This is the poppy I knit yesterday because I could not find the one I knit previously. Or the one previous to that! Click here for the post where the instructions are given.
If you decide to make one and would like to know what changes I made with this one , well, here they are: At a garage sale on the weekend found one of those small skeins of tapestry wool (25 cents) and there is about 12 inches left after I made the poppy. (Lovely coincidence.)
The needle size was 3 1/4 metric (9 Can. 5 Amer) with 18 being the number of stitches at halfway point between increasing and decreasing.
Instead of making four petals, when I got to the last three stitches on first petal, I did not cast off but treated those three stitches as the cast ons for the second petal. Did the same with petals 3/4. I crossed one pair of petals over the other and simply stitched them together where they crossed and sewed the black center (made from some black linen yarn) in the middle. I did a bit of tacking of the petals to give them more form and less droop. By tacking I mean stitching the petals together here and there. The wool holds shape quite well.