Motif of the Month March 2016 Chromatic Motif and Blanket Pattern Crochet Tutorial

Hey everyone, it's Deja from CrochetEverAfter.com. Today is the newest motif of the month and it's actually a free pattern workshop as well. This is the Chromatic Blanket Motif. So I made this motif because I wanted a really dense, colorful motif. It's a pattern that I made a couple of years ago. Now I'm going to give it away for free so that everyone can make it. It creates a really large square, so they... Work up fairly quickly. You have to make a lot of them if you want to make the size blanket that I have in the pattern, but you can definitely make less and make a smaller blanket. So check out the pattern in the link to get the yarn that I'm using if you like these colors. Otherwise, you can use any kind of self-striping variegated yarn for the center. This is just one type of yarn that changes color. And then a white for the outside. Then we have, just make sure it's the same weight of yarn, so this is worsted and this is worsted, so make sure that your two different colors are the same weight. And then we're using a 6mm USJ hook, a yarn needle, you'll need to weave in your ends and if you're going to do any kind of stitching join you'll need that. We are going to go ahead and get started. For round one, we're going to be making a magic adjustable loop, which is going to give us a completely closed circle in the center of our motif. So we're going to start by putting our tail on the bottom, making kind of a loop with two hands. Tail on the bottom, working yarn on top. Take the hand that has the actual loop and just turn it down and it's going to cross over and that's where you're going to want to hold on to. So you're going to pinch that crossover and reach your hook through to pull up your loop. So this is your working yarn attached to the ball. Just grab it, pull it up. And then we're going to start the instructions. So the first thing it says is to chain 3 and then DC 11 times in your magic adjustable loop. So the first chain 3 is going to count as our first double crochet. So we just yarn over from the top to bottom, point our hook down to get through the chain, and do that 3 times. Then we're going to start doing double crochets. Once you have that first chain 3 made, your... Magic adjustable loop is pretty well secured. It shouldn't come undone. It should be kind of like a pretzel. It should be twisted right here. So if you need to close this up a little, if it's a little too tight or too large for you, just grab the tail and pull on it to make it a little smaller. So it might be easier to work into. If you want to hold on to it, we're gonna do our double crochets now. So we yarn over from back to front again, insert our hook through the loop, yarn over, pull up a loop, Yarn over, pull through the first two, pull through the second two for a double crochet. Keep them close together so that they don't get all out of shape. If they're far apart, they're going to get different sizes because it's taking a farther trip of yarn to get over there. So keep them next to each other, don't start making them way over here. So just kind of pull down on your loop to move them over. And we're going to do 11 total of the double crochets. I'm making my 11th double crochet, so now I have 12 stitches total because I'm counting that chain 3 as a double crochet. I just have my tail all wrapped around here. So I'm going to close up my hole now, I'm going to turn this into a circle. So hold on to your last stitch you just made down by where the yarn is coming out, right at the bottom there, and then grab the tail and pull on it. And that's going to be the easiest way to get it closed. So you're going to work all the way to keep pulling on it until it's completely closed. And then we're going to join it, looks like Pac-Man right now, we're going to join it with a slip stitch in the top of our chain three. So there's my chain three over here, so I'm going to go up to the top, insert my hook through the top chain, pull my loop through, and then through the loop on my hook. So now I have a nice closed circle to begin round one with. If that pops open while you're working, just tug on it again. Once you weave it in, it will stay closed. Now we're ready for round two. So round two is just... More double crochets, we're just going to do a lot of double crochets. This is a very dense motif so that it creates a totally closed blanket, which I like because I don't like my fingers and toes sticking through my blankets. So again, I'm going to chain 3 and that's going to count as my first double crochet. You can, if you've seen my other videos, substitute the tall chain and do a double crochet instead of the chain 3. You can check out a tall chain video to see how to do that if you've never done it. But we're going to do a double crochet in that same stitch. So you see that little hole right there where I joined my stitch? I'm going to insert my hook right into that hole and do another double crochet because we're going to increase this round by doing two double crochets in every stitch around. So here's my next stitch, these two loops here. I want to go under both of those loops. Yarn over, pull up a loop. Pull through two and two, again go back into that nice large hole I have there and do another double crochet. And I'm going to keep doing that for ten more stitches, so that's going to end up with twenty-four double crochets at the end of this round, a chain three, always counting as a stitch in this pattern. I've got my last double crochet for this round, loving the colors of this yarn, it's such Such a cool yarn because it has short color changes, which is good for this blanket. You can use like a long color changing yarn as well, like I love Knit Picks Chroma, but it has really long color changes. So I would only get maybe one or two colors per motif out of the yarn, so it would be Maybe more. Kind of, it would all blend together, but it wouldn't have this many colors in one motif. So I like how this has short color changes, but still it's not splotchy. It's not like the variegated where it's got like blue, purple, you know, all next to each other. It's got a little bit of each color before it changes. So you can check out that yarn, this yarn, in the description to get the same kind. Or if you want that long color change where... Kind of the... you could even do the blanket kind of in a... start putting all the same colors together in the blanket and make it look like a ombre effect or something if you use the Knit Picks Chroma. We're ready for round three so we're going to chain three again and we're still increasing because we've got to make this thing flat and round so we're going to put another double crochet in that same stitch that we just joined. Right where that hole is, the top of that chain three technically. Then, what we're gonna do to make it... Round and not like have a lump on one side is make our increases all the way around evenly dispersed So we do an increase and then we're going to do one double crochet in between in the next stitch So I'm going to do one double crochet in my next stitch Increase again in the next stitch. So you'll see it as DC two times in next stitch and then comma, So the comma, when you see patterns, that means go to your next stitch. So it may not say dc in next stitch to tell you specifically, but when you see a comma that means stop what you're doing in this stitch and put the next stitch you see in the next stitch you come to. So now we're going to do a double crochet in our next stitch, then we're going to do two in the next stitch again, and those brackets, you just repeat what you see in the brackets over and over again. Again, so you do two DCs. Then you do 1 DC in your next stitch, then you go back to the beginning and do 2 again, and 1 again, and you do it for the amount of times that it tells you, which in this case is 11, so we're gonna keep going around with the 2 and 1, and then we'll meet up to join again. Alright, we're on the last double crochet for this round, 1, 3, 4, so it's just more double crochets, super easy. Chain 3, we're doing another increase, so double crochet in that same stitch. This time we're going to spread out our increases in between two regular double crochets, so one double crochet in the next two stitches. I do one in my next stitch, one in my next stitch, and then I start the pattern over again. DC two times in my next stitch. You'll see the pattern says DC in next two stitches, so that means put one double crochet in each of your next two stitches. This is going to give us 48 stitches at the end of this round to switch and turn this into a square. So just keep heading around and we'll meet up at the end again to join. End of round 4, I've got some pink in here now. For my last round of color, so I'm going to join with a slip stitch at the top of my chain 3. Increasing, so we chain 3 again. Do our double crochet in the same stitch. This time we're spacing them out by three, so you can kind of see the pattern. We spaced out by one here, two here, and now three in this row. One double crochet in my next stitch, double crochet in the second stitch, double crochet in the third stitch, and then I repeat that 11 more times. Three double crochets. The only thing I don't like about this yarn is that it's got the thick and thin, which ends up making your stitches look a little wimpy in certain spots. If it was all one single thickness, it would be perfect. It can thin unless it's for a design element, I think. This doesn't quite look as great as I would want it to kind of look a little skimpy there. Probably with washing, it'll bloom a little bit and not look so small. But just be aware of that if you want to use this yarn, but it does have that. Do two and then one in each of the next three all the way around. And then right at the end, we're going to join our new color or our white. So we came down at the last double crochet of our last round of color and now what we're going to do is join with a slip stitch but we're going to join with a CB slip stitch which means we're going to join in our new color while we slip stitch join this last round. So it's just kind of a way to just start your color without having to... Fasten off and join with a slip stitch. It's the same thing, it's just we're doing it kind of one step earlier than if we were to put a slip knot on our hook and then join with a slip stitch. So I insert my hook for my slip stitch. I grab my new color, put it on my hook and pull through and pull through the loop on my hook. Then we begin our next round. First I'm going to cut my other color away, weave it in a couple rounds. So we're going to start making this into a square. Right now we have just a big circle. So we're going to do a lot of different height this height the different height stitches. So we're going to first chain one. Grab your yarns attached to your ball, chain one. This is probably going to pull out a little where your slip stitch was from your previous color. Just grab it and pull it and when you weave it in it will close all up. Then What we're going to do is a single crochet. We're not counting this as a stitch, so we're going to go ahead and do our single crochet in that same stitch, so right above our chain 3. We're going to insert our hook, just kind of like how we were increasing, but this time we're just going to do a single crochet. It doesn't really matter if you start in this stitch or the next stitch, it's gonna all end up, because it's a big circle, it's all gonna work itself out after this round, but just to be correct, because we don't count this chain one as a stitch, we're working into the first stitch. Okay, now we're going to half double crochet in our next two stitches, so we're gonna yarn over, insert our hook in our next stitch, yarn over, pull up a loop, got three loops Yarn over, point your hook down to get through all of them nice and easy. You pull through, do that again in the next stitch we come to. So now we're not doing increases because we just want to start making a square. So just the corner is going to have some kind of increasing to make the turn. Then we're going to double crochet in our next two stitches. So we do one double crochet in our next stitch, crochet in the stitch after that. We're going to treble crochet in the next stitch we come to, so we yarn over twice, insert our hook into our next stitch, pull up a loop, start working off two at a time. Pull through the first two, yarn over, pull through the second two, yarn over, pull through the third two. That sounds funny. Now, we're going to make our corner by doing three more of those in this next stitch. So yarn over, insert hook into the next stitch. Do three trebles. This is going to give us a natural turn. This one is going to become our corner so you can see that it's kind of worked its way up and now we're going to start working our way back down the other side. So now we're going to do another treble because it's going to be a mirror. So we're going to treble DC two times, HDC two times, then it changes a little bit because we have a whole side this time. This is just half a side here. I'm going to do a treble here. Double crochet in the next two stitches, so one double crochet here, double crochet in the next one, two half double crochets, one in each stitch. Now this is where it changed, because before we only had one single crochet here, but we're actually going to be single crocheting in our next four stitches for this side, so this is the repeat that we're doing for the last. We're for three sides of our circle, and then we have just the change over here, so we're going to do four single crochets, stitch, then we're going to kind of start the process over, so we don't do that first single crochet, we just start doing half doubles, the doubles, the triples, triples, trebles, the corner again, two half doubles, two doubles, treble, and three trebles. And then the mirror working your way back down. So we'll continue doing our sides and then we'll meet up at this corner over here so that we can work this last section together. Here's made, this is my last treble corner and then we just have these stitches here to do so you can see how we're starting to turn into a square. So we bring this a little closer so we can do the last portion. Stuff is just, we have our trebles here, three trebles and we're gonna do one treble. And then start bringing it down again, all the same stitches, two double crochets, one in each stitch, two half double crochets, three stitches left, so remember we did a single, just one single crochet at the very beginning of the round, and all of our other sides had four single crochets, so we have to do three more single crochets in our last three stitches to make our side even. three and then we're going to join with a slip stitch in the top of our first single crochet, not the chain. So insert under both loops down for our very last round. So now we're going to be doing some more double crochets. This one's an easy round because we're just going to double crochet all the way around and then when we come to corners we're going to put three double crochets in that middle treble. So you don't even have to count. For this round, it gives you the counts in the pattern, but basically do your chain three for your first stitch, double crochet in your next stitch, and double crochet in all of your stitches until you get to that spot where you have three trebles in one stitch, and then in that middle one, we're going to put three double crochets to make another corner. And that's what we're going to do all the way around, it's a very easy last round. Also, if you're not sure how to... Know where your stitches are. Just know that when you look up, there is a hole. The hole is a little bit to the right of your stitch, so you can see this stitch is coming out of this hole that's a little bit to the right of this stitch. Two loops from this stitch. That's all one stitch, that little hole and the two loops in this stitch. So... That is worked into the first treble of this round, so you'll see that they are offset just slightly to the right. They should be like right on top of each other, but they still look a little bit to the right. But then they kind of lean that way from all the yarn over, so they line up. But right where you join, where they're connected, they're just slightly offset. So now I'm going to do three double crochets in that middle stitch. And I'm going to do the same thing. I'll just keep going around. So you get to the next middle stitch and put three double crochets, and we'll meet up at the end to join and check out our square and talk about joining and such. Double crochet! Yay! You're making the same size blanket as the pattern, only 79 more to go! And of course make it much smaller, I'm just joining with a slip stitch in the top of the chain three. I'm gonna fasten off so you can definitely make it smaller. If you're making it, this is kind of like a queen size bed. I wanted a really big blanket, so I made it really large. I'm going to go ahead and start weaving in my ends as I talk about what, I'm going to bring this out a little so you can see more. How you can join this. So I used the single crochet join because I wanted the ridges to show on the blanket. So in the picture that's using the single crochet join. You can also whip stitch it or mattress stitch it. That will give a flat edge and a less visible edge to your blanket or to in between your squares more like it. And so when you go, so I'm just using a yarn needle, I try to stay in the same colors. This part right here, that part of the beginning round is a good place to hide your tails. I wish I had a metal needle right now, this one kind of gets stuck a little. But when you go to join these, it's good to join kind of back to back, make a long strip. So put Just one after another, make a really long strip for however long your blanket's going to be, and then take those long strips and put them side by side and then go down the long side to join. I'm not going to do the joining in this video because I have videos on all of those joins. So I have a single crochet join video. It's really easy because it's all white on the edges so it's not, you're just going to use white yarn. It's not going to be visible once you join it no matter what kind of join you do. Then you put the border on. So the border, if you want to use the border that the pattern shows. You're just doing single crochets. So it's just like this last round of our motif. Instead of doing double crochets, it's all single crochets. So just start wherever you want on the blanket, single crochet until you get to the corner of the blanket, and then put three single crochets in each of your four corners. And that will make the turn to be able to single crochet down the next side. And since it's in the round, you'll have your two loops to work into no matter where you are on your blanket. So just make sure that when you join your squares, look at your stitches before you join. Right now this is the wrong side. You'll see that the stitches look kind of go in different directions they have this little kind of v up here at the top the right side it has these two swooping Loops here, that is that yarn over that you're doing when you do a double crochet. So when you're putting these together, if you're joining wrong sides or right sides, depending on how you want to join it, make sure that you're looking at your stitches before you join your squares, because if you're brand new to crochet and you're joining these, you might just grab whatever you have and start putting them together, not looking at your stitches until after it's joined and you're like, wait, this does not look the It's the same as this square because You mix them up so make sure that all of the same sides are facing the right way. So here I have two different colors. I have the pink and then I have this pink. So I'm going to make sure that I fasten or weave in the ends to this side of the pink. So one of the problems with this color changing yarn is you get limited on where you can weave your stitches in. So I go down, because it's very holey here, you see there's lots of holes when you move the hand. So I want to make sure that I'm going down stitches, not across these holes, so that I don't make it look funky. Right here, through the white, it's through the stitch. Hopefully, if you fasten off and you have a really short color change, you might just You just have to kind of. Hide it inside of your stitches. So if you need to hide it, kind of go in between these stitches up here so that your color change doesn't show through. Sticky this yarn needle gets. This is why I don't use plastic crochet hooks. It's good for beginners. If you're a beginner and you find that you have a hard time controlling the yarn when you're making the stitches, use a plastic crochet hook because wood will do that. I'm going to do the white real quick and I'll come back and show you what it looks like all woven in Here is my finished square. Let me get out a little bit more. Finished square all woven in. So if your square is not looking quite square, just block it before you put it together. It's gonna be easier to block these now and pin just the small square than trying to pin an 80 square blanket or however big you're gonna make it. So, and you can easily measure. So set out a measuring tape or if you have a blocking board that has the grid markings, That way you can pin them all to the same size. I've even seen where you stack them up and then pin them together. But you just want to make sure that if you stack them, that you're getting all of your edges even. Because if you kind of pull it out a little, it's going to get stuck like that. So if you have some that are really small and they're pulling really far, it can start making your stack wonky. So if you have very... Different sizes, do them separately. You have a lot of give with these double crochets, so you can really stretch these out if you have one that you made super tight. So don't worry about that. Just stack them up, see how they measure out to each other, and then go and block them if they're not even so that you won't have a problem also when you're sewing them together. Because if you're... Not all the same size when you're sewing them together, you'll get puckers and things. So blocking will really help that. You can check out my blocking tutorials that will show you how to do that kind of stuff. But that is the chromatic motif. If you have any questions, leave them below and thank you for watching.