FREE Crochet Snowflake Patterns!

It's beginning to look a like well, Winter and with winter comes all the beauty of Christmas and other festivities, one of which is crocheting snowflakes!

I absolutely love designing snowflakes and have shared quite a few designs over the years so I thought I would collate them all in one post so you can pick and choose your favourites to crochet this year.

As for my five pointed snowflakes, well... we're going to call those quasi-crystal snowflakes. Ooh if I had a pound for every person who had commented on how five pointed snowflakes don't exist in nature. I could point out that creativity is not bound by reality, but instead I'm going to throw you some science as if you know me, I am a total geek when it comes to maths and science.

What's a quasi-crystal? I don't hear you scream. Well, for those who are interested, a quasi-crystal can be thought of as a snowflake, although it is not a snowflake is the normal sense of frozen water, but when looked at very closely can resemble the beautiful shapes and structures of snowflakes, but in fact almost defy the laws of physics as they seem to show almost a forbidden form of symmetry. No six-sided geometry found here.

It was believed, over a hundred years ago that crystals could only have four types of symmetry, two-fold, three-fold, four-fold, or six-fold, which created an ordered, well-defined geometric structure that repeated easily and before 1984 it was believed that it would be impossible to find any other type of symmetry geometry, either man-made or found in nature. Exactly what I often hear on YouTube...

However, some scientists began to believe that other forms of symmetry could in fact come into existence perhaps under extreme circumstances, such as during chemical collisions in space that could exhibit a magical five-fold rotational symmetry. It was theorised that these magical crystals, deemed "quasi-crystals" could be arranged in such an order that when x-rays and electrons passed through them they formed a pattern of sharp spots. In conventional crystals, these spots are equally spaced to form typical symmetrical patterns, such as in a six-sided snowflake, but in quasi-crystals these spots could form a fractal snowflake pattern that had forbidden symmetries, such as five-fold.

This was just a theory though, but over the next few years scientists did manage to create these magical crystals by melting and mixing certain elements and then cooling them at very specific rates in the lab. It was indeed possible to create a five sided snowflake! Albeit one you definitely wouldn't want to melt on your tongue, but none had ever been found naturally occurring in nature. It was thought possible though that these crystals could exist out in space somewhere.

A few decades later though scientists came across a tiny sample of a meteorite from the Russian Koryak Mountains that had a tiny grain of aluminum, copper, and iron mineral that exhibited five-fold symmetry. Again, in 2015 another five sided "snowflake" was discovered from the same meteorite, confirming that the natural existence of quasi-crystals was indeed possible, just very rare, but in space scientists believed they could be much more common than we think as the types of collisions required for them to come into existence was happening continiously within the asteroid belt alone. The Russian meteorite had undergone a huge impact at some point before crashing to Earth, most likely from colliding with another slab of rock during its time in space.

It's thought that these magical, symmetry defying crystals were formed as matter collided in space during rapid cycles of compression, heating, decompression and cooling although scientists are unsure exactly when these crystals are formed during this process. Another mystery is that no-one quite knows where the copper-aluminium alloy found in the meteorite came from because it has never been found anywhere else in nature.

So, whether you like a traditional six-pointed snowflake or a more magical five-pointed snowflake, both exist in nature in some form so I hope you enjoy the following list of beautiful snowflake patterns and wonder at just how magical they really are!

Snowflake 1