3 Awesome Crochet Tips To Improve Your Projects

Hey everyone, it's Deja with Knit and Crochet Ever After, and today I have got three, not six, three major tips to share with you to improve your crochet, and they're not really major. I don't know why I said that. They're just good tips. I'm going to help you clean up your bottom edge, I'm going to help you clean up your side edges, and I'm going to give you a reminder or a tip for reminding yourself on how to do that pesky, what's it called again Foundation single crochet. That's what to call it, a single foundation. That ain't it. Foundation single crochet. That's what I'm doing. If you like tips, if you like free patterns and all that good stuff, hit the like and the subscribe button, and I will be churning these guys out as much as I can. The more subscribes, the more free patterns. So hit it. So unlike this shirt with my trash panda, This video is not trash. It's got very useful tips. If you do like my shirt though, there's a link in the description because I'm an affiliate for Boardwalk who makes these shirts and I love them so much. I have bought a ton of them because they're so fun and snarky and silly. They have a Just hundreds of different logos and sayings and fun stuff, just all kinds of stuff. I'm just raving because I love these so much. I have a coupon code too, KCEA, and you get 10% off every purchase you make. So it's awesome. Go check them out. But enough of that. Let's get back to the tips. Let's get started with number one. So your first tip is a tip so that you never forget how to foundation single crochet again. So this I have a longer video on, it goes more in depth. But foundation single crochet is great because it creates this stretchy border, a stretchy foundation. It's just a really good thing to know how to do, but the steps are kind of confusing and it's, you know, not the easiest without looking at how to do it every single time until you really get it down. So these are some tips to help you remember the steps. So of course we will do a slip knot and we will do a chain two because that's how you will always start your foundation single crochet. And then you're going to think about it as what it really is. You're going to insert your hook in that second chain and pull up a loop and pretend that you are creating a foundation chain and a single crochet together. So what do you do for a foundation chain? You chain one. So you create your chain, then you create your single crochet. You've got your two loops on your hook, you yarn over and you pull through two. So you just created one foundation chain and one single crochet. The next hard part is always like where do I put my hook? You're going to put it in the foundation chain. So you created this little foundation chain on the bottom. You're going to go under both of those loops. Pull up a loop. You're going to create your next foundation chain. And then yarn over and create your next single crochet by going through both loops. And that's what you're going to do all the way down. You're going to turn your work if you need to find both of those bottom loops, get under both of those, that foundation chain, pull up your loop, yarn over, chain one, yarn over, single crochet. Remembering those steps, We'll help you to make this without having to re-read a book or pull up another YouTube video, whatever you need. Just remember you're making a chain and then you're making a single crochet. Let me come a little closer for that foundation chain. You can see it really start to take shape now. You can see those V's. So you're looking for that last V you made and it's a little twisted so sometimes it takes a little to get under it. I just split the yarn. So you just got to get under both of those loops, pull up that loop, chain one for your foundation, yarn over, pull through two for the single crochet. And you just keep doing that until you get to the amount that you need. So nice easy way to remember. Okay my next trip is for a trip. It's a tip not a trip. My next tip for a good looking edge on your crochet. So normally when you make your foundation chain and they tell you to start working, whether it be double, single, half double, they always say just start Going across and you usually pick the back loop of your chain to work into it's fast. It's easy It's kind of what everyone works into The problem with that though is when you do that. So say this is a scarf that i'm not going to put a border on the edge That I worked into is not the prettiest. It kind of loops around and it doesn't look as nice as my top edge, which when I finish my scarf, that's what that's going to look like. So I don't have a matching edge. There's an easy fix for that. Instead of working into that back loop, you instead are going to turn And work into your bottom bump. So there's little ridges on the back side of your chain that I like to call the bottom bump. You'll skip the first one if it's a single crochet. And you'll crochet just into that one loop. And when you do that, your chain will turn and it will be easy to see the next one. It kind of sticks up nice and easy. It's not difficult to get into. Just the very first one might be tricky to find. Once you get going, it just comes right along quickly, and the benefit of working into this bottom bump is that top of your chain now becomes your edge. So now both sides have that nice V edge, so it really makes the project look good from both edges. So that is the second trick. Okay, my third and final tip trick is one that I have a whole video on, and that is called the tall chain. And what it is, is when you're working with anything other than single crochet, they usually have you chain at the beginning of your row, and then you do your next stitch in the stitch after, and that chain counts as a stitch. The only problem is you get these big holes at the edges of your work, which are not cute. Well if you look at this third row you'll see there are no holes and that's because I used what I like to call the tall chain and I put this in every pretty much every single one of my patterns that is over a single crochet and it's super simple all you're going to do is pull out your hook about the size of a double crochet. Go a little shorter than taller because it will kind of blend a little better if you go too tall it could stick out a little and that'll That'll make sense in one second. Once you get it to the height of a double crochet, you're going to lock it in with a chain. Then, instead of skipping that first stitch, because we're not counting this tall chain as a stitch, we're going to double crochet in that first stitch. So keeping it a little bit shorter than the double crochet helps to stretch it to keep it right next to it. If you had a little bigger, it's going to pop out a little bit, but you'll see that because we do that tall chain, it eliminates that gap at the beginning of your row. So it creates this nice. Stitch on both ends where you don't have that hole like you would with that chain three. So it really makes your project nice when you're doing taller stitches with a kind of basic pattern like this. So that is the third tip. Get rid of those holes with a tall chain. And that, my friends, are some three simple ways to make your projects look better. Work up faster and make your life easier. So I hope you liked those three tips. I'm going to be coming out with some more tip videos. I've got some yarn tips, some knit tips, some gauge tips. I've got a bunch that I'm going to be putting up. So make sure that you're hitting the like, subscribe, and the little bell for notifications if you want to see those. I'm Deja with Knit and Crochet Ever After, and thank you for watching.