Lessons
Lesson Info
Crocheting in-the-round
All right, how about a quickie lesson on crocheting in-the-round? I just want to give you the basic fundamentals of just wrapping your head around a piece that is knit in-the-round, so you would use the in-the-round method if you were making a hat maybe leg warmers or wrist warmers, if you didn't want to seam up anything. Anytime that you want sort a cylindrical piece and you don't want there to be a seam. So the first step would be, you create your chain, for whatever the pattern calls for, or, whatever the circumference of the item is that you want it to be. I sometimes like to do vase cozies or whatever, I have these cool, kind of, just from IKEA or whatever, these cool cylinder vases, and I like to put different yarn cozies on them, sometimes in holiday colors, sometimes in whatever colors, I just to be cozie things. So for crochet, all you would need to do is create a chain and then wrap around it and you could probably get a relative idea that it would work. I would probably do a...
couple chains less, just thinking that it's gonna stretch to accommodate. But that's one of the cool things about crochet is that you don't have to do a lot of math when it comes to the actual width or circumference, you can kind of cheat it a bit by just eyeing it. Okay, so when you're joining in-the-round, there's a couple things that you could do, or, what you need to look out for. So the most important thing is on that first round, you need to make sure when you're joining, that you are not twisting. In a pattern, it would generally say, join with a slip stitch, taking care not to twist and what that means is, if I'm going to join this right now, without checking to make sure that it's untwisted, you can kind of see that there's this mobious thing happening right now, unintentionally, you see the top of the stitch is here, are showing, but then over here, it's transitioning to the bottom stitches. If you start that way, your entire piece will be twisted. It's really important that you don't skip this step of laying your chain on the table... and then making sure that all of the stitches are oriented in the same way. So they're all laying flat. Once you're really certain that all is right in the world, as far as your chains go, you're gonna go ahead and insert the hook through that first chain, yarn over, and then pull it through both. That is called a slip stitch, that is almost always how you would join any form of around, and so now you're working with a circle. All right, let's just go ahead and I'm just gonna pick a random stitch, let's talk about double crochet. So if you were gonna double crochet, just like if you were working with a swatch, that you were working back and forth, you need to create the height of that stitch first. So to do that for double crochet, we know that we need to chain three first. So we're gonna chain one, two, three. That's gonna count as that first stitch and then we're gonna go ahead and work in the next stitch. So we're gonna double crochet in that next stitch and then we're gonna keep going all the way around. And I'm just gonna continue all the way around 'cause I wanna show you what you do to join it to start for the next round. So this is the same method that you would use if you were doing single crochet, half-double crochet, triple crochet; obviously you would start with a different number of chains at the beginning but it's the same method, you're always gonna start with that foundation chain and then with a slip stitch to join it. So really the key is just to make sure that it's not twisted to start and it's not something that you'll have to second-guess, it'll be really clear if your piece is twisted, so you'll just have to stop and pull it out. The good thing about crochet is it's really easy to pull out and start over again. So we're going around and we're just, I usually use my middle finger and my thumb, not only am I using it to pull the piece so that it's taught and it makes it easier to work the stitch in, but it's also just another way for me to make sure that I'm in the right position, you can kind of feel where the next stitch is and it makes it really smooth, because that first round, when you're working through the chains, is the one that you need to pay the most attention to. Chains are harder to see where to go through than most of the other stitches once you've got that clear, defined stitch with the two loops. So you just want to pay a little attention and you can see that this little round is slowly building together. The interesting thing about hats, when we're talking about knitting in-the-round though, is that for most beanies, with crochet, you don't necessarily start from the bottom and go up. In crochet, it often works better to start from the crown and work down because there's not any flexibility in a chain stitch, and since the most standard way to start a project is with just the chain stitch, there are other methods but usually this is the way. You don't want that to be the part that's gonna be at the biggest portion of your head. So normally all of the crown shaping will happen at the top and then you'll work your way down further. So this probably would not be the way that you would start a hat per se, although you could, it just wouldn't have as much give. All right, so we're almost to the end, or around. You can see us in the home stretch. We've got, we pull on it, oh, it looks like I still have one more stitch left. All right, I'm back to where I started from, so what I need to do is rejoin, so whenever you're working with a stitch, whether it be single, half-double, double, triple, you want to join with a slip stitch in the top of whatever that beginning chain is. So since this is a double-crochet, that's gonna be a chain three, so I want to slip stitch in the third chain so one, two, three, that's this one. Actually, this is a slip stitch so one, two, three. I'm going to... yarn over, pull through. I've joined it again, I'm gonna show you again. You have an option here, so one, two, three, this is where you would normally, this is where you should insert your hook. Sometimes I like to go over to that next step if I really want to suck the two pieces together. With a double crochet though, you probably want to just go ahead and stick with the chain because there's so much height that there's gonna be space in between each individual stitch anyway, so you pull that through and now you're ready to start your next round so from there you would just chain three again, and you would begin double crocheting, and you would just work all the way around and continue on. And that is the basics of how you crochet in-the-round.
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