HOW TO MAKE GORGEOUS CROCHET CHRISTMAS BAUBLES - SIMPLE AND EASY GUIDE

Hi this is Carmen from Annie Design Crochet and today I'm going to show you how to make these very easy and very fun to make crochet Christmas decorations. They're my one of my most popular patterns on Ravelry and on my blog for making these crochet baubles. They're not difficult they're actually very easy to make and sometimes a beginner might find them a little bit daunting at first but I hope by today that you'll be making loads of them yourself and you can make all your favorite colors and you can have great fun creating lovely combinations. I mean you can use red and a cream to make very traditional Christmas baubles or you can bring in some brighter cheerful colorful and colors you know whatever you have really in your stash or you can purchase some cotton yarn particularly these little tiny balls they're gorgeous and you can have loads of colors in your stash then and make your baubles as colorful as possible. They make lovely decorations as I said for your tree and they also make beautiful presents and you could put maybe four of them in a little box with some tissue paper and would make a lovely Christmas gift to give to somebody that they can share with their family every year. So before we go any further we'll just talk about the yarn. Now the yarn I like to use is a four ply that would be a fingering weight maybe near sports weight cotton and the one I have here is from a company called Yarn and Colors and it's a beautiful cotton in lovely rich colors comes in every color you could imagine and Sheep Jays also do a beautiful four ply cotton and but you could use a double knit yarn a light double knit yarn and just a slightly larger hook. Cotton works best it gives a nice I think lovely texture on it but acrylic will work fine as well. So use whatever you have around the house and I'll show you how to make them. They're made in two halves and then I'll show you how they fit together beautifully. As I said you will make your baubles in two halves and what you will use then for the inside are some plastic Christmas baubles that you probably have lying around from last year they sell them quite cheaply in the shops in packs of maybe 12 or 24. They're kind of a standard size roughly around three inches around the diameter but you needn't worry too much about the size you can make your bauble to fit any size of these that you find and here's some I have from last year for my tree and you could also use these they're polystyrene baubles that they sell in local craft shops and they're very handy and convenient as well if you didn't want to use these ones and what you will do then is you make first of all one half of your bauble it's kind of like a little dome shape then the other half and you make them slightly smaller you fit as you go than the actual plastic bauble that you're covering and then you kind of pull them together and then you sew them around the side and they fit like a glove. I have chosen my yarn that I will use to make this bauble and you will also need a three millimeter crochet hook you could use a smaller than three millimeter if that suits your tension best but that's kind of a standard size to start off with for wool of this yarn weight if you were using a DK weight yarn you may need to use a 3.5 millimeter crochet hook scissors and a yarn needle for sewing up your baubles so we will start off now with round one and the first thing I will do is make a magic ring and out of that magic ring I will chain three that first chain three counts as your first double crochet and into the magic ring I will make 11 more double crochet a yarn around hook into your ring yarn over pull through two loops yarn over pull through last two loops so I now have two double crochet your beginning chain three counts as your first three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven and twelve so you may wish to count those to make sure two four six eight ten twelve and pull your ring tight and you can weave that in later and you will now go back to your beginning chain three and you will join your circle so just join in there at the top of your beginning chain three and slip stitch to close so we will cut and thread there and tighten that up and that's round one now round two this is round one and this will be our second round so you will using the next color you will join in any stitch from round one I generally join in a stitch opposite where I have been cast off there so hook into any stitch join your yarn and chain three which counts as your first double crochet and back into the same stitch we will do another double crochet and we will do two double crochet into each stitch around it is two double crochet in our first stitch two double crochet in our second stitch and we will do that in each stitch around just keeping count of your stitches as you go you will end up with 24 double crochet in total when you come to after your join with your loose thread I put it under my stitches and I will crochet over it as I go which means I have less threads to weave in and they will be hidden inside your bobble anyway so I'm just grabbing that and crocheting over it that's two double crochet in each of your 12 stitches around your circle from round one now we'll just check that we have the correct amount two four six eight ten twelve fourteen sixteen eighteen twenty twenty two and our last two which will make a 24 double crochet go into our final stitch and we will slip stitch to the top of our beginning chain three to join that round and fasten off your yarn that's round two for round three I'll take my next color and we will join in any space between two double crochet from your previous round so you can see there your sets of two double crochet in each stitch and just go into the space there between any two sets of double crochet and join your yarn you will chain three again counts as your first double crochet one more double crochet back into the same space chain one skip the next two double crochet and in the next space we will make two more double crochet chain one skip two double crochet and in the next space put your hook right there between the stitches we will make two more double crochet and chain one and we will do that the whole way around for round three two double crochet chain one two double crochet remember your chain one between every set of two double crochet I hope you're able to follow along with this you can stop and start it at any stage while you finish your own round and you get very fast at making these after you've made one you'll become addicted and you will constantly be making them they're very addictive to make and then they look beautiful in the end so when you come to the end you have your last chain one and again as before you will join into the top of your beginning chain three to fasten off cut your yarn and pull through so that's round three round four and round four will have some spike stitches I will show you how to make them now and it's nice to use a contrast color so that your spike stitches will show up well and I'm going to use a yellow which I think will show up against that um corally pink color I used in round three so what we will do is we will join in if you look at your first your two double crochets and then your chain one but join in one of the first double crochets any of them on your round and from round three and just insert your hook and join in your contrast color so chain one one single crochet and one single crochet in your next double crochet and now we will do a spike stitch a spike stitch is a long single crochet stitch so insert your hook down into round two and where you have two double crochets and insert your hook right in the middle of those two double crochets hook your yarn pull it up nice and loosely up to the height of your single crochet and complete your single crochet that way I'll show you again how to do that so in the next double crochet do a single crochet single crochet in your next double crochet and now do a spike stitch by reaching down and going into in the middle of the two double crochets in the previous row bring up your yarn to a good height yarn over and pull it through two loops single crochet in your next stitch and in your next stitch and again a spike stitch by reaching down between the double crochets from round two pulling up a loose loop yarn over and pull it through two loops so we will repeat that the whole way around single crochet single crochet and spike stitch it gives just a nice little effect and you can have fun playing around with colors as well single crochet single crochet spike stitch you will have 36 stitches in total for this round and remember if you want to see the written pattern you can find it on my blog anydesigncrochet.com now this makes what you can see is a large flat circle but because we won't be increasing anymore the next few rounds it will curve slightly in and we finish off with a spike stitch and slip stitch back into our beginning single crochet to fasten off so that's round four round five join in any stitch with another color chain one single crochet in the same stitch and single crochet in each stitch around give you a total of 36 single crochets and you will join again to your first single crochet to complete the round and you can see it's already starting to curve now if i take my bobble and just put it on it this is where you start fishing it now i'll need at least one more round you always make it slightly smaller than the bobble because it does stretch one more round this time i'll go back maybe and use my green again as before just join in any stitch and mine say if you have one this size you may want to continue to do one maybe two more rounds of single crochet again as i said just make it slightly smaller than half your bobble just fit it on as you go but i'm going to cover the smaller one so i can see that i have more than enough so what i need to do now is make exactly the same for the other side sometimes i will do an extra row with a contrast color like i did here in this one on one side only and then attach them together so come back in a minute and i will show you how to put the two pieces together and cover your bobble and complete it i now have my two halves made this is the one i made earlier and here is the second one i made and on this one i added an extra row just to give a bit of contrast color and then because it'll make it just slightly large enough to fit and i'm not worried about my ends i weaved them in in places and others i had worked over them so you can just leave them like so now to fit it on just fit on one side now there's loads of ways of doing this and you could also sew your two pieces together and fill it with stuffing or some kind of fiber but this is the way i do it and i fit it on either side of the top of my bobble just like that i kind of bring them together so that they just fit and i get a sewing needle a darning needle or whatever large needle you have and i thread it with cotton of one of the colors i've just used and i start sewing it around usually i start as you can see it's just held like that i have a knot on it or you can leave a long thread you can weave in afterwards bring it through and then i will start sewing from one stitch on one side pull tight and grab another stitch on the other side and on the corresponding side just thread it through pull it tight and i work my way around the whole way around the bobble and if you don't like sewing you could try and crochet it together there's lots of different ways of doing this i like sewing so i don't mind doing this and i think it gives a nice neat finish so you just work the whole way around threading on one side then on the other side and you'll just have a nice neat tight seam you can see there so if you come back to me now in a minute i'll have worked the whole way around i'm just at the other side now so i will just do my last few stitches and just finish it tightly there around the little top of the bobble do a few extra stitches just to make sure that it holds firm and then just weave in your last thread you will find that you'll get very fast at making these after a while you can sit down some evening and just crochet the two halves in different colors and then sit down another evening perhaps and sew them all together and before you know it you will have a full selection for your christmas tree or to give as presents they're not difficult and a little bit fiddly to make but no weaving in of threads as such you can tuck them all inside just make sure that you know that you snip them so that there's enough of an end that they won't unravel on you and there's your bobbles which you'll have for many years to come i hope you enjoyed that and thank you for watching and again if you want to find the written pattern you can find it on my blog Annie Design Crochet. Thank you, bye-bye