Crochet a Plant Pot Cover Using Plastic Bag or T-Shirt Yarn

1. Welcome!: My favorite thing about crochet is taking something really simple, like a piece of yarn and turning it into something really beautiful. Hi, I'm Christina and I'm a crochet designer. I love bringing colorful and quirky designs to life from a crochet. My crochet designs have appeared in magazines and books, and I share a crochet patterns, and tutorials on my blog, Tiny girl. Crochet has brought me so much joy and I made this class to pass that on to you. In this class, I'm going to teach you how to take your old t-shirts and plastic bags and turn them into yarn you can crochet with. Then we'll make this really cute plant pot cover for your plant. If you've never crochet before, don't worry, I'm going to take you step-by-step through the process of crocheting this plant pot cover from beginning to end. This project is a great way to use old t-shirts and plastic bags you have lying around your house and reuse them to make something really fun. I'll also show you how to customize your pot for different sizes and add different elements like color blocking or shaping and even making a hanging pot. I hope you'll join me and take some of the trash you have in your house and turn it into treasure. 2. Materials: To make your plant pot cover, first, you will need a plant that needs the cover. This is a four-inch variegated rubber plant and it's in its nursery pot. That works great. Then you will also need a plastic Tupperware dish or something to catch the water at the bottom of your plant pot cover. Depending on the size of your finished plant pot cover, you might need to cut your plastic lid so that it fits inside. To make your T-shirt or plastic bag yarn, you will need a T-shirt, and preferably it has as little design on it as possible. Make sure it's a color that you want your plant pot cover to be. So this plant pot cover was made with the same T-shirt. A four-inch plant pot coverage should use one t-shirt. But as you get bigger, you'll need more t-shirts. This is maybe using two T-shirts and a little strip of this color shirt as well. For your plastic bag yarn, you'll need plastic bags. Most of my plastic bags where this standard size and depending on how many balls of plastic bag yarn you hold together, you're going to need a different amount of plastic bags. The beauty of it is that you can always cut more really quickly and add it to your balls as you're crocheting. Of course you'll need your crochet hook. I'm using a 12 millimeter crochet hook to crochet the T-shirt plant pot cover and also the plastic bag, plant pot cover with three plastic bag balls held together. You will also need scissors. For the plastic bags, I used just regular household scissors and for the t-shirts, I used fabric scissors. You can also use regular scissors for the T-shirts. I found it easier with my fabric scissors, but use what you have in your house. You'll also need a tapestry needle. This needle has a larger eye so that you can pass your plastic bag or T-shirt yarn through it, and weave in the ends after you're done with your project. Finally, you'll need something to mark your stitches. I have a stitch marker. You can use a safety pen or a bobby pen just to mark what stitch is the first stitch of your round. Gather up all of your materials and let's get ready to make our T-shirt yarn in the next video. 3. Making T-Shirt Yarn: Now I'm going to teach you how to cut your t-shirt to make the most yarn possible. I'm going to use as much of the t-shirt as I possibly can to create the least amount of waste, but some parts of the t-shirt we're not going to be able to use for our yarn like the neck hole and some of the stitching around the sleeves. My t-shirt has a little design on it, but it's going to be fine because it'll roll into the yarn once we stretch it, but the less design, the better. Our first cut is going to be right below the sleeves. I've laid my t-shirt on a flat surface, smoothed out as many wrinkles as possible, made sure that it's straight. Now I'm going to make the first cut right below the sleeves. This is going to be our biggest section of yarn. I'm going to set that aside for now. I'm going to cut the sleeves right on the side of the seam. You want to get as close as possible. But we're going to have to throw that away because it's not going to be good for our yarn. Set that aside with its sleeve friend. Now for the yoke of the T-shirt, I'm going to cut the sleeve seam as close as possible and we're going to discard that. We're going to need to cut out the neck seam. I'm going to cut into it and then work around it. We're going to discard that. We have the two sleeves, the body of the shirt, and the yoke. On the sleeves and on the body of the shirt, you have this bottom seam. What I'm going to do is I'm going to cut into it and fold it over because that's going to give me about another inch of yarn. I'm going turn it inside out, I'm going to go ahead and cut into it. There we go, now I'm just going to cut as close as possible to the seam. Now you'll see we have about another inch of yarn. I'm going to include this seam in my yarn because it's pretty stretchy, so it'll be fine once we're making our yarn ball. I'm going to repeat that for the other sleeve and for the body. Now, I'm going to show you how to cut each piece and then roll it into a ball. We have our body, what you're going to do is you're going to fold one side. This is the closed side. This is my two open sides. You're going to fold one closed side over, leaving about one inch at the end. Now I'm going to take my scissors and I'm going to cut one inch strips starting on the closed side that's folded over and I'm going to stop right before I get to the end. I'm just going to keep going that way and stopping at this folded over line. Now we have our cut body, you're going to take all of the little strands, unfold them and then you're going to take your shirt and open it up with the spine up. Now we are going to make our continuous spiral to form our yarn. We take the spine and we're going to make diagonal cuts across the strips, so to start out, I have this first strip down here.You're going to cut from the bottom up to meet the left strip. I'm going to make a diagonal cut up to meet the left strip. Now I have detached that, I'm going to cut from this first section up to meet the second section and I'm going to do that again. I'm at the second section and I'm going to cut up to meet the third section. As you can see, I'm cutting one continuous piece. I'm going to continue all up the spine making diagonal cuts. Now I'm to my last cut, you just make a diagonal cut off of the shirt like that. I have one long piece of t-shirt yarn, to turn this into a ball you take the yarn or the T-shirt and you stretch it. This is where the no design shirts are much better because as you can see, it doesn't stretch as well as the pieces without a design. But it's alright, we can crochet around it. Just give it a little roll, so you just tug. I'm not pulling with all of my might because I don't want to rip the shirt. I'm just pulling enough to get this tubular shape. Now I'm just going to roll this section into a ball because it's going to be the biggest section of yarn from your shirt. Just going to roll it around my finger, just roll it up. This is my ball from the body section. Now I'm going to go ahead and cut the yoke of the shirt and the sleeves. If you're wondering why this is a different shirt, my camera turned off and did not inform me, so I wanted to replicate how to cut the top of the t-shirt with this other t-shirt that I have. We're going to take this half of our t-shirt and we're going to fold it in half with the neckline facing forward. I'm going to take my scissors and I'm going to make cuts an inch wide and stop about an inch before I reach the end because this end is the end that has the openings that we cut the sleeves off. I'm going to keep going this way and then make my last cut before the neck line. Actually, I'm going to go ahead and make one more cut where this top of the neckline is. Now I have four strips and then this is the neckline. It's opened now. I'm going to open the top of my t-shirt and we're going to make a continuous piece of yarn by cutting and not cutting the ends. I'll show you what that means. First I'm going to start on this side and cut right here. We have this one strand and it's going to go around this way, down this way, so I cut up here and it's going to go down this way so I'm going to cut the next one. It's going to go up. I'm going to cut here and it's going to go this way, so I'm going to cut one going this way. The one strand, the neckline stopped it. At this point I unfold, so you can see that I can get a couple more strands here. I'm going to cut along the back of the T-shirt like this, stopping in about an inch from the end and then it's going to go back around this way. I'm going to cut the one-inch length like that and then I'm just going to straighten the remainder. I'm going to separate my two strands, so now I have two strands of yarn and it's a little different than the body because we have these squared off pieces where when we're going to pull our yarn, one we don't want to pull too tight, too hard because it'll rip the shirt and also we have this hanging piece. What I'd like to do is I round it off and make it a little smaller so that I can roll it into the yarn. I'm just going to cut around, making the transition a little smoother like that, so I'm going to repeat that for the rest of the square pieces. Now that I've trimmed all of the corners, I'm going to go ahead and pull it just like the body. Once you get to a corner, you want to make sure that you don't pull it too hard because it will tear and then I just go ahead and roll that cut piece, the cut corner that I made as best as I can. But once you crochet, it's very forgiving and all of those little imperfections will hide in your piece. I'm going to show you how to knot the two ends together. You take the end attached to your yarn ball and that you want to attach, cross them over, then I start with the one attached to my yarn ball. I go under the strand so it looks like this. Back over the strand, like that and then bring it through the center of the loop that we just made to make a knot, so just my yarn ball strand is knotted around this other piece. Now I'm going to knot the strand that we wanted to connect to the yarn ball. I'm going to go under the strand, reposition the yarn so that you have this loop visible. I'm going to go over the strand and through the center of the loop and make a knot, so now we have two knots on our strand. But this little piece in the center, we're going to pull both knots tight together and then you're going to cut the excess from the tail pretty close to the knot. Because I've made this double knot, then it shouldn't come unraveled, it's pretty secure. Now we have the bottom of our shirt and the top rolled into this ball. This is how big it is and finally we're going to cut the sleeves. Now I'm going to take the bottom fold it over about an inch left and do the same thing we did with bottom and cut it just to this part. That's four. You're going to do the same thing that you did with the bottom of the shirt. Find the spine, and make your cuts diagonal. Starting from the bottom, I cut one strand, the second strand. Repeat that with the second sleeve. Now I have both sleeves cut and now I'm going to pull them to make the tubes and then attach them to my yarn ball and wind them. There you have it, this is the entire t-shirt rolled into a ball of yarn. Now it's ready to be used for our plant pots. 4. Making Plastic Bag Yarn: So now I'm going show you how to make plastic bag yarn. It's a similar process to the t-shirt yarn. It's a lot easier in my opinion, but you need a lot more plastic bags to get the same amount of yarn. I'm going to first start by flattening my plastic bag. You want to make sure that you fold. There's this little fold where the handle is, you want to make sure that that's folded under and flattened as much as possible. Now I'm going to cut off this fused end and the handles. Then this is something that you discard or recycle. Now I'm going to go ahead and cut off the handles and this top part that's what they used to hold them all together. Then you discard or recycle these. Now you have a big tube. You take your plastic bag and you open it up completely. Smooth it out. Now with the open ends to each side and the closed end toward you, you fold over like we did with the t-shirt yarn, leaving about an inch at the end. Now I'm going to cut strips an inch wide, stopping at the end of this side before I get fully to the end. Now we have strips and one piece that's still together, which I'm going to call the spine. You're going to take your loops and open it so that the spine is on top and the loops are all spread out, like so. Now I'm going to be cutting a continuous spiral the same way we did with our t-shirt yarn. I am going to cut vertically and connect the strips. Starting at the bottom, I cut from the bottom to after the first strip and then I continue making my cuts vertically like that. Then I'm on my last cut, so I'm going to cut diagonally off of the plastic bag. Now we have our plastic bag cut and in one continuous piece of yarn and now I'm going to roll the strand into a ball. I make it into a tube as I go with my left hand and roll around my right hand. You don't want to pull because you will stretch your plastic bag and it will tear. Now I have my plastic bag ready and if I wanted to connect it to the other bag, I would just knot them together. I'm going to do my double knot by going around and over with one strand, making a knot completely around one strand and then having this strand knot completely around this piece. Like so, pull it together and then cut your tails. Now you have two plastic bags. I'm going to wrap it around the other one. This is two plastic bags cut into yarn. 5. Holding your Yarn & Hook: Before we get started, I wanted to show you how you should hold your hook and how you should hold your yarn. I hold my hook in my dominant hand, which is my right hand, and my yarn in my left hand, which was my non-dominant hand. For such a large hook that we're going to be using for this project, I used the knife grip, and I recommend that you use the knife grip too. A knife grip is how you would hold a knife when you're cutting your food. You just grasp it with all four fingers curled around and your thumb is underneath your hook. Then this gives you a lot of control with your wrist. The other way you hold a crochet hook is called the pencil grip. A lot of people use this one when they're crocheting with a thinner hook. I always use the knife grip. I find it gives me more control, but this might be more comfortable for you. This, you mainly use your fingers to guide your hook, but with such a big hook, it's a little more difficult to control. If you're a beginner, start out trying the knife hold. To hold your yarn, you're going to want to bring it through two fingers just to give it some tension. You can hold it like this when you're crocheting, or you can just hold it like this. Your fingers are giving the tension that you need. When I'm working with thinner yarn like worsted weight yarn, which is probably the most common yarn size that you'll encounter, I need more tension, so I wrap it more around my hand. I bring it between my pinky and my ring finger, down between my middle finger and my index finger, and then I use my index finger to wrap it once around. This gives me a lot more control. The yarn passes through my fingers this way. For such a thick yarn, just doing this or this is enough tension. It'll make more sense to you as you work, but I just wanted to give you a little bit of a primer on how to hold your hook and your yarn if you've never crocheted before. 6. Making a Magic Ring: To start the base of your plant pot cover, the first thing we're going to do is make a magic ring. A magic ring is an adjustable loop that you crochet your first round of stitches into. It's great because it makes the center really as small as possible and it conserves a lot of yarn. I have my ball of t-shirt yarn and I'm using a 12 millimeter hook. To start the magic ring, I'm going to take the tail end of the yarn and drape it over my fingers, slipping about this much tail. Then I'm going to take the yarn around my fingers up and over, making an X. Then I use my hook and my dominant hand, which for me is my right hand and I insert the hook under the first strand and over the second and then, I use the hook to pull the second strand through the loop. Then I reposition the circle to face me. I have this one loop draped over my hook and going through the center of the ring. Then I reposition the yarn in my yarn holding hand, which is my left hand, my non-dominant hand and I'm going to make one chain stitch. To do this, I yarn over, which is from back to front or from right to left over the crochet hook and then I take the hook and pass that loop through the first loop that was on my hook. Now, I have one chain stitch. This doesn't count towards the first round of stitches so it doesn't add to our stitch count. It just prepares the magic ring. Now, I have my magic ring and I'm going to crochet into the center of the ring, my first round of stitches. I'm going to make six single crochet is into the center of my ring and I'm going to walk you through how to do a single crochet. 7. How to Single Crochet: To do a single crochet, you insert your hook into the center of your loop, and I have my yarn that I'm holding with my left hand, this is my yarn tail that I want to crochet over, so that I can weave that in while I'm working. Let me do that again. We're starting here with our magic ring, this is the yarn tail, this is our working yarn. I bring my yarn or I bring my hook into the center of the ring and then I yarn over from right to left over the hook and bring that loop through the center of the ring. Now, I have two loops on my hook. Then I yarn over again from right to left or from back to front over my hook and now I'm going to bring this loop through both of the loops that I had on my hook. I pass that through both and now, I'm left with one hook or one loop on my hook, and that makes one single crochet. This is the view from the top, this is the view from the front. Now, I'm going to make five more single crochets into my magic ring. I'll show you how to do it slow. Again, insert your hook into the center of the ring, yarn over, pull through your ring, yarn over again, pull through both loops on hook. That's another single crochet made. If you look from the top again, I have one, two stitches. I'm going to make four more stitches into the center of my ring. As you work, you're going to need to tighten your magic ring. To do that, you pull the tail that you've crocheted over and the ring will get smaller. We want these stitches to form a circle. I have two more single crochets is to do. Now, I've made six single crochets into my magic ring, I'm going to take the tail, pull it, making sure not to break your T-shirt yarn, especially if you're using the plastic bag yarn, you're going to want to be pretty gentle with that. This is what my first round of stitches looks like once I've tightened the ring. 8. How to Increase: Now you're going to find the first stitch that you made. Here this little bump we made as our chain stitch that didn't count towards our first round of stitches. This is our first single crochet, and you can identify it because it makes a V. This is the V. This is our first stitch and we're going to crochet into that stitch to start our second round. I'm going to do an increase in this first stitch. Round 2 is all increases. I'm going to make six increases for the second round. An increase is just two single crotches and one stitch. Instead of just doing one in each, I'm going to do two. In this stitch, I'm going to make two single crochets. I'm going to insert my hook. I go under both of the loops of the stitch as you can see. This is my yarn tail. I'm going to get that out of the way. I don't need a crochet over that anymore because I've already secured it. I just have my working yarn and my hook inside of my stitch. I'm going to make a single crochet, a yarn over from right to left, back to front, and bring that through the stitch. Now I have two loops on the hook, yarn over, bring through both loops on your hook, making a single crochet, as you can see from the top. Now I'm going to use my stitch marker, which I have here. I'm going to mark the first round of my stitches. You can use a safety pin, you can use a bobby pin and whatever you have lying around. Remember that this is the first stitch of my round. As you make increases, it becomes harder to tell what your first stitch is. I'm going to go ahead and pull the center of my magic ring a little tighter now that I've made the first stitch of my second round. Now I'm going to make another single crochet into the same stitch to increase. I just inserted into the same stitch that I just single crocheted into. Yarn over, pull through, two loops on hook, yarn over, pull through. I have two single crochets in one stitch and that makes one increase. Now I'm going to do five more increases around to finish round 2. Now I've reached the beginning of round 2 and you should have 12 stitches after you finish round 3. You can count your stitches by counting the V's or the tops of the stitches. I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. In the pattern, it tells you that you're supposed to have 12 stitches at the end of this round. I know that I did it right. My stitch marker tells me that I'm at the beginning of my round 2. I'm going to take off my stitch marker and make the first stitch of round 3. Round 3 I'm doing one single crochet and then two single crochets in the stitch. One single crochet and one increase. I do that six times around. One single crochet, one increase, single crochet, increase, single crochet increase all the way around. I'm going to start with one single crochet. Then I'm going to mark that stitch with stitch marker. Now I'm going to increase in the next stitch by making two single crochets. I have one single crochet and then an increase. I do that five more times that set. I've reached my stitch marker and this tells me I'm at the beginning of my round. This was the first stitch of round 3 and I've gone around doing one single crochet and one increase. Per the pattern I should have 18 stitches so I'm going to go ahead and count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18. I 18 stitches so I know that I made all my stitches correctly. Now I'm done with my base and I'm going to be crocheting up to make the height of my plant pot cover. 9. Crocheting in the Back Loop Only: If you look at the top of these stitches, you'll see a V. As I'm holding my yarn toward me, I can see a distinct front loop and a back loop. In the next rounds, we're going to be only crocheting in the back loop of our stitch. This makes a really pretty rim on the outside and adds a little decorative touch. It also shows less of the plant pot through the cover. I'm just going to crochet through the back loop only, and single crochet around until I reach the height that I want. I'm going to take off my stitch marker, you can continue to use your stitch marker if you'd like, but because we're just single crocheting around and around until we reach the height that we need, you can stop using it. But in the pattern, I tell you how many rounds I did. I'm going to make one single crochet in the back loop only of my next stitch. To do so, I insert my hook into the center of the stitch. Instead of going under both loops like we had been doing, we're going to go into the center of the stitch, pick up only the back loop. So only this back loop of the stitch. Now I'm going to make a single crochet just as usual. I yarn over, I pull through, I yarn over and I pull through both loops on my hook. You can see that the front loop is still outside of my pot. I'm going to keep going, and so into this stitch just to pick up the back loop, yarn over, bring back through the stitch, yarn over, both loops on hook. You can see that the ridge is already forming, I'm going to keep doing that around. I can tell that I've gone around because my ridge goes all the way around as you can see. I crochet pretty tightly. The base of my pot has bubbled out, as you can see. But because this yarn are so stretchy, you just stretch, you can just stretch your work, and form it. Stretch between each piece. I have my yarn tail still here so I can even tighten the center of my loop. That did cool things. I completely eliminated that little bubble by just stretching my yarn. When you're crocheting with plastic bag yarn, you're going to have less of a bubble because it's less stretchy. I don't crochet as tightly because I can't pull and wrap it tightly around my hook. There we go. As you can see, the base has formed really nicely because of our back loop only round. Now I'm going to just continue to crochet upward to get the height that I want for my pot cover. I'm just going to keep going around in the back loop only. I've gone 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 rounds up in the back loop only, so you can see the loops on the outside as opposed to the bottom, that's what it looks like when you crochet through both loops of the stitch. 10. Fastening off & Weaving in Ends: So now I'm gonna show you how to fasten off your pot cover and we've in your ends. So you take your hook and you've just made your last stitch. You're going, Teoh, Continue going through just the back loop, insert your hook into the sketch like usual yarn over and pull through. But instead of making a single crush, I I'm gonna make a slip stitch. So that is just bringing this the loop that you just brought through through the loop on your hook. So you're not gonna yarn over again? You just yarn over once. So now I've made a slip stitch and I'm going to fasten it off with a not by yearning over pulling through the loop again, just like a slip stitch. But I'm gonna cut the end of it. So yarn over, pull it through, and then I'm gonna cut this end with my scissors. You can see that I haven't. Not that I made to join my yarn. That's fine. It might be a little trickier to weave in, but it's not a problem. So this is what you're pot looks like when you finished it off and I'm gonna go ahead And we've in this tale the tail that you have from the beginning of your yarn from your magic ring. I'm just gonna cut that close, but not too close because it's gonna be hidden inside the pot. So I just cut it like that cause I've already crow shade over it when I made my first round , so it's pretty secure. If you don't feel like there's a secure, you can go ahead and leave yours in. So I have my tapestry needle Tapestry needle is a dull ended needle with a wide I so that I can fit my T shirt yarn through it like so. And now I'm gonna go inside of my pot, too. I'm actually going to turn it inside out. It's gonna be easier to see. So that's a look, too, if you want to have that be the outside of your body. So I'm gonna take my threaded needle and weave it through a few of the stitches on the inside. So I just find stitches that I could go under like that and pull it through. I'm going to do that a few more times. Gonna go this way through the stitches So here the legs of messages may be better to do it , you know, one at a time. Because I have that. Not that I have to account for a minute stretch than not through my stitches one by one. If you don't have a, not where I did. And you're gonna be in a better place, but working with what I got, just do it a couple times so that your your intel is secure and I'm gonna just cut it right after that. Not because the knots kind of kind of help me keep it in. But if you didn't have a not then you could just cut it close and it'll kind of retract back into the stitch. And again, if you need to stretch your your pot, Teoh, make it more even. Make it fit the plant better. Then go ahead and do that. Now, there you go. Your plant is ready to go into your pot and be beautiful. 11. Making a Hanging Planter: We've just finished the base of my plant pot cover, and I'm making one for four-inch nursery pot, and I'm using three strands of plastic bag yarn. I have my three balls, and my three strands that I'm using to crochet, to get the bulkier texture. Now I'm going to show you how to turn this plant cover into a hanging planter. I haven't fastened off, I've just stopped working when it's at the height that I need it to be. In the next stitch, instead of going just through the back loop as we have been to create this texture, I'm going to go through both loops of the stitch to make it sturdier for my hanging basket. I'm going to insert my hook, and go through both loops on the stitch. Now, I have the three loops on my hook and I'm going to go ahead and yarn over. I have all three strands as one and pull it out through the stitch. Now, I'm going to make a slip stitch which I showed you when fastening off. I'm just going to bring that loop that I just brought through the stitch and bring it through the last loop on my hook. Now I have a slip stitch here, we're going to chain up to the length that we need. I'm going to go ahead and do 10 chains up. A chain is similar to a slip stitch, except you're not going through a stitch. You're just taking the loop that you have on your hook and you yarn over, and bring it through the loop on your hook. There is one chain. Show you again, yarn over bring through the loop on my hook. You want to make sure that you're having a consistent tension so that your chains are all uniform. I'm going to go ahead and make eight more chains. I recommend chaining a little bit looser so that they're bigger and they're not as tight. They look better, they look more like a braid. Now, I have a chain of 10. We're going to make three different chains from our hanging basket and they're going to meet at one point and then continue in one strand up. This is about the length that I want before I join my three. I'm going to go ahead and fasten off just making another chain, pulling it out a little bit like this, and cutting the center of the loop. Pulling it out and tightening the knot. Here I have one strand. I'm going to make three chains up to meet at the center and then one continuing. Every sixth stitch, I'm going to put my chain. Here's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. These are the two spots that I'm going to make another chain. I'm going to start by making a slipknot and then putting it on my hook. To make a slipknot, you drape the yarn tails over hand, similar to how we started our magic ring. Loop it over, the same as we did our magic ring, so around our fingers and over. Insert your hook under the first strand and over the second. Pulling up our loop, and instead of crocheting a chain and going into magic ring, you just pull it tight, and this makes a slipknot on your hook. Now, I'm going to insert my hook into the 6th stitch from the last chain. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and I insert under both stitches. Now, my yarn needs to be on the other side of my hook, so you just rotate like that. Now I'm going to make a slip stitch by yarning over, and you want to control where the knot is because it wants to go back that way, but it has to be a yarn over. You yarn over, bring through your stitch, and then bring through the slipknot that was on our hook. Now, we have our slipknot, and now I'm going to chain 10 just like we did with the last strand. Give myself a little more room and chain 10. I have my chain 10. I'm going to fasten off again by yarning over, pulling through the loop, leaving a little room and cut an end. As you can see now, we have two chain ropes going up and we have this tail. We're going to weave those in after we're done. Just hide that for now. We're going to make our last chain counting six stitches from the last time we made. I'm going to repeat the process I did with the last chain. Now, that I have my last chain done, I still have the tails at the end. I'm going to move my plastic bag balls to my right side so that I can work on connecting the three ropes that I've made. I'm going to make sure that they're straight and not twisted or curved or anything. I have my strands straight, and now I haven't fastened off this third chain. I'm going to take my hook and connect all three of them with my hook and then continue one chain up. I'm going to take my next one and I'm going to insert my hook through the top of the chain like that. I'm going to grab my third one and insert through the back of the chain, and if you see the way that I've inserted through the chain, it keeps the ropes as straight as they can be. I move my balls of yarn back to the left. I have my loop on my hook, then I have one chain, and then the last chain on my hook. I'm going to take my yarn that's connected to my third chain, I'm going to yarn over, and I'm going to bring through all three loops. I have the two chains and then the last loop on my hook. Here's through one chain, the other chain, and the last loop. I've connected all three chains with that one loop, and now I'm going to make one chain up. I'm going to continue my chain. Now that I have attached all three chains together, I'm going to keep changing to get the length of hanging basket that I'd like. You just yarn over, pull through your loop on your hook, and then just continue as many chains as you need. Now I've reached the length that I want. I'm going to make a loop at the top of my chain for it to hang on. I'm going to continue chaining. I'm going to make five chains, say, and now it's going to be my loop. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and now you're going to slip stitch into the fifth chain from your hook. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. To slip stitch into your chain you just take your hook, insert it into the chain, yarn over, pull through, and pull through the loops on your hook. Now I've made a little loop that my hanging planter can hang from. I'm going to fasten off by yarning over, bringing through the loop on your hook, pulling, and cutting. Then tighten that slip stitch that you just made. Now you have a little loop that you can hang your hanging planter from. Now that I finished my planter I need to weave in all of the tails that are left. I have my tapestry needle and I'm just going to go ahead and weave in the ends like we did for the base plant pot cover. I'll just go ahead and show you how to do one on the plastic yarn. I make the plastic yarn as thin as possible to thread it through my eye, the eye of my needle, and then working on the inside, I'm going to tighten that slipknot a little. I insert same way to hide my knot. Then working on the inside of my planter I just thread my needle through some stitches. I'm not too worried about it unraveling because of that slipknot, it is secure. I'm just hiding as much of the tail as possible for a cleaner look. I've just weaved it through maybe four stitches on the inside. I'm going to cut pretty close without cutting my stitch, of course, and then you just pull and the tail will retract into the stitches. I'm going to go ahead and repeat that for all of the tail. When you get to this juncture of the three chains meeting together, it can be really tough to hide your tail in the chain. What I'm going to do is I'm going to make a pom pom to hide these knots. But if you don't want to have a pom pom then I would just tie these together like that. Just do a couple of knots to secure it and then cut as close as possible to the knot. I just did a couple. Make sure you're not going to pull your plastic too hard or else it'll rip. That's about as hidden as I'd get without my pom pom to cover it. For our top loop, the same thing. I don't want to really weave in this tail, so I'm just going to cut it close to the knot. This knot is not holding our loop together. We have the chains that are supporting it, so the integrity is not going to be challenged by the this knot. 12. Making a Pom Pom: I'm going to show you how to make a pom pom with your plastic bag here. I have three strands and I'm going to start with the tail draped over my fingers, like so. I'm going to wrap around making sure that I'm going really loose because I don't want it to be too tight. The size of your wraps is how big your pom pom is going to be.I'm just going to do ten. Now I just cut the end and I'm going to slide the wraps off of my finger, but keeping the wraps intact and pinch in the middle. I'm going to tie the center of my wraps with plastic bag yarn. I'm just going to take my yarn that's still attached to the balls and place it under and over. I want about eight inches of tail on each side so I'll go ahead and cut this end now. Now I have controlled the center of my pom pom and kept it pinched the entire time. I'm going to wrap this yarn tail around and tie a knot in the center of my loops. Like so. I'm going to do another knot in the center. Make sure you're not pulling too hard. It can rip that plastic. I have a double knot in the center of my loops. I'm going to keep these long for attaching. I'm going to cut the center of the loops on each side. I have my scissors. It can be tricky to find all of the center of the loops, but I'm going to use my finger to just funnel through and try to collect all of the loops that I've made. Now I think I've got most of them. Watch your fingers. Cut the top of the loops like that. Then you can just see if you've missed any. Cut them. I'm going to repeat that on the other side. I think I have all of them. I'm going to gather the two yarn tails of my knot. You don't want to cut those. We use them as a handle for trimming my pom pom. You just fluff it up. Now I'm going to trim it to make it more spherical. Just give it a little haircut. I'm happy with that. You can make it smaller by just continuing to cut it. There we have our pom pom. I'm going to attach it to my hanging planter right in the center there. You can either just tie it and then trim it or I'm going to insert it through the center. You can pull it through with your hook or you can pull it through with your needle. Just get it through. Just pulling one side of the tail. Now it's a little bit more sturdy in there. Now I'm just going to double knot it and cut the ends. Now it's just double knotted and I'm going to cut it at the same height or length of the pom pom. The tail acts as a extension of the pom pom at the back. Like so. That's the back and that's the front. 13. More Customizing Ideas: I've showed you how to crochet a plant pot cover for a four inch nursery pot. But if you have larger pots like six inch, eight inch or whatever size nursery pot you have, you can customize the size of your plant pot cover by changing the amount of increases you have on the bottom. In the how to crochet video, I showed you how to make increases to expand the circle of the bottom of your plant pot cover. Then I taught you how to just crochet up. If you add more increases to the bottom of your plant pot, it'll expand and let you fit a larger plant pot into it. We only did two rosy increases where we increased in every stitch around and then we increased every other stitch. If you wanted to make the base bigger, you would just increase by one single crochet between the increases every round. If we wanted to make this bigger to fit a six inch path like this, you would continue increasing and do two single crochets, one increase, two single crochets one increase all the way around. That would make the base bigger. Then you could just follow the pattern as usual and crochet up. Just remember the bigger your pot is, the more shirts or plastic bags you'll need. Depending on the size of your pot, you can just keep adding rounds to make it taller. I'm fitting this really tall pot into this plant pot. I've decided to use multiple colors to give it a color blocking look. To change colors, you can either fasten off your yarn and start crocheting with your new color, or you can change the color by doing the last yarn over of your single crochet with the new color and then just keep working as usual. Using brown plastic bags, creates this really fun, almost rougher looking result. Here I've used brown plastic bags and then given it a white trim with white plastic bags. If you're lucky and you live somewhere where you're grocery stores or other places, give fun colored plastic bags, then that's going to be really fun. You can make stripes, all different color combinations. If you want to have fun with some different shaping. For this plant pot cover, I have a six inch money tree. I've made a larger plant pot cover, but then I'm put in this tupperware lid that's larger. It gives it this really fun funnel shape. Is the same exact pattern as I used for this plant pot. But I'm using it for a smaller plant. I'm getting some shape from the plastic tray that I insert into it. It gives it this vase shape that I really love. I hope this video has given you some fun ideas for customizing your plant pot covers, and I can't wait to see what you make. 14. Yay! We did it!: We've reached the end. I hope that you enjoyed this class and that you have a beautiful plant pot cover to add to your home and bring you a little spark of happiness whenever you see it. Now that you have some crochet techniques in your tool belt, you can make so many more projects just from the stitches I've taught you. You can make scarves, bags, accessories, and even crochet dolls. If you're looking for more patterns, you can visit my website. I have some fun free patterns that you could try. Thank you so much for watching and I can't wait to see your plant pot cover, so please post it in the projects page.