon, ₹399 to ₹2,999, 2–3 days to make and flat ₹49 shipping across India.