A Beginner's Guide to Mosaic Crochet

1. Introduction : Hi, my name is Chelsea and I am a self-taught digital artist and crafter. I have tried many different crafts over the years, but I am especially drawn to the needle arts. I love knitting, crochet, sewing, quilting, embroidery. I've tried all kinds of different things. I especially love crochet though, because it is really easy to learn, it is easy to correct mistakes, and all you need to get started is some yarn and a hook. I also think there's something really magical about taking a piece of string and turning it into something beautiful. Plus, I think there's nothing better than curling up with a crochet project and a cup of tea on a rainy day. In this class, I will be teaching you a special technique called mosaic crochet. This is a little bit different from regular crochet because you are working one row at a time and you cut the yarn after every row. In this class, I will teach you how to make this really fun fringed edge. This pattern is really a very simple one, but it will give you a beautiful result, both on the front as well as on the back. Whether you are brand new to crochet or you are just looking for something new and different, I think mosaic crochet is a lot of fun and I cannot wait to share it with you. I hope to see you in class. 2. Your Project : Your project for this class will be to make your very own scarf. I will be teaching you this pattern and we will finish it off with a twisted fringe. You will choose at least two colors so your project can reflect your personality and style. If you are intimidated by making a project that is so large, you can please feel free to just make a swatch. This is only two colors and it makes a great mug rug or a coaster. Doing a swatch like this is a great way to practice a new technique without the pressure to finish an entire project. Because crochet projects can take a little bit longer to complete, please post photos as you work so that we can see your progress. Make sure you definitely post a photo of your final masterpiece so that we can all celebrate your accomplishment. I cannot wait to see what you create 3. How to Choose Your Yarn: Let's talk about what we will need to get started. The first thing we need to decide on is a yarn, which is probably the most fun part. For mosaic crochet, you need at least two colors, but you can really use as many as you like. You're going to choose at least one background color and at least one pattern color. In this project, I chose white as my background color, and then I used several different colors for my pattern. On this scarf, I chose black as my background color. Again, I used some brightly colored yarns for the pattern. You want there to be a lot of contrast. You want all of your pattern colors to really show up against your background color. Even this darker purple, we can see shows up really well against the black. One great way to achieve multiple colors is to choose a neutral background color like a black or white, and then get these little packs of Bonbons. They come in all different colors. You can just use a little Bonbon until it is gone, and then switch colors. That is a great way to get multiple colors in your project. If you are just starting out, you can choose only two colors. Black and white, of course, is a super high contrast. This is also a great way to use up smaller bits of yarn from your stash that you might have laying around because you're only working one row at a time. There's less of a need to worry about running out of yarn mid-project. These soft striping yarns are really great if you want a multi-colored look but don't want to have to worry about changing your yarn. These have a good range of multiple different colors. With one piece of yarn, you can get a multi-colored look. You just want to make sure that all of the colors in your striping yarn are going to work with your background color. If I look at this blue one, it goes from a very dark blue to a very light blue, almost white. I put the dark blue on the black. That is still visible, but it is not the highest contrast. It might get lost in your project. If I look at it against a white background color, it almost disappears completely. You want to take that into consideration when you are choosing your yarns. If you are just getting started, the lighter the color of yarn, the easier it will be to see your stitches. I recommend not going with anything too super dark. The next thing we need to talk about is the weight of the yarn. This is a weight 5, it is a bulky yarn. If I was going to use this yarn, I would want to pair it with another yarn of a similar weight. Either another 5 or a 4 would work just fine. For this scarf, the black background color that I used was a 5, and the pattern colors were a weight of 4. Because you are alternating rows, the weights even themselves out ,but you would not want to pair a bulky yarn with something much thinner because the thinner yarn is going to get lost. For this project, I'm going to be using this red and this tan beige color. I'll call it white, even though it's not really white. These are Big Twist brand, and let's look at my hook size here. The recommended hook size is a size H. You can just look right on your yarn label and choose a corresponding hook size. You'll need a pair of scissors, and you can use a ruler to measure your fringe if you want to. That is not necessary. Another helpful tool is stitch markers. These are going to be really useful for helping us count in our first few rows. If you are going to purchase stitch markers, make sure they are the kind that can open. Otherwise, you want to be able to get them off of your project. If you don't have stitch markers, a safety pin or a paperclip works just as well. You just want something that you can hook onto your yarn to help you keep track of your counting in the first few rows. That is all we need to get started. Let's go. 4. The Stitches: We're going to talk about the stitches we will be using for the rest of the project. There are only two stitches, the single crochet and the double crochet. I'll be showing you them now. But first we need to talk about how to hold the yarn and how to hold the hook. The correct answer is there is no correct answer. Feel free to hold them however you like. I prefer to put the yarn around my pinky and then I use my index finger to adjust the tension of the yarn. If the yarn is more tight it is easier to get the hook under the yarn. If it's loose, it can be very difficult to get the hook under there and make your stitches. I use my index finger to hold the tension. You can put the yarn around a different finger if you prefer. Some people do all kinds of different ways. If you are comfortable with it, feel free to do it. The next question is how to hold the hook. There's a knife grip like what I use that is like you're holding a knife or you can use a pencil grip which is more like holding a pencil. You're free to play around with both methods and see which one you prefer. I have tried them both and some people find one to be more comfortable than the other, if you like it you can do it. There are no rules. Now let's see what stitches look like in crochet. In crochet the stitches look like these V's. There is basically just a row of them that sits on top of your project and V is made up of two loops, the front loop and the back loop. If I put my needle under here, you can see there are two on the hook or two on the needle that's connected on both sides. There's one in the front and one in the back. That will be important later. In normal crochet, you would go under both loops. For a single crochet you're going to go under the front and the back loop. The single crochet stitch is just putting your hook under the yarn pointing through both loops of that V and now you have two loops on your hook, one and two. For a single crochet stitch, we're now going to yarn over the hook and pull through both of those loops. Now you can see our completed single crochet stitch. Look at the top here you can see the V, that's what I just made. Both sides, we have one completed stitch reach up and you can see the other ones that I've already done. Let's do that one more time. For a regular single crochet stitch, you're going to go through both the front and back loops of that top V. You can see them both there. Put your yarn over your hook, pull it through, and so you get two loops on your hook. Now, pull the yarn through both of these. That makes one complete stitch. Very good. Now, for a double crochet, it is basically the same thing except you'll be doing it twice. A single crochet is shorter than a double. See how much taller the double is than the single? So for a double crochet stitch, you're going to put the yarn over the hook first. Just lay it right on top of the hook and then we will go under the two loops of the stitch. We have two loops on the hook now basically. We're going to go under our stitch, both sides of it. You see the two right there? Great. Pull the yarn through. Now we have three loops on our hook. What on earth are we going to do with three of them? All we do is the same thing that we've already done except twice. We're going to pull it through the first two stitches only, there we go, the first two loops. Now we have two on our hook. This is just like a single crochet. Now we're going to pull the yarn through both loops and there we go. We have our working yarn coming through the top and you can see that the double crochet is taller than the single. It's getting pulled down a little bit with the hook but you can see that it is definitely taller. One important thing to notice when you are working is, do you see how you can tell that the yarn is pulling on that stitch right there? You can see the two V's. You might think that that is the stitch that you're supposed to put your hook under. But if you look at the side, you can see that that yarn is pulling up on that stitch. You want to go into the next stitch where there is no yarn pulling up on it. Put your yarn over your hook, you have the two loops now. Now you can go under both sides. Great. Pull the yarn through and now we have our three on the hook. Pull the yarn through just the first two, one and there's the second one. Now we have two left. Let's pull the yarn through those last two. There we go. Now we have done two single crochets and two double crochets and you can see how much taller the double crochets are. Even with the hook pulling upward, pulling up on that last stitch you can see that they are definitely taller than a single crochet. Now that we know our single and double crochet, we're going to learn what makes mosaic crochet so unique and special. We are going to go into the back loop only for our single crochet. Instead of going under both loops of the stitch in mosaic crochet, you go through the back loop only if you look at the stitch from the top, go right down through the middle and your hook will only be going under that back loop. That leaves the front loop open which is what forms the pattern in mosaic crochet. You can see all of these stitches right here. These are the front loops that were left behind when I did my stitches into the back loop. We want that front loop to stay untouched. Now that my hook is through the back loop, I'm going to just do a normal single crochet just like we've already done, pull it through the stitch, in this case it's only that one white loop. Now we pull our yarn through both loops and there's our stitch. You can see it looks exactly the same from the top, there's our V. From the side, we have this open front loop and you can see the difference between the regular single crochets that I did before. We want this nice line of stitches to go across and form a pattern. Let's do it one more time. We're going to go down through the middle and under that back loop, just the back part of that V. Pull the yarn through. Now we have our two loops on the hook just like a normal single crochet and pull it through. There you go. It looks exactly the same from the top but from the front we're going to have the basis for our pattern. That is a single crochet for mosaic crochet. Now we're going to do a double crochet. Remember how double crochets are taller than a single. Mosaic crochet instead of going up, instead of making the stitch taller, we're going to make our double crochets go down. They're going to connect the rows and that is what gives you the pattern in mosaic crochet. We yarn over just like we normally do for double crochet but instead of going into this stitch on the top, instead of going into that back loop, we're going to skip that stitch on the top row completely and go to the row below. That is our pattern color on that row. We're going to go up and under that front loop that was left behind from the last time. That is why the front loops are so important. We have our two loops on our hook, we're going to skip the next stitch on our row and go to the row below, up and under that front loop. That is why we leave those front loops behind. Now we will do a normal double crochet, pull the yarn through. We have three loops on our hook. Go through the first two and the last two. Now you can see that instead of our double crochet going up it goes down and it connects those two rows. We have the red going into the red and that is what gives us our pattern. It is a taller stitch that goes down. Let's do that again. I'm going to do another double crochet right next to this first one. We will skip that white stitch completely and go down to the next one. We have our two loops on the hook, go down the row, open under that friendly that we left behind. Now let's do our double crochet. Go through the first two loops, one and now to the second two loops, two. So in mosaic crochet, the double crochets go down and they cover over the row that is in-between. These weights stitches are covered up and that is what gives us our pattern. You can use these single and double crochets in all kinds of combinations to give you all kinds of patterns. 5. Foundation Row : The very first thing you need to do is get your yarn onto your hook. To do that, we're going to cross the yarn over and make a loop and then just like you're tying your shoes, you're going to pull a loop through, then tying it. Let me show you that one more time. Cross the yarn over and then pull a loop through, then you can put your hook in to the loop and pull it tight. Now you are ready to get started. You will also have a long tail, which is more than we will need. To start you need to do a row of chain stitches. For this project, the pattern is six stitches, so you will need to do multiples of six. In this scarf, I did 300 stitches. There is one and then five, one and then five to make a pattern of six stitches. Then we will add three stitches on top of that. To do a chain stitch, you put the yarn under the hook and pull it through. I'm going to slow that way down for you. Put your hook under the yarn and then pull it through the loop. If you're using a stitch marker, go ahead and put it on your project right now. We have one stitch at the beginning, and now we're going to start counting six stitches. There's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. That is our first pattern repetition. I will put another stitch marker on to keep more place 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, time for another stitch marker. You can see that I have two repetitions of six plus the one extra at the beginning. For this project, I'm only going to do five repetitions. If you are going to do a scarf the same size as mine, 300 stitches, that will be 50 repetitions. You can always double-check how many stitches you have by counting these V's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. This loop that is on the hook is not a stitch, you did not count that. Let's put another stitch marker on and I have two more repetitions to go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. You can make your project as long or as short as you want, as long as it is a multiple of six. Then we add one stitch at the beginning, and as soon as I'm done with this repetition, I will add my last stitch marker, and I will add two extra chain stitches on the end. I can see all of my stitches one and two. Now, we have our multiple of six plus three. Now that we have our chain row and we've learned our single and double crochets, we're going to go ahead and get started with our project. This is called the foundation row, and this is the only row of the project that we will be working backward. All of our V's are going to be facing the opposite direction, but it's okay. We're only going to be going into the back loop. Here's that one extra stitch, we're going to skip that and we're going to go into the next stitch. So stitch Number 2 go into the back loop and work a single crochet. Let's move our stitch marker out of the way and go under just this back loop right here, this top part of the V, and do a single crochet. Go under the top loop, pull the yarn through, and pull the yarn through both loops on the hook. We're just going to single crochet all the way across the row. This is the only time that the V's will be backward. Afterwards, we will be cutting the yarn and going across the rows one by one. This is the last stitch of my very first repetition, I come to my stitch marker here, I will move it out of the way and just continue on. We'll be moving the stitch markers out of the way in a few rows. But for now keep them in, even though they might be a little bit in the way. They will be very helpful to us in a couple more rows. You can see that the yarn is going through that stitch. That means I've already worked into it. I'm going to go into the next stitch and I'm going to speed this up here a little bit while I continue to the rest of the row, and we will stop at the very last stitch. You might find that as you're crocheting, you start out crocheting a little bit more tightly, and then I often find that I start crocheting pretty tightly and then by the time I'm a few rows in, I've started to relax and loosen up a little bit. If you find that to be the case that after a few rows, your stitches are becoming looser, that is totally fine, you can just continue as you are or you can switch to a smaller hook as your stitches naturally loosen up. We're coming to the end here, and here's my last stitch marker. I'm going to do one last single crochet right into the top of this stitch, and now this last stitch in the end, this is the very first chain stitch we did last time. This is going to be a special stitch, this is going to be our border stitch, and for this one only, we're going to go into both loops and it's a little tricky on this first time so take your time. Get your hook under the first loop and under the second. Now, you can see we have both loops of the V on the hook. Now, we're going to carefully pull or yarn through and do a single crochet. That was your ending border stitch. Now it's time to talk about our fringe. If you want to measure, feel free, you can grab a ruler, and let's say that you want to do maybe a five inch fringe, go ahead and cut it a little bit longer to give yourself some extra, and then you're just going to cut it and pull it all the way through. All the way loop. Now, just tighten it down a little bit. You don't need to make it super tight, but just tighten it enough that it doesn't look like a stitch so that you don't get confused on the next row. There you go. You can see our last border stitch right there and that little tiny, not where we pulled our yarn through and that's it. That is the foundation row. The rest of the rows we'll be working going from right to left. Good job. 6. The First Row: Introducing the Pattern Color: It is time to start our first official row of the project, Row 1. From now on, we will always be working from right to left, we will not be flipping the project back and forth, which is how you work in normal crochet and regular crochet. Mosaic crochet, you cut every row and work from right to left. This is the first time we will introduce our pattern color, so go ahead we want to start thinking about our fringe. On this side we will measure our six inches or whatever you decided and give yourself a little bit of extra space. To start, we will find the very first stitch of the project. From the last row that we did, there's a stitch marker and there's that one extra stitch on the end. You can see it right there all by itself. This is going to be our beginning border stitch. Just like the border stitch on the last side, we will go under both loops of the V. Now we have two on the hook, beginning and ending border stitches, you always go through both parts of the stitch. Just hold on to your yarn to start a new color, just hold onto it, pull the yarn through. Hold it with your fingers, pull it through. Now, we have one on the hook and we're just going to do a quick little chain stitch right there just to hold that yarn in place. Now, that that is secure, our yarn is attached to the project and isn't going to come loose. We're going to go right through that same stitch, that very first stitch, both loops and do a single crochet. There's our two loops, pull it through, now we have done a chain stitch and a single crochet into that very first V. This will give us a nice border along the edge of our project, we have a little loop right here and our single crochet. We will do that at the beginning of every row. Now, even though this is the first time we are using our pattern color, this is not the first time we will be starting our actual pattern. This row is only single crochet, so we're just going to go all the way across doing a Mosaic single crochet, which means the back loop only. There's our stitch marker, there's our very first stitch. We're going to put our hook through the middle of the V and go into the back loop only in single crochet. We're going to go all the way across single crochet. Now we've come to our first stitch marker, we'll just continue on. We are not doing any pattern stitches in this very first row, just single crochet all the way across. This will give us our first row of pattern color, and then in the next row, we will start our double crochets to link it to the foundation row with that white color or whatever color that you chose. I'm going to speed this up a little bit now, while I finish off the row, I will see you at the end. Now, we are at our last pattern stitch or single crochet right there. Now, you can see our last stitch and this weird little knotted stitch, we're going to just ignore that, and now this was our border stitch from the last row, you can see how much easier it is to get through both loops on this side. I'm going to go through both and a single crochet. All right, now it's time to cut our yarn. We could measure again, or since we have already cut one piece, we can just use that as a guide, go ahead and cut it to around the same length and now we will pull it through to secure all the way up, pull it tight. There we go, our very first pattern color row. Great job. 7. The Second Row: Adding Double Crochets: Welcome to Row 2. This is the very first row that we will be introducing our pattern stitch. The double crochets that we'll be making up the zigzag, start now. I think this is probably the most difficult row of the whole project, but it is okay. Take a deep breath, we will work on it together. Let's start with our fringe, let's give ourselves a nice long tail. It's always best to leave a little bit extra, and it's hard to get the beginning very precise when you are attaching it to the project. Go ahead and hold onto your yarn. Here's our border stitch from the last row we have this little loop right here, and then the V on top from our single crochet. Just like last row, we're going to go under both loops of the single crochet. There's still on the hook under both sides. Now hold onto our background color yarn and pull it through. Now we're going to just do a little chain stitch, this just secures the yarn to the project. Now we're going to go back under that same stitch and do a single crochet. The beginning border stitches always a chain stitch and single crochet into both loops. Let me go. Now let's get started with the pattern. We're going to start right off the bat with a double crochet, so there's our stitch marker. There's the first stitch that we would work into, but we're going to skip back completely, go to the row below and work into the front loop of this stitch from our foundation row. There's the front loop. We work into the back loop so that we can leave the front loop open. There's your nice row of front loops from the first row there. But your yarn over your hook go up and under. Now we're going to do just a regular double crochet. Put through two and two. Now we have this big loop right here, don't worry about that, as you work those relax and go away. Don't stress too much about this giant gaping hole that it looks like right now. Our pattern is one double crochet and five single crochet. Here's our first double, and now behind it is that single crochet from the top row. We skipped that completely. This double crochet covers it up, so we're not even going to touch that, we're going to skip over it and instead go into the next stitch. Now we want to do five single crochet, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, there is our one double crochet and five singles. Let's just count and see what we have here, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 this one turning around. There are six stitches, double is right here, that's the first one followed by five single crochets. Now it is time to do another double crochet. This is where the stitch markers are going to come in handy, so you can see the stitch marker is right here, Right above it is the front loop of the stitch that we want to go into. Right above that is this stitch that we're going to be skipping, which is the next stitch that we will come across. We will yarn over our hook, skip that topstitch, and go down to the front loop of the row below, right above our stitch marker. Go up and under, do a double crochet. Now on this row, especially, it can be hard to tell exactly if you're going into the right front loop down here so I always like to pause and count. In between the two double crochets, there should be five single crochets. This is really easy to see, it's like a little box of these front loops, there should be five, and they're are, five little front loops in between the two double crochets, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, so that's how we know we have done it correctly. There's a double crochet times do five more single crochets. You can see we have come across our next stitch marker. Will look at the stitch right above it, that's that right stitch right here, we're going to skip it. Go up and under the front loop from the row below and do a double crochet. Let's double-check. How many front loops are there? There are five in between our double crochets. There we go. Now, let's do five more singles, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. The stitch markers are really great for helping you, at least make sure you are close so that when your accounting you can be pretty sure that you've got it right 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. I'm doing great. This row looks a little weird because we haven't gotten into our so pattern yet, this is just the beginning of it. Let's double-check here. All right, go into this first stitch and single crochet. Let's do a double crochet right above this stitch marker, we have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, front loops there. Now, let's just double-check here. There's the stitch that we're skipping. If you lay the double crochet flat, straight up and down, you can easily see which is the next stitch. We'll always be skipping the one behind where the double crochet is. This is our last five single crochet and how great? Even though I've done all these counting, I still somehow counted wrong. You might find that to be the case for yourself as well. You have some choices, you can undo these last few rows and just start over, and work on your counting again, or just do what I'm going to do and [inaudible]. We're going to just continue on with the pattern, do another double crochet. This pattern is extremely forgiving. Do our border stitch right here. Because it's such a repetitive pattern, it really doesn't matter if you are few stitches off at the beginning or the end, it will just continue to zigzag all the way across. I will show you some methods for correcting mistakes at the end. There is our first pattern row. Great job. 8. The Third Row: The Pattern Emerges: In this lesson, we will be starting row 3. We're going to switch back to our pattern color. In my case, it is red again, we're always going to be alternating. Let's measure out our fringe. Remember to leave a little bit more than you think you might want at the end, and we're going to go right in to our border stitch, go under both sides of the V, secure the yarn to the back, pull it through and just do a chain stitch to lock it in. Then go back into that same stitch and do a single crochet. That is our beginning border stitch. Now we have our double crochet from the last row. We are not going to start with a double crochet in this row, we're going to start with one single crochet. Now our pattern is going to start again with one double crochet and five singles. Everything will just be shifted one stitch to the left. Let's do our double crochet. It's going to go into this very first front loop down here. Go up and under double crochet. Now just like the last row, we will do five single crochet, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Our last single crochet will fall right on top of that double crochet. Now, our next double crochet is going to go right next to our last one. That is what makes the following rows so much easier than the first one. Because we don't really need to count anymore. All of our double crochets are going to line up one after the other. If you want to look and count, you can see we still have the five front loops in between the two double crochets. Everything is just shifted one stitch further to the left. This is what gives us the zigzag pattern. Let's continue. We did our one double crochet. Now we will do our five single crochet ending on top of the double crochet from the last row, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. There's our last double crochet. We're going to go right next to it. We'll continue like that through the rest of the row. For this project, I am using the same two colors for the entire thing, just the red and white. But you might choose to use multiple colors for your pattern. You could do a read and then maybe a white, and then for your next pattern color, maybe choose a blue or whatever you decide to do. This project and this pattern looks great no matter what colors you choose. You can see our double crochet stitches are lining up. We are approaching our last section here. We have our five single crochet, and where we would put our last double crochet. We do five single crochets and then will we start over with a double. But there's no place to put that double. We ran out of our row. We're just going to finish off this border stitch. Each row. The number of single crochet in our last section is going to get smaller and smaller because the pattern is continually moving to the left. When we get to row 8, I will show you how to restart the pattern. Let's do our ending stitch here our border stitch. Single crochet, cut the yarn and now pull it through. Great job. So now we have completed two rows with our pattern color. The pattern is looking a little weird right now, but it's going to start coming together. At this point, you can safely remove your stitch markers. We will not be needing to refer to them anymore because we will just be following along with our double crochets. 9. Resetting the Pattern: Rows Four Through Eight: So far, we have done our chain stitch row, our foundation row, and then we have completed rows 1, 2, and 3. In this video, we're going to do the next five rows together: 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8. Let's get started here with row number 4. We're back to our background color. We do our border stitch. This time, we have two single crochets. Then after our previous double crochet, we follow that up with another double crochet, the first one of this row. Now we're onto our pattern, five single crochet. We're going to continue like this for the next four rows. Rows 4, 5, 6, and 7 are all going to follow along the same pattern. You will be adding one extra single crochet at the beginning until you start your pattern over with the double crochet, and then five single crochets. I'm going to speed up the video now while I do rows 4, 5, 6, and 7, and I will meet you at row 8. Here we are at row 8. If you start counting here, you can see that we have six stitches before we would start our double crochet. That is too many, we should only ever have five single crochet stitches. All we're going to do is just repeat our first pattern row down here, way back in row 3. We're going to start with a double crochet. Every sixth row, you will need to start the row with a double crochet, because there are only six digits in this pattern. Let's do our border stitch under both loops, chain, and single crochet. Just like in row 3, we're going to go into this front loop and do a double crochet. Now, you can see that there are five single crochets. 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. We are back to where we would put our double crochet. There are five single crochet stitches in-between and we're good to go. If we do not reset on every sixth row, then all of our double crochets will eventually just march off the end of the project and we'll be left with only single crochets. So we need to reset the pattern every sixth row. You are just going to continue like this, every sixth row, adding a double crochet at the beginning, and follow the pattern, and make the project as long and tall as you would like. If you want to make it a coaster or mug rag, you can make it square. If you want to make a full blanket, just continue on for as many rows as you desire. I will see you in the next video where we are going to be talking about correcting some common mistakes. 10. Correcting Mistakes: Let's talk about some different mistakes you might encounter. Let's say you are just crocheting along, having a blast, you do a double crochet. Let's count our single crochets here, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Everything seems fine, but wait, that last single crochet should have gone into a double. We missed this double crochet in the white right here. That's okay. This is really easy to fix. One nice thing about mosaic crochet is that mistakes like these are really simple. We're going to just pull some stitches out, backtrack a little bit, and get that red yarn out of the way. Now because we are doing one row at a time and cutting the yarn after every row, we can simply undo this knot and pull these stitches out. We're just going to pull them out until we get back to where the mistake happened. Gently pull and right there is where that double crochet should be. It should be connecting those two white rose. We'll just put our hook in, pick up that piece of yarn and just continue like normal. That will be a single crochet, and now we can put our double crochet following where that red double crochet is. Then we'll just finish the row like normal, and then go back and pick up our red yarn and finish that row as well. What if you are a crocheting along and you spot a mistake that is a little bit further down in your project. That's okay. We're going to do exactly the same thing that we just did. I will show you how to correct that. We are working this double crochet right now, and now I notice that something is definitely off. There should be a red double crochet, but not only that, there should be a white double crochet in the row below. I must have gotten in the flow and wasn't paying attention to what I was doing and missed a couple of double crochets in a row. Again, no problem. We will simply remove this knot and pull it back to past where the mistake happened. That's where that red double crochet needs to go, but we need to go back one more row because we're also missing this white double crochet. Let's pull that out of the way, and now we're going to pull back the white yarn, so that we can correct that mistake as well. You can do this for as many rows as you like in mosaic crochet. Just pull the yarn back to past where the mistake happened and go down as many rows as you need to. Here is where the double crochet should go, let me put my hook in here, and now I can just finish the row correctly. Single crochet and a double, and then I will finish the row normally and tie it off at the end. Now I can go back to the red row that I had to pull out, do the same thing. That is the great thing about crochet as opposed to knitting. There's only ever one stitch on your hook. If you need to pull out some stitches, you're only going to lose the stitches that you are pulling out. In knitting if you lose some stitches, you have to redo everything that is on your needle and it is a lot more difficult to correct, crotchet is very forgiving that way. Now we corrected that mistake in the red row, finish it off, and now we can continue where we were in the first place. We get to the end of the row and our project is now perfect. Great job. The next mistake is something that happens to me all the time when I'm crocheting. I think I just zone out and do not count very carefully. But let's say you do not have the correct number of stitches in a given section. In this one, there are seven stitches. After my double crochet, there are six single crochets until I will get to my next one. That is too many, we should have a double crochet and then five singles. Somewhere along the way, I put an extra stitch in there. To correct that, all I'm going to do is fudge it. I want to have five single crochets, so I'm just going to skip this stitch completely. I'm just going to pretend it's not there and go right into the next one. Now, I'll do 2, 3, 4 and here's my 5th single crochet. You can see that I am back to where I should be. Let's do my double crochet right here. Now if we go back and count, you cannot see that I skipped a stitch anywhere. There are five single crochets between the two doubles. You can't really tell if you really are searching for it, maybe. Now there is a little bit of a weird double crochet there where I messed it up on the row below. If I wanted to, I could pull out those rows and correct that or just let it go, because if you are going to really search this mistake it's going to be really hard to find. Let's say you have the opposite problem and you come to a section where there are too few stitches. In this one, there are only four single crochets, I need five. There's this stitch here behind the double crochet that normally we do not work into. It is behind the double crochet. We usually go right past that. This time I'm going to go into it. I'm going to make that my first single crochet. Now this one will be number 2, 3, 4, and 5. We just added a stitch where there was not supposed to be one to help us get back on track. Let's put that double crochet back where it's supposed to be, and go back and count. There are our five single crochets, just like we're supposed to have. You cannot tell. Everything looks the same. I do this all the time. I just fudge one way or the other. Another thing that can easily happen is running out of yarn. You're crocheting, you thought you had a piece of yarn big enough, but it is actually too short. That's okay, it is not a problem it is really easy to just add another piece of yarn onto your project. I'm going to use the same color here, but if you are switching colors, if you're using these smaller band barns, this is a great opportunity to switch to a new color. Just like you are beginning a row, you're going to leave a tail. Now you want to hold on to everything in the back. You're going to hold on to the yarn that you're working with, hold on to the piece of yarn that was too short and just do a single crochet. It's going to feel a little bit loose, but that's okay because we're going to pause now. Flip it over and here are our two tails. There's the one that we started with that was too short, and this is the one that we just added on. You can see when we tie in it, it tie-ins against the hook. We're just going to keep things nice and snug. Hold on to that piece. Now here is our new yarn, one that we just added and here's our old too-short tail. We're going to take this tail and just weave it in to secure it. Let me show you how to do that. We're going to lay it across the top of the project like this. Now when we do our single crochet, we're going to let that piece of yarn fall right on top of the hook right next to the back loop that we pull are hooking to. Now when we pull it through, we are trapping that tail in our stitch. You can see that it's going right through the middle of that stitch. This is going to secure that tail in place so that it will not go anywhere. It's laying right on top here, we're just going to crochet like normal. Our double crochets, we can skip that. Just do a normal double crochet and then for our single crochets, let it lay right next to the stitch that you're working into. When you go in, just grab that piece of yarn with the stitch and do your single crochet. It's getting twisted right in there and this will secure it so that you can easily change colors. We're going to finish off this section here. Do about maybe five or, six stitches. Here we are at our last single crochet, and now we're going to just drop that tail and let it hang in the back, it is perfectly secure now, and we can finish the row as we normally would. We had two pieces of yarn, one that we added on and one that was too short. We secured the piece of yarn that was too short originally, we just wove that into our stitches. Now, on the next row I'm going to show you how to weave in the end from the yarn that we added. We added our new yarn, we finished that row, and now we're moving on to our next row. We did our border stitch, we worked up to where we joined the yarn on the row before, and when we get a few stitches in front of it, we're going to do the same thing we did in the last row and just catch that tail in with our single crochets. Suppose, make sure it's snug but not too tight. You can wrap it around your finger, make sure there's enough of a tail to hold it in place and then you're going to continue single crocheting, while catching that tail, just like we did in the previous row. This is going to secure both ends of that join. You can see it laying on top of these stitches here. We're going to work all the way up until where we got to the join, single crochet, catching that little piece of yarn in our stitch. Now, you can see we have this stitch that is much smaller than the rest. This is our join, this is where we join the two yarns together. It's a little bit smaller because we pulled it tight, but if you can't, is definitely still a stitch. We're going to just very carefully, pull our hook in through the back loop, be a little tight. Now, we will just work a single crochet, just like normal. We have successfully joined two pieces of yarn together, and if we continue to the end of the row, you can not see where the joint happened, we have successfully weaved in our tails, we have joined our yarn, it is really difficult to see from the front. If you are really searching, maybe you can find it, but this technique is great because it is pretty much invisible. Now, let's do something with these tails on the back. We have two tails, one going in each direction. This one was in our final row, this one went into the very first row, and we can just cut these off, they will be fine, they are secure. Now, this is a project that you are planning to wash a bunch of times or you just don't feel comfortable. We can make them a little bit more secure by weaving them in. You can use one of these blunt tipped large eyed needles, and we'll just thread the yarn onto the needle, and we will go the opposite direction, just a few stitches. We're just going to put the needle under a few of these stitches, not going all the way through, just right on the top here. Pull it snug, but not tight. For extra good measure, if you really don't want it to go anywhere, you can turn it around again and go back a few more stitches. We just want to stay on the top here so it's not going to poke through to the front of your project. Now, you can safely cut the yarn, and that is it, virtually invisible. We can do the same thing, to this tail. This is the one that we wove into the red row right here, thread our needle, pull it through and cut. There we go. This is a great technique to know because it is really easy to underestimate the amount of yarn that you're going to need, especially if you were using scraps. I did this technique on this scarf and it is really hard to tell where I changed colors. I would use these little bonds until they ran out, and then I would switch colors. You can see right here that I ran out of pink and I switched to the orange, and there's this one orange double crochet in between the two rows of pink, and that is the only thing that you can see. I did this many times to this project and you have to really search to be able to find. This pattern really acts like an optical illusion, is very difficult to see mistakes. Your eye just wants to follow the colors as they go down. But sometimes you're going to have a mistake that is more difficult to correct. Right here, there should have been a white double crochet and I missed it, so you can see that the pattern looks a weird right here, it does not follow where it should go. This is too far back for me to want to undo all of the rows and do them all over again. Let me show you this really cool trick. We will start with a slipknot, just like we did in the beginning of our chain row, do a slipknot, throw a hook in, and now we're going to do one chain stitch, then one more, and that is it, a little mini chain row, just to change stitches. We'll cut the yarn, leave a nice long tail, and we will pull it through. Let's take in the knot down. Now, if you look what we have here, we have a fake double crochet stitch. This is just a knot, then we have our two Vs and another little knot. This will lay right on top of our project and act like a fake double crochet stitch. We missed it the first time around, that's okay, we will make one and just add it on at the end. Pull the tail so it's about the right size, and now we will grab our needle. We're just going to sow this stitch into place. Let's find where the bottom of that stitch would be. Right here, put our needle through and pull all the way, just so it's resting right at the bottom there. Now, we don't want it to go anywhere, so I'm going to hold it in place with my thumb, flip over to the back, and just so it doesn't move around, I'm going to do one tiny little stitch just to hold it in place. Now for the back to the front, and repeat that for the top part of the stitch. Thread the needle again. Let's go into where the top of that stitch should have been and pull it through. Take a moment to make sure it is aligned properly. Once it looks good, hold it in place. You can see that it just blends right in. This is such a great technique, I use this all the time. Hold it in place and flip it over and do another little stitch to secure it. Now we will flip the entire project over, and just like we did in the last section, we're going to weave in these tails, you can cut off the excess, and now when we flip it over, this is a great technique. You can move it around a little bit, make sure it's positioned perfectly. When you zoom out, it is basically invisible, you will have a really hard time finding this stitch again. 11. Finishing Touch: Twisted Fringe: We have finished our project, it is the size that we want and we are totally happy with it, and now we're going to work on the fringe. I will show you how to do this twisted fringe. I think this gives your project a really nice fun look, and because you are using very high contrast yarns with mosaic crochet, the twisted fringe just really makes it pop. If you don't want to do a twisted fringe, you can just cut these off to whatever length you like, and it will be just fine. So you can measure your fringe if you choose or do what I do and just eyeball it, and we're going to cut it each piece to about the same length. whatever length you decide. If your fringe as long or as short as you like. On the other side, we will straighten this out, make it about the same length. Cut them off. Very imprecisely. Great. Now, for the twist, we're going to take these first two pieces of yarn and start right here. Get this out of the way. Let's start at the very bottom, and take these first two pieces. We want to look at the direction that the yarn is twisted. You can see that this yarn already has a twist to it. In my case, if I twist it away from me, it will get tighter, and if I twist it toward me, it will get looser. We want to twist it so it is tighter. I will be twisting this piece away from me. Twist, twist, twist. You can go really forever with this. I stop before it starts getting really super curly. That should be good. Hold onto it, and we're going to pick up the other piece of yarn that we're going to pair with and twist that as well. Make it nice and tight. Now we will carefully hold onto the ends of both pieces of yarn, and now we're going to twist the opposite direction. Before I twisted away from me, now I am going to twist both pieces toward me, and this will hold them together and they will not untwist. Beautiful, I love it. Now we'll tie a little knot and secure as close to the end as we can. There we go. That's it. We are going to continue that for all of our pieces of yarn. Now, if you get to the end and like me, you discover that you have an odd number of pieces at the end. That's okay. There are a couple of things we can do. The first and easiest way to prevent this is to make sure that you are ending on the same color that you start with. Your background color should be the beginning row, and it should also be your ending row. Now, if you run out of yarn or for whatever reason you don't want to add another row on the top. No problem. We will just do the same twisted fringe with three pieces instead of two. So we will twist, twist, twist. Our first piece, the second piece, and the third. Grab all three pieces and twist them in the opposite direction. This will give you a slightly thicker strand then the other ones. But when you are wearing your gorgeous scarf, no-one will notice that one piece of fringe is slightly thicker than the other ones. Pull it tight. Perfect. It looks great. If you want to, you can cut all these little pieces off. There we go. Congratulations, you have a completed project. You've learned mosaic crochet. You've learned how to finish it with a twisted fringe, and I cannot wait to see what you have made. 12. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for joining me in this class. I hope you enjoyed learning this amazing technique. Please ask any questions that you might have in the Discussion section below, and don't forget to post your photos to the Project Gallery. I absolutely cannot wait to see your beautiful creations. Happy crocheting.