Transcripts
1. Introduction and Welcome!: Hey, I'm Kara. I'm super excited to show you how to crochet. Crochet is the art of making things with a hook. All crochet patterns, whether it's for a sweater, or a blanket, or a toy, they're all made by making loops with a hook. If you can make a loop, you can crochet. In this course, we'll be making three basic dishcloths, each one focusing on a different stitch that together form the foundation for all of crochet. You'll learn how to single crochet, half double crochet, double crochet, and I'll show you how to make a slipknot and a chain. My goal isn't just to teach you the basic stitches or how to read a pattern, but to really help you understand the basics of how crochet is constructed so you'll be able to tackle any other project with competence. Along the way, you'll also learn how to read a yarn label, so you know what you're looking at when you're out shopping for yarn, as well as how to read both written and charted crochet pattern. That way, you'll be able to keep this adventure going long after you've make dishcloths for everyone you know. Included in the course materials, you'll find a supply list with links to everything you need, a copy of all three patterns, and as a bonus, I'm excited to be including a couple of different labels, so when you're finished, you'll be able to gift and share your handmade treasures in style. Crochet is a great hobby. You can take it with you anywhere, it doesn't require batteries or power, and it's a great stress reliever too. Grab your favorite beverage, settle in, and let's get ready to hook it up.
2. Supplies: All right. For this class, you will need a few different supplies. They're pretty inexpensive and you can pick them up at most any craft store or even Walmart. The first thing you're going to need is a crochet hook. For this course, we'll be using a G hook, that's a four-millimeter hook. You should probably be able to find that stamped on the hooks somewhere or certainly on the label at the store. Crochet hooks come in all different sizes. Some of them are really thin, some of them are really big and thick. That's what the millimeter measurement is referring to, it's how big of a hook it is. You'll also find that they come in all different materials, some are plastic, some are aluminum, some are bamboo, some are a mix of both. There's no right or wrong. It's just whatever works for you, whatever fits your budget, and is accessible when you need it. The next thing you're going to need is yarn. For this class, we'll be using worsted weight cotton yarn, and we'll talk about how you figure out what's what in a minute. I'm going to be using three different colors, one ball each. But if you want to, if you just want to use one color, then I would just get two balls in that same color, just to make sure you have enough. This is lilies, sugar, and cream, you can get this at Joanne's or Michael's or something called Peaches and Cream, from Walmart, it's a couple bucks for each one of these balls. You should be able to make multiple dish cloths from each ball. If you get three different colors, you should be able to make quite a number of dish cloths with it. How do you tell when you're shopping for yarn, how do you tell what you're looking at? Well, the first thing to know is that yarn comes in different weights. So some yarn is really really thin. It's called a fingering weight yarn, it might be like what you make socks out of or sometimes jewelry. Then from there it goes up to a sport weight yarn, a DK or light worsted yarn, sometimes it's called worsted weight, bulky, super bulky, and it just keeps going up from there. The way that you know what you are looking at is you check the yarn label. On the back of the label where you see all these stuff, what you're looking for is this number right here. So a four refers to worsted weight. The bigger this number, the bulkier the yarn is, and the smaller the number, the finer it is. You can see here the difference between a worsted weight and, I don't even know what this was called. A super bulky, I guess? Super bulky, huge. Obviously you can feel and see the difference. But sometimes you can't. Sometimes they look really similar and you're not sure, are these both worsted? Is one worsted or is one maybe a light worsted? When in doubt, just check the label. The other thing you want to know is what is the fiber of your yarn? Yarn comes in all different fibers, it can be acrylic, bamboo, linen, wool, or some blend of all of that, or a cotton. This right here tells us on the label again. It tells us that this yarn is 100 percent acrylic. This would be good for like scarves or hats or a blanket, something cozy, but it is going to be a terrible choice for a dish cloth. You want to make sure that the yarn that you get is labeled as being cotton or 100 percent cotton. The other thing that you can take into consideration when shopping for your yarn is the style of yarn. Some yarns are solid, solid colors like this, some yarns are variated. Here's a couple other examples of yarns that are multiple colors. That can add a different look to what you're looking at. Some yarns are self-striping, some of them come in this flat format. This is called a yarn cake. These are self-striping yarns. You can just put it on your hook and start stitching away and it will automatically change colors and make stripes. That can be fun. Some other things you're going to need are scissors. They can really be any pair of scissors. Then some things that are not required but are nice to have, one is a yarn needle. That just means it's a duller-tipped needle that has a really big eye, so that you can thread yarn through it. You can find these in plastic and/or metal. These are just more durable and ultimately over the years I've switched to these. But they're all pretty inexpensive. If you don't have one, I'll show you how to do the same thing, how to accomplish the same thing with a hook. This is just used to weave our ends of our finished dish cloth to weave them in and out of our project, to basically tuck them in and hide them. We can do it with a hook too. I'll show you that. The other thing that's nice to have is a stitch marker. You use these when you need to put your project away for a little bit and come back to it. These help keep it from unraveling and sometimes you'll use it to mark different stitches for different things. But if you don't have these, you can also use a bobby pin or a paperclip, a lot of different options. I'll show you how we use this to. The other thing that I like to have, which isn't so necessary for this project, but this is a row counter. I can use it to count my rows on more complicated projects where you might forget where you are in a pattern. I have mine tied around this string here to just keep around my neck when I'm working because it ends up lost in the sofa quite a bit, so that is my little tip for you. The other thing you're going to want is your pattern. Crochet patterns literally tell you stitch by stitch what to do. They can be expressed in a chart, like this, which is basically a picture of all the stitches and how they fit together, or they can be written out with instructions like this. I'm going to walk you through all of this so you can understand what we're working with. Just make sure you download the patterns and if you want to, you can print them out or you can just look at them on your phone or tablet or laptop, or something like that. But to get started, we really just need three things. Grab your yarn, get your hook, and a pair of scissors, and let's get started.
3. Construction Plan: Unlike a hat that is worked in a circular construction, are dish cloth is going to be worked in what we call rows. So we're just kind of like a typewriter, we just go back and forth and as we go, we make our stitches. So all of these dish cloths are made focusing on a different basic stitch and all of the dish cloth start out with several rows of that basic stitch and then I'm going to teach you a fancy version to just add a little interesting motif to your dish cloth. So if you want to join me and pick up the fancy version, it's really easy, I promise. I'll walk you through it. You can if you prefer to just keep doing the basic stitch, you can do that too. If you are a visual person, let me show you how it works with our chart here. So this is the pattern will be using, it's both a chart and a written out explanation. So the way that it works is we're going to start in this corner by doing what's called a chain stitch. So we're going to make 30 chain stitches. So each one of these little marks represents a stitch and we can see that these little circle marks represent the change stitch and these little plus marks represent single crotchets. So we'll do 30s chain stitches will chain up one to bring us to the next row and then we'll single crochet across chain up one to bring us up row, single crochet across chain up, go across, chain up, go across, et cetera. So that's how it works. When we get to the fancy part, I'll show you what we do, it just means making some more chains. So we just repeat that over and over again and we'll make our way through our dish cloth. We can see down here that our dish cloth measures 24 rows tall. So it's 24 rows tall and even though we chain 30 stitches at the beginning, we end up having only 29 stitches in each row and you'll see why when we get there, but 24 rows tall and 29 stitches across.
4. How to Hold Your Yarn: All right. For those of you who are totally new to this, let's talk about the super basics like how do you even hold your hook and your yarn? Well, if you are right-handed, you're going to hold your hook in your right hand, and you're going to take your yarn and put the ball somewhere off to the left. You'll have the working yarn in your left hand and the hook in your right. If you're left-handed, you're going to do the complete opposite of this and you'll work this way. If you're left-handed, whatever you see me doing, you just mirror it the complete opposite. How do you actually hold the yarn? There's no right or wrong way. Ultimately, it's whatever is comfortable for you and allows you to manipulate the yarn the way you need to. Personally, what I end up doing is I have my yarn going over here to the left, so I'm holding the end in my right hand. What I like to do is scoop my index finger and my middle finger under the yarn like that, and then I'm going to lift my index finger and rotate my hand like that. It's a swoop move. Let me do it again. My index finger and my middle finger swoop under the yarn, and then I rotate my hand and also lift my index finger. I'm putting tension on the yarn really in two places, between where I'm holding it here, between my middle finger and my thumb, and then I can control some of the tension by moving my index finger. But then I also have it pinched here between my ring finger and my middle finger. That's how I'm controlling the tension. You want to be able to, as you pull the working end of your yarn, you want to be able to manage that tension with your fingers. It takes practice. Everyone does it a little bit differently. Another thing that some people do is they like to have it over there pinkie as well, that just gives you an extra place. Sometimes if your yarn is really slippery for some reason, sometimes I do that. Or sometimes my hands are just slippery. I don't know. Then I do add my pinkie there. But most of the time, I'm just using my index finger and my middle finger to swoop under the yarn and then lift my index finger up while I rotate my hand around. It's a swoop, rotate. Just remember that it takes practice and don't give up.
5. Making a Slip Knot: The very first thing that we do when we are working with rows as opposed to working in around like on a hat, when we work in rows, the very first thing that we do is we put a slip knot on our hook. We need to tie a slip knot in our yarn and then we'll slip our hook into that, and then we'll be ready to go. How do we tie a slipknot? You want to hold your yarn in your non-dominant hand, so for me I put my yarn in my left hand, if you're left-handed, put it in your right and move your ball too. Hold your yarn like this. Just slide it over your hand, grab onto it, and then what you're going to do is wrap it around your index finger twice and then hold it right here. I've got it wrapped over once, wrapped over twice, and then I'm holding it. Then I'm going to take this back loop, pull it across and over the other loop, set it down, then pick up what is now the back loop and pull it up over and off. You see that? Then when you pull, you can slide your finger out and you're left with a loop. This loop is where we put our hook, and then you can pull the tail end of the yarn, pull it to tighten up that loop. We'll do it one more time. If you make a mistake, just pull your hook out and then you can pull the yarn and the knot will disappear. Again, holding the tail in my hand like this, I'm going to close my hand around it, bring it around my finger twice, and then hold it down here. Take the back loop, pull it over the front, take what's now the back loop, pull it over and off, and then tighten up the yarn until you're left with a loop that you can slide your hook in. Then you want to position your hands. I show you how to hold the yarn, you want to be holding the yarn and holding your work right here, basically holding on to the not on your hook and then we're ready to start our chains.
6. Creating a Starting Chain: In this video, I'm going to show you how to make what's called our starting chain. If we look at our chart of our pattern, the starting chain is this series of little chain stitches right here. The instructions tell us to chain 30. That's what we're going to do. Then after we chain 30, in the next video, I'll show you how we'll make the first row by stitching into these chains stitches. You can think of it like a foundation for a house. We're about to make the foundation. Then in the next video, we will start stitching into that foundation or building on that foundation. A chain looks like this. It's just a series of chain stitches. Once you have them made, if you make a mistake, you can always pull them out by just taking your hook out and pulling out the yarn. You should already have that slip knot. You want your hook in the slipknot, and you want to be holding your yarn in whatever way you decide works for you. Then you're holding your work. The hook or assuming the knot, you're holding it in your hand. All right, so to do a chain, all you do is you do what's called a yarn over. You put the yarn over your hook, so you can grab it, and you pull it through. That's one chain. Let's do it again. Yarn over, pull through. There's two chains, yarn over, pull through, three chains. Yarn over, pull through, four chains. Before we keep going, let's talk about what we have here. You can see as we do that, that we're making these little loops. They look like lips a little bit. If we look down on them, each one that we've made is a lip. If you ever get confused and you're like, "Oh, I lost count, I don't know how many I made." Here's how you figure it out. This loop that goes on your hook doesn't count. When you're counting, don't count that loop. I'm going to pull it a little bigger for a minute to just get out of the way here. I'll pull my hook out and you can count each pair of lips is one chain. We see a pair here. We have a top lip and a bottom lip. That's one chain. Here's another pair, a top lip and a bottom lip. That's the second chain. Third limp or top lip here, bottom lip here. That's three. Then our very first one, top lip, bottom lip is four, and here's our slip knot. It's easy to lose count when you're chaining, especially if your kids or partner, somebody's talking to you and asking you questions. But you can always count when you're done. It's a good idea when you finish to just double-check yourself by counting it before you move on. I've already done for, so we're going to put the hook back in and keep going till we get to 30. Here I am at 30, I just want to point out. Because when you're new to this, the whole tension thing is tricky to get a grip on literally. If things get loose for you and you end up with a big loop like this on your hook, just tighten it up by pulling the working side of your yarn. I can either pull this way or it can pulling that. These are adjustable, so you want things snug but not so tight that you can't work, and not so loose that your piece is just full of holes and falling apart. Just know that good tension will come with practice and that's why we're here. If your first few dishcloth, don't look fabulous, that's okay. They will get better the more that you do this. Now that we've got our 30 chains, we are ready in the next video to start on row 1.
7. Dishcloth 1: Row 1: Let's check in with our chart here so you can see what we're doing. We just finished the chain 30. Now, you might remember in the earlier video I said that we're chaining 30, but we only end up with 29 stitches across. How can that be? Well, every time we move up a row, we need to use a chain stitch to level up essentially. We started with 30 chains, and we can see our 29th one is right here. This one on the side here becomes the 30th chain. That 30th chain becomes our turning chain or our level up chain. A turning chain is what allows us to level up, to move up to the next row and start that next row. We chained 30, the 29th one is the last foundation brick found in this whole row of bricks. The 29th chain becomes really the last one, and that's 30th chain becomes that level up chain, called a turning chain and that will make sense after we finish row one. When you do single crochet and your working in the row like this, you always chain one extra, then the number of switches that you want. We want 29th stitches and that 30th chain becomes the turning chain. That means that we're ready to start stitching into our foundation chain. Because this 30th chain, which is the one, the top chain right below here, that 30th of chain becomes the turning chain. That means we skip it when we start our row, so we don't stitch into that very first chain. We're going to stitch into the second chain on our hook. Skipping that first one, that means that the next pair of lips is our second chain. Now, when we put our hook in, where do we put it? We're putting it under that top lip for right now. When we're stitching into a chain, which is only what happens during this first row the other rows will be different, but because this is our first row, we're stitching into chains. We'll skip the first chain, we'll go to that second chain and our hook goes under that upper lip. We've gone under the upper lip, We're going to yarn over and pull up a loop. This is called a single crochet. We're making a single crochet here. We've got two loops on our hook now, so to finish the single crochet or going to yarn over again and pull that loop through the two loops on our hook. That is a single crochet. Let's do it again. We'll single crochet now in the next chain so we can see if we look down here, this upper lip is hooked, like a fish, that's the stitch we just made, so that stitch is used. The next stitch, the next upper lip waiting for us is right here. We'll stick our hook in, yarn over, pull up a loop, we have two on our hook, yarn over, pull through two. That's our second single crochet. Let's do one more and then we'll talk about what we're looking at here. Let's stick our hook under the next available upper lip, yarn over, pull up a loop, we have two on our hook yarn over, pull through two. Now we've done three and if we forget, we can count our stitches by looking at the top of our work. If we rotate it towards us like this, we see lips again, pairs of lips, or sometimes people call them V's it's helps me to think of them like lips. We have our working loop that goes on our hook so that doesn't count. We just pull that out of the way and then at the very base of that we see 1,2,3, pairs of lips. We know we've done three stitches. I'll put my hook in, tighten this back down, and just keep going. Insert the hook under that top lip of the next stitch yarn over, pull through, yarn over, pull through two. Insert our hook in the next loop, yarn over, pulls up a loop, yarn over, pull through two, and you just repeat that process all the way across until you get to the end. If along the way you make a mistake, one of the things that can happen is you drop a stitch or your hook falls out, maybe. That's okay, you can just stick it back in the loop and keep going, or if you pull out a stitch by accident, let's say your hook flips out and then you you pull and you are unraveling a stitch, that's okay too, then just finish unraveling it until you get back to this scene right here, where you have a completed stitch and the next stitch waiting for you. You should have a loop right here waiting for your hook. Again, if you drop a stitch, you just don't want it to be like halfway pulled out. When that happens, just pull the yarn until you get back to somewhere where you have a finished stitch and a loop right here waiting for your hook, and you can just slide it back in and give it another go. Work your way across upper lip by upper lip, there is no race, you can take your time and, I will meet you right before we do the last stitch of this row. I've stitched my way across, and if I look here at my work, I have one more pair of lips just waiting for me. That is the last ditch of this row, so I'm going to put my hook in there, yarn over and pull up a loop, yarn over and then pull through two. That's it. We've just completed row 1.
8. Sidebar: How to Put Your Work Down: Just so you know, at any time if you need to put your work down because life calls and you've got to come back to it later, there's a couple different options. You can, one, just pull your loop really long, and you can slide your hook out, and that gives you some wiggle room. You can also stick one of these stitch markers, it's basically a safety pin. You just stick it through the loop that was on your hook, and then when you pull it snug, this just keeps the loop from sliding through. If you don't have one of these stitch markers, you can stick a safety pin in there. Sometimes, I use just a bobby pin. Basically, you just need to snug this loop that was on your hook. You just need to snug it or pull it really long, so that it doesn't run the risk of pulling out. That's it, then your work will be waiting for you. When you come back, you just take your bobby pin or your safety pin or your stitch marker out, stick your hook back in, tighten it down and you're ready to keep going.
9. Dishcloth 1: Rows 2-4: Now we're ready to make rows two through four, so each of these rows is just going to be done the same way. Here was our last stitch in the previous row. Now remember that to, we look at our pattern here, so we've started with our chain, we worked all the way over here. Our last chain, that 30th one became the turning chain, and then we single crochet it across. We are over here now. You can see in our pattern, both in the picture and down here, it tells us that the next thing we need to do is chain one. Remember that when we level up to the next row, we do that chain to just bring the yarn up and then we can single crochet across again. That means that will chain up. Just like we did when we made our foundation chain, we yarn over and pull through, that makes a chain, and then we actually flip our work around. We're going to turn it. Instead, we just came from over here and we worked across, so now we're going to flip our work around so we're ready to go across this way now. Here's our chain one on our hook, so now, instead of looking and going underneath just that upper lip, that's what we did when we were working into the chain stitches of our foundation down here. But now we're up and running and we are just making our regular rows. That first row is done, so now we put our hook under both lips. Here's our chain one, we skip that. What we're looking for is the first pair of lips and when we look from the top, we see these smiling mouths looking at us. Find the first one, not that chain, the very first pair of lips right after that chain. Put your hook in there and then yarn over, pull up, yarn over, pull through two, and that's it. Again, now we're putting our hook under both lips, under the top and bottom. From the side facing you, you slide under those lips, yarn over, pull up a loop, yarn over, pull through two and that's how it's going to be most of the time. When we look at our work here, we're now working into a row of single crochet. In that first row that we did, we were working into our chain stitches, so that's why there's a difference. But now we're working into regular single crochet stitches, so that's why we go under both loops. Yarn over, pull through, yarn over, pull up a loop, yarn over, pull through. Grab your coffee and work your way through row two and I'll see you here at the end of raw two, and I'll show you what's next. I'm coming to the end of the row and I'm looking for that last set of lips right here, I can see it. I'm going to put my hook under both those lips, sometimes the last one is tricky to get into with your hook. Don't worry, that's okay. Yarn over, pull up a loop, yarn over, pull through. That is the last single crochet of that row. If we get confused or we are going to just double-check our work, you can count your stitches across by just counting each pair of lips. Every stitch makes a pair of lips. I can count across one, two, three, four, five all the way across and I should have 29 stitches. You can check your work if you want to, but also know that it's okay if your crochet is not perfect, it will still do the job. That was row two. You're going to continue making rows three and four the same way. At the beginning of every row, or I guess at the end before you can start the next row, you're going to do the chain one, so we can level up to the next row and then we flip our work over, it's called turning your work. Then we're ready to go by single crocheting into that very first stitch. If we look at it from the side here, we can see that the stitches made of the two lips at the top and from the side we can see the opening that are right there waiting for us. You'll just continue going across. We chain one and then we single crochet across. You want to do that until you finish the fourth row. Then if you want to join me in getting fancy, I will show you how to do that. I'll see you at the end of row four.
10. Dishcloth 1: Row 5 to End: You should at this point have completed the first four rows. Now, if you get confused about how many you've done and you don't have a row counter, you can just count them by looking at your work and counting up. It can be hard to see when you're new to this. But this very down here, this is our starting team and then we have our first row, our second row, third row, and our fourth row. Ready for row 5, we're going to get a little fancy here just because I wanted you to understand how variations and stitching can change your project. We're not going to do anything we haven't already learned. You've learned the slip knot, you've learned the chain stitch, and you've learned the single crochet stitch. We are going to just keep doing those things, but we're just going to change where we put them. That's going to create this open pattern, this open work area. Let's start row 5, remember that like always we chain 1, so we can turn our work and we'll do a single crochet, just like we've been doing just one single crochet in that first stitch. That first pair of loops, we have our chain one here, and then we have our first entry here. I'm going to go in there and do my single crochet yarn over, pull up a loop, yarn over, pull through two and now is where we get fancy. Instead of continuing to single crochet across, we are going to chain 3 and then skip 3. What does that mean? Let's look at our pattern here. We are up here now, we're about to start this. As you can see here in our chart, we chain 3 and we'll skip three stitches down here. We'll single crochet 1 and then we'll repeat that all the way across. We can see that down here for row 5, the pattern tells us Ch 1, that means chain 1, turn, single crochet 1. Then we have an asterisk. Whenever there's an asterisk, that's telling us a section that we're going to repeat. Whatever is enclosed in the asterisk, that's what we repeat. We see that the repetition will be chain 3, skip 3, single crochet 1. Then we repeat that over and over again till the end of the route. Let me show you what that looks like. We chain 1 single crochet 1. Now we're going to chain 3 and skip three stitches. We chain 3, that means we yarn over and pull through three times to make 3 chains, so one chain, two chains, three chains. Now, we skip three stitches. Instead of stitching into this one, we're going to skip it. We're going to skip 1, skip 2, skip 3 and we put our hook into that fourth stitch, and then we do a single crochet. We yarn over, pull up a loop, yarn over, pull through two. What did we just do? Look at that, we created a little hole here. We chained up single crochet 1, then we chained three and we skipped three. We made this tall chain and then we tied it down over here with a single crochet. Now we're going to repeat that. We chain three again, chain 1, chain 2, chain 3, skip three stitches, 1, 2, 3 and single crochet into that fourth one. There's our second pattern, or second little hole area, open space it's called or chain space. We'll chain three again, 1, 2, 3, skip three, 1, 2, 3, and single crochet into that fourth stitch. Then you just repeat that across 1, 2, 3 chains, 1, 2, 3 single crochet into the fourth one, 1, 2, 3, skip 1, 2, 3 single crochet into the fourth one. Chain 3, 1, 2, 3 skip 3. 1, 2, 3 single crochet into the fourth one. When you get to the end, it should work out if you have the right number of stitches and everything that you chain 3, 1, 2, 3 and then you skip 3 and that fourth one that you go into should be your last stitch of the row. We'll do a single crochet there. Let me show you how we deal with this and the next row. We've done four rows of regular single crochet, then this fifth row was this funky one with the chains stitch. Now, we're ready to go back to our regular single crochet and I'll show you how it works when you get to these chain spaces. We'll chain 1 to level up and turn our work around, and we will single crochet into that first anchored down stitch. You should only have one right there, it should be pretty easy to find. Go in there, yarn over, pull through, yarn over, pull through two to do that single crochet. Now you're going to treat this chain space just as if it's three stitches. That means we're going to put, remember we skipped three and we chained three. We're going to put three single crochets in this chain space. You just treat the chains space like a stitch. You go under the chain, yarn over, pull up a loop, yarn over, pull through two. That's one single crochet, do it again, two single crochet, three single crochet. Then we find that anchoring stitches between the chain spaces and we single crochet 1, and then we put another three single crochet in this chain space, 1, 2, and 3. Again, we single crochet and that anchor stitch. I call it the anchor stitch because it's the one that's holding down these chains but it's just a single crotchet. Again, three single crochet and this open chain space. We're going to keep going all the way across and I'll meet you at the end of this row. When you get to the end and you finished your three single crochet is in this chain space, then you'll just have one more single crochet in your last stitch to finish it off, and there we are. We've done four rows, regular single crochet, a fifth row where we had this funky chain stitch and then this is just another row of single crochet. Now we just repeat that whole pattern. It's four rows, single crochet, one row of the funky chain stitch, four rows single crochet, another row of the funky chain stitch and you keep going until you have 1, 2, 3, 4 sets of the open work area. Keep going and your last four rows should be regular single crochet. That's row 21 through 24 and I will see you at the end of row 24 and I'll show you how to fasten off.
11. What if You Run Out of Yarn?: I wanted to show you, what you do on this project or any project, this is just a random little sample I made to show you this, but what you do when you run out of yarn or you get to the end of your yarn ball? No matter what stitch you're doing, whether it's double crochet, single crochet, half double, whatever, what you do is you work your stitch. Actually, I'm going to undo a stitch, I think I went too far. You work your stitch to the point where you have the last two loops on your hook, so whether that's any of those stitches, when you're ready to do the final yarn over pull through two, that's when you put the old yarn down so you want to make sure you have a tail here, and then you grab the new yarn, and you do the final yarn over and pull through of that stitch with the new yarn. That's all there is to it. Then to save yourself a little time, I'm going to show you how you then crochet over these two tails. I have two tails here, one from the old yarn and one from the new yarn. I'm just going to keep crocheting now, but I'm going to lay those tails on top of my work. I'm going to go into the next stitch and I happen to be doing double crochet in this example, but this applies no matter what's it you're doing, and I just keep crocheting right over the top of those tails. That way, I don't even have to weave in those ends when I'm done, because I'm essentially, locking them in right now. I'm going to go all the way here to the end of this row or round or whatever, and then I'm ready to start or chain up and ready to start my next row and I have these tails here, and what I can do is just pull them snug and snip them off, and then when I pull the work they disappear inside of it, and I'm ready to just keep going. That's all that there really is to it. Just make sure you leave enough tail that you can at least stitch over it for four, five, six stitches. Remember that you work the last stitch with your old yarn, work the stitch no matter what stitch it is, until you've got the last two loops on your hook and you're ready to yarn over and pull through, and that's when you grab the new yarn.
12. Dishcloth 1: Finishing Off: We've reached the end of our project. Yours should be a full-sized dish cloth, so we'll just pretend that I made a whole other one and I'm right here with you. Actually it would be up here. You should at this point have a full dish cloth and I'm going to show you how to finalize it and finish up. I just finished the last stitch will say, and I've got my loop on my hook. What I'm going to do is cut my yarn, I'm going to leave a tail that's probably six inches, eight inches long, and cut it off. Then I'll yarn over and pull that through my loop all the way through. Then it be like a little knot and we're done. Then all we need to do is weave in this end. This is where it comes in handy to have that yarn needle, and if you don't, that's okay. You can use your hook too. I'll start with the yarn needle and then I'll switch to the hook so you can see. I'm just going to thread the needle, and then all you're really going to do is weave it in and out of a bunch of stitches and just try to hide it basically. What I like to do is I like to go in and out in a snake pattern. I like to go in and out under these top stitches, under both loops. I'm just going back and forth, and I will do that for a few stitches, and then I'll change direction and head back the other way now to get a little bit tangled, just really lock it in. You can also weave down. If you want to, you could go down the side if you want. The idea is to just sneak in through there and weave it well enough that it doesn't come out. Now, if you don't have the yarn needle, you can do it with your hook. It's a little more tedious. You just insert your hook where you want the yarn to go, yarn over, and pull it through. Wherever you want it to go next, you insert your hook, yarn over, pull it through there. Whoops. I think if you just under the stitch. You just use your hook to weave it through. After you weave it through a few stitches, maybe like four stitches, one-way, four stitches another way, then you just pull it snug, snip off the end, and you're good to go. We still have this tail on our beginning, our beginning of our piece. You just do the same thing. I'll do this part with my hook. Insert my hook, grab some yarn, pull it through, decide where I want to be, weaving this, and I'll just grab it with my hook and pull it through a number of times. This one has a slipknot tied on it, so I'm less worried about this one unraveling. This one's more just about hiding the ends so it doesn't pop out. When you've woven it in well enough and you pull it tight, snip it. The reason you pull it tight is then when you snip it and then you pull your work, it sucks it back into your work. You don't have a little tail hanging out, and that's that for this cloth one. I hope you feel really comfortable now with chaining and single crochet. In the next video, we're going to start on our next dish cloth, and we'll be working with half double crochet.
13. Dishcloth 2: Starting Chain: Before we dig into our new pattern, I just want to point out the difference. On our old dishcloth, on our previous dishcloth, we were working with single crochet. Single crochet and then we had chain stitches, and the single crochet is marked with a plus. This time we're going to be working with half double crochet and the icon that represents half double crochet is this t right here. We'll be starting with chains stitches just like before and then you'll notice when we get to the end and we're ready to level up to our next row, instead of a single chain like we had over here. We're going to have a chain two to level up. The reason for this is because the half double crochet stitch is taller, slightly, it's slightly taller than the single crochet stitch. The height is actually different and one chain is not tall enough to level us up for another row. When you do half double crochet, you typically chaining two before turning your work around and starting the next row. We are going to be chaining 31. We'll start here and we'll chain 31 and the 29th chain is going to be the last stitch of the row or the first stitch I guess on the next row across, and these last two chains, the 30th and 31st chain will become our chain two giving us ready to start row one. Let's make that happen. Just like before we start with a slipknot. I'm holding my yarn, I'm going to wrap it around my finger twice. I'm going to grab this back loop, pull it over the front loop and set it down. Then I'll grab what is now the back loop, pick it up, pull it over and off, and then I'll tighten it up and that becomes my slipknot. Now I can stick my hook in there, tighten this up, I'm do in my yarn hold. I've got my tail held here in my hand and I'm ready to chain 31. Remember that chain is just a yarn over and pull through. There's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. Just keep going until you get to 31. There we have it. We tied a slipknot and we did 31 chains and now we're ready to start our first row of half double crochet.
14. Dishcloth 2: Rows 1-3: On our other dishcloth, when we started our first row, we worked into the second chain on our hook. But because this is half double crochet and it's a little bit taller, we're going to start by working into the third chain on our hook. We get our chain ready so the lips are facing us, and before we insert our hook into that chain, we're going to do a yarn over. It's a funny thing, about half double crochet and double crochet is that before you put your hook into your stitch, you do a yarn over. That's different. That means we already have two loops on our hook before we even start. Let's figure out which loop we're going to work into. There's the first one and the second one, we skip those and we go into the third. I've got that figured out down here to my third stitch. I'm going to yarn over and then put my hook into that third stitch. Remember just the top loop, because this first row is worked into the starting chain, and when we work the starting chain, we only go under that top lip. We aren't over. We went into the top lip. Now, we're going to yarn over, pull up a loop. Now we'll have three loops on our hook. We'll yarn over and pull through all three. That is a half double crochet. Let's do that again. Yarn over, now put your hook in then yarn over, pull up a loop. Got three loops, yarn over, pull through three. It's the same motions as a single crochet. The difference is, that you yarn over before you insert your hook. Then you yarn over, pull up a loop just like before. Then you yarn over and pull through all the loops on your hook, which are now three instead of two, like in single crochet. It's really the same thing. It's just starts with a yarn over and then instead of pulling through two, you pull through three. Let's keep going. Yarn over, insert your hook, yarn over, pull up a loop, yarn over, pull through all three. Yarn over, insert your hook. Yarn over, pull up a loop. Yarn over, pull through three. I'll talk you through it again. You can work on it and you can hear my vocal cues. Yarn over, insert your hook. Yarn over, pull up a loop. Yarn over, pull through all three. Yarn over, insert your hook. Yarn over, pull up a loop. Yarn over, pull through three. Again, it's the same as a single crochet, except we start with the yarn over, and then when you pull through at the end, you pulled through three instead of two loops. That's half double crochet. We're just going to keep going all the way across, until we get to that last chain. I'm about to do my last half double crochet into the end of my starting chain here. I'm going to yarn over, insert my hook into that top lip of that final chain. Right off my hook. Below my hook is that slipknot. Yarn over, pull through, yarn over, pull through three. There is our first row of half double crochet. Now that you've got the hang of it. To start the next row, we're going to chain two instead of the chain one that we did for single crochet, because half double crochet is taller, we'll chain two. One, two, turn our work around. Now we're going to half double crochet across again. This is row two, yarn over. Now when we look here, we see our chain two right here. Our first stitch is going to be at the base of that chain two. Now we're going through both lips, the top and the bottom. Because we're working into half double crochet now. The first row we were working into the chain, but now we're working into half double crochet. We're going to go through both lips, pull up a loop. We've got three on, yarn over, pull through all three. Yarn over, insert your hook. Yarn over, pull up a loop. Yarn over, pull through three. Yarn over insert your hook, pull up a loop. Yarn over and pull through three. Keep going all the way across. Here I am at the end of row two. It can be a little bit tricky to make sure that you actually get enough stitches in here. I'm looking at my work and I can see I have one more stitch, this that's hanging off the side. This is our chain two. We're not going to get into that. But I've got one more stitch here. That is an actual stitch. I want to make sure I put a stitch in it. I'll finish that up, yarn over, insert my hook. It can be a little tricky sometimes. Yarn over, pull up a loop, yarn over, pull through three. That's the end of row two. If you just want to double check your work and see that you have the right number of stitches. If we look at what we have here as you open it up, you can see each stitch and you can just count. You can either count the lips at the top or you can count the stitch itself. There's one, two, three, four, onward like that. Whatever works for you, if you want to check your work, we should have 29 stitches across. That was row two. We're going to do one more and then we'll get fancy. Again, we're going to chain two. One, two, flip our work around. Then keep doing half double crochet in each stitch across. When you get to the end of row three, you should have some work that looks like this. You can keep going if you want to. Do the whole thing in just half double crochet, like we've been doing. You can totally do that. This dishcloth has 18 rows in the pattern. You can just keep going until you've complete row 18 and then you can fasten off and call it good. If you want to get fancy with me, we're going to get fancy in the next few rows and then join me in the video and I'll show you how we do that.
15. Dishcloth 2: Rows 4-15: So for the next rows, rows 4-15, we're going to get a little bit fancy. So we're going to chain 2, just like usual. To start a new row, turn our work, and all we're going to do differently is, instead of half double crocheting under both lips or both loops, we're going to do what's called working in the back loop only. So we'll start our half double crochet, we'll yarn over, and instead of going under both loops, you're just going to put your hook under the top loop, or the top lip, and then just like before, you'll pull up a loop, yarn over, pull through three. So yarn over top loop only pull up a loop, yarn over pull through three. The effect that this has is that it creates ridges in our work. So you see this a lot in hats or in amigurumi when you need to turn a corner, and you need a clean edge, it makes these ridges. So what we're doing, by not working into both loops, by working only into this back loop, that leaves the front loop loose, and unworked down here, and that is what becomes the ridge. So for rows 4-15, you're going to keep doing half double crochet. You'll just go into that back loop, and when you get to the end, your chain 2, turn your work and keep going again. Just keep working into that back loop only. On your pattern down here it tells you for rows 4-15 chain 2, turn your work Half Double Crochet, that's HDC, in Back Loop Only, which is written HDC BLO Back Loop Only, all the way across, you should have 29 stitches in each row when you're done. Here in the chart, the back loop only stitch, is indicated with a T, that has a little upper lip on it. So that's trying to communicate that you work into just the back loop, so that's different then. Right here we just have the regular T for a regular Half double crochet. But when you work into that back loop only, then the little icon looks like this. So that's rows 4-15, and then we'll finish it up with three more rows of regular half double crochet and at the end. So I'll see you back after row 15.
16. Dishcloth 2: Rows 16-18: So after you finish Row 15, you should have something that looks like this. We have three rows of just regular half double crochet in both loops and then we had several alternating row. Well, every row you stitched in the back loop only and that creates this alternating ridge pattern. After Row 15, you're going to finish with another three rows of regular half double crochet in both loops. It should be three rows, half double crochet in both loops, a bunch of rows in the back loop, and then three more rows of working in both loops again. If you haven't done that, finish off with those last three rows of half double crochet. n the next video, we'll fasten off.
17. Dishcloth 2: Finishing Off: Hopefully now you have a full dish cloth, so your yarn should still be attached. Here's my sample piece. So we'll pretend that it's a full dish cloth. Then to finish off, just like before, we snip the arm, and then we'll yarn over and pull it all the way through, and then we'll just use a yarn needle or a hook to just weave in the ends. There's not really a right or a wrong way, you just try to weave it in and have it be not very noticeable. You want to keep your stitches tiny and just follow the pattern of yarn that's already there. I'm going to weave through a few stitches and then I'll turn around and go back the other way. Once you get that woven in a few stitches in both directions, then you pull it snug and snip it off, and when you pull your work, it should just disappear right into your work. You'll have to do the same thing with the tail from the beginning of our project, and there you go. Congratulations on dishcloth number 2, half double crochet. Join me in the next video and we'll learn the double crochet stitch.
18. Dishcloth 3: Starting Chain: Welcome to your third dish cloth. This one we are going to be doing in double crochet stitch. Just to help you understand some of the differences, let us take a look at the pattern. The symbol for a double crochet is a t with a double crossbar, if you can see that, a double top. The half-double crochet just had a regular t. The other thing that's different is the turning chains. For single crochet, the turning chain at the end or beginning of each row is just one chain. For half-double crochet, we had a turning chain that was two chains tall. For double crochet, our turning chain is three chains tall. This is because the double crochet stitch is taller than the half double crochet stitch, which is taller than the single crochet stitch. Literally, single crochet, half-double crochet, double crochet. That's why we need three turning chains. You will also notice then, that to make our dish cloths roughly the same size or same height, that's why our single crochet needed 24 rows, our half-double crochet took 18 rows, and our double crochet because it's taller; the stitch itself is actually taller, we only need 12 rows to make a dish cloth that's about the same size. That is neat. It works up extra quickly. The other thing that is going to be different about our chain stitches here for double crochet is in the other two patterns, we changed two and we basically ignored it, and then we just stitched into the very first stitch and kept going. But on this pattern, we are going to treat those chain threes as if they are a double crochet. Chain three, at the beginning and/or end of every row, but then instead of double crocheting into that very next stitch, we will go into the second stitch because we are going to count this as being the double crochet. The chain three will basically count as the first double crochet. It will make sense when we get going. You can see that here in the pattern it says that the chain three counts as the first double crochet here and throughout. That is how you will see that written out in patterns that call for it. Let's get started. Just like all of our other patterns, we will start by tying a slip knot. Wrapping that yarn over twice, grabbing the back loop, lifting it over, setting it down, grabbing what is now the back loop, lifting it over and pulling it off, and then tightening it up so we can put our hook in there. This pattern says to begin, we chain 30. That is yarn over pull through one, yarn over pull through two, yarn over pull through three, and so on, till we get to 30. Once you've got 30 chained on your hook, it should look like this. I will see you in the next video, where we will start on row one.
19. Dishcloth 3: Rows 1-2: Like I said, for this particular pattern, this chain three is going to be treated as if it's a double crochet. It's like a wannabe double crochet. That means that instead of starting in the fourth chain from the hook, we're actually going to put our first double crochet in the fifth chain from the hook. Just like in half double crochet, we'll begin our stitch with the yarn over. We'll yarn over and then let's find the fifth chain, one, two, three, four, five, that's where we're going to insert our hook, pull up a loop. Now we've got three on our hook just like we did with half double crochet. The difference between half double crochet and double crochet is that, instead of yearning over and pulling through all three, we're going to yarn over and pull through two, yarn over again and then pull through two. That's it. That's the difference. Let's do that again. Yarn over, insert your hook, pull up a loop, yarn over, pull through two, yarn over, pull through two. You can see the stitches are taller. They're taller than what we're used to so far. We've only made two stitches but because these chains count as a stitch, we count this as one, two, three. Let's keep going, I'm going to just work our way across doing double crochet is all the way across. When we get to the end of row one, we'll chain three and double crochet back. I will see you on the flip side. Remember that when you work into the chains, you insert your hook into just that top lip. That's different for row one. When we get to the end of row one, we're going to chain three. One, two, three, then we're going to flip our work-around. Normally we would stitch into this right here. This very first open state. But because this chain three is being treated like it's a double crochet, then it counts for the first stitch. Basically that first stitch is already done because we've got this chain three. We'll skip that one and go into the next one and keep going across. Remember that on this row now because it's not worked into the foundation chain, we work under both loops. You want to go in under both loops, not just the upper loop or the upper lip. When we get to the end here, normally we would ignore the chain. But because we're counting this chain as a stitch, that means we have to stitch into it as well. It doesn't have two lips like a regular stitch. Does cause it's just a chain so you can just grab one of the loops and finish your double crochet. If you're feeling confused or not like you did it right, you can always count your stitches to make sure. We should have 27. Double crochet is really easy to count the stitches because they're so tall, so we can just go through and count. Remember to count this chain here, counts as a stitch. So there's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26 and this little chain counts as 27. If you want, you can keep going and once you finish 12 rows, then you're done. You can just finish off. If you want to get fancy, then join me in the next video where I'll show you how to do the double crochet as something called a v stitch.
20. Dishcloth 3: Row 3: Now we're going get fancy with our double crochet. If you look at your pattern instructions, it's going to tell you that for row three we're going to change three, just like we have been. Let's do that. 1, 2, 3, we'll turn our work just like we have been. It says, double crochet two in the next stitch, that's called an increase. That means if we look to here we can see it as well. That means we're going to put two double crochet in a single stitch. We won't count this one at the bottom of the chain because the chain itself counts for that stitch. We are going to yarn over and in the next stitch we're going to put two double crochet. I'll make the first one. I'll just yarn over and put my hook right back in that same stitch that I just used to make another double crochet. Then it says, skip one. So we're going to skip the next stitch, and then we put two double crochet or double crochet two it says in the next stitch. Again, we'll yarn over. We're going to skip this stitch and we'll put two double crochet in this stitch. Here's one and two. We're going to keep that pattern going. This is making what we call a V stitch. It's easier to see once we get a little further in the pattern. But because there's two double crochet in one stitch you can see that it looks like a V because they press each other out like that. Then we skip a stitch. Then we have another two double crochet makes a V, Ps or p sign. We're going to keep doing that across for row three. We'll yarn over, skip that next stitch, and do two double crochet in the following stitch. Again skip the next stitch. Skip the center loop lips and go under both lips of that following stitch. Again skip. Make sure you're putting two double crochet in each one. Each stitch that we work is going to get two double crochet. You can see that. We get a little V, and then we skip, and then we get a V and then we skip and then a V, and you just keep going. We skip, put another V over here. Keep doing that and I'll meet you at the end of this room. When you are getting to the end, just like we've been doing, we'll skip a stitch and then we'll do two double crochet is to make a V in this last actual stage. We have our chain here, and we'll just do one double crochet in that last chain. You look at the instructions, it says, you go until there's one stitch left and you finish with just a single double crochet. That's what we're going to do. We're going to skip this stitch. We'll do two double crochet in this last real stitch. We should have 13 Vs across, and then a chain over here. A chain, 13 V's, and then we'll finish with a double crochet into the chain stitch. Just pick one of those chains. It doesn't really matter. Just stick your hook somewhere over here and then put a double crochet in it. That means we started with our chain over here, which we treat it like a regular stitch. We made 13 V's, and then we finish it with just a single crochet. This one is meant to be like the book end to match the chain three over here. That was row three. In the next video, I'll show you how to do the fancy version of row four through 10.
21. Dishcloth 3: Rows 4-10: So four rows, 4-10. We're just going to repeat this. We chain three just like we have been, 1,2,3, we turn our work and now instead of double crocheting into a stitch like we have been doing, we're going to put two double crochet in the V basically. So the instructions say to put double crochet 2 in the space between the first two double crochet from the previous rep. So basically in the center of the V is where we're going to make another V. So I am going to yarn over, insert my hook not even in a stitch, not under the loops, but actually in the V, so in this hole, in the V-space. Does that make sense? So in that hole there, this big one, not into the stitch, into the loops but into the actual V. So yarn over and I'm going to put my hook in the V space. I'm going to put two double crochet in it, one and another one. See even I dropped my yarn sometimes. So there's my one double crochet and then my second. So I've got a V sitting in another V so now I'll just keep going and I'll skip the space and I'll find my next V and I'll put my hook in that V space and put two double crochets in there. Move to the next V space and put two double crochets in there. So I'm just working my whole way across putting two double crochets is in each of those V's. So if we look at our chart here, some people find this helpful. We're now on this row. So you can see that it's a V inside or on top of the V from the previous row. So we just keep going like that two double crochet in each of those V spaces. So now I'm to my last V, I have a V here, and then I have the chain. So I'll put a double crochet inside the V and then I'll finish by putting just one double crochet into one of these chains here. So I'll just pick one of the little loops of that chain and I'll put a double crochet in it. That will finish row 4. To keep going for rows four to ten, you'll just chain three again, flip your work and start going again putting to double crochets inside each V, and you'll finish with just one double crochet in the chain over here. So keep going and I will see you after row 10 to bring us home with the last two rows of just straightforward double crocheting
22. Dishcloth 3: Rows 11-12: At this point you should have 10 rows done and be ready for row 11. We'll just pretend that I have my full dishcloth here again, so we're ready to go back from the V-Stitch. We're going to go back to just regular double crochet. So we chain three at the end of the row, flip our work around, and now we're going to double crochet our way back. Remember, we're going to skip that very first stitch that's at the bottom of the chain because this counts as a double crochet. So we're going to skip that and go into the next one. We're just going to work our way across. This time we're going in the actual stitches. So under both loops, both lips, into that last one, and then we put our last double crochet into the chain. So pick a loop and put a double crochet in it. We're ready for our last row. Row 12, we'll just chain three, flip our work, and remember we don't go into this first stitch because that's what our chain is. It counts in this case as a stitch, so we go into the next stitch. You're just going to double crochet across and I'll meet you at the end. All right, when you get to the end of the row, just make sure you put your last stitch in one of those chains. You did it. So join me in the next video and we'll fasten off and be finished with your third dishcloth.
23. Dishcloth 3: Fastening Off: All right, so just like all of our other videos, when you get to the end of your dish cloth, you will grab your scissors, leave about six inches or so, 6-8 snip off the end of your yarn. Then yarn over and pull it through to make a little secured end there. Then you're just going to grab your yarn needle or your hook if you don't have a yarn needle and just weave it on through several stitches. It's good to change direction, to help lock it down. Now I'm going back. Then when you're done, pull it tight. Snip it off and then pull your work and it'll just suck the end right in. Do the same for the tail from your starting chain and you'll have a beautiful dish cloth.
24. All Done!: If you made it this far, you have three different finished dish cloths. One made focusing on single crochet, another with half double crochet, and a third with double crochet. I hope you feel comfortable with those three main stitches now. Combined with a slip dot and a chain stitch, that's pretty much how you make any crochet thing, it's just a combination of those three stitches and variations on the way they're combined and where you put them. That's it. Now you can take all of your fancy dish cloths and if you're not going to keep them for yourself or you make lots of sets for everyone else, you can just roll these up and print out whichever label you like the best, and wrap them up and they're ready to give away. They make great gifts. You can make them, keep them and share them. I hope you've enjoyed this course. Thanks so much for watching and happy stitching.
25. Ready for More?: Hey, congrats on learning a new skill. To keep the fun rolling, I just want to let you know that this course is part of a three-course series where you'll learn the basics of crochet while making some really cool projects like dishcloths, hats and cup cozies. So if you're ready for your next project, check out my Skillshare channel for more great ways to hook it up. Thanks again for watching, and I hope to see you back here again soon.
Khara Plicanic, Photographer, Designer, Adobe Educator
