Motif of the Month June 2015 Skinny Leaf Motif Crochet Tutorial

Hey everyone, it's Deja from CrochetEverAfter.com. Today is the newest motif of the month. It's June 2015. This is kind of just a basic leaf that's kind of got a heart shape at the end. Maybe like an ivy leaf. I'm not really good at naming my different types of leaves. But this is a great piece to add. Add to flowers that you make. It's a very simple, fast, one round leaf so you can attach it to the flowers, use it as a place filler for blankets and scarves and shawls, lots of different things. We're using some worsted weight yarn in green, of course, and a 5mm USH hook. If you need some supplies, check out. Let's get started. Okay, we're going to start off our leaf by putting a slipknot on our hook. I usually do two hands, then I twist my hook, and usually the tail is pointing down. And we're gonna start the pattern. So the very first thing is to chain 12. Yarn over from back to turn your hook down to get through that first chain nice and easy. And then push your loop to the shaft of your hook, that way it chains all nice and even. Once you get used to it, it's a nice fluid motion. And then when you get too far to keep pulling it, just reach up higher on your chain and do some more. So I wasn't counting so I don't know what I'm on here. So if you're not counting or you lose track, count your V's. These look like little stacked V's. This very first one is kind of small, that happens sometimes. So I have one, two, three. You can also count just this left side loop. These are a little difficult for you to figure out because they kind of loop on top of each other like a braid. Instead you can just look at the one side loop and see how you have one here, two here, So you can count those instead if it's a little difficult to make out your V's when you first start out. Now we're going to move on to the first and only round of the motif. Okay, so to get started with round one, what we're going to do is double crochet five times into the fourth chain from our hook. So we're going to skip our first three chains and we're going to work into this fourth chain. So that's normally what you do with a double crochet is you skip the first three chains and that's so you don't have a squished down double crochet when you start crocheting. So I'm going to yarn over from back to front just like we do for chains and everything else in crochet and I'm going to insert my hook into this back loop only of the fourth chain. The reason I'm doing just the back loop only is because we're working down the entire So I'm going to work on just this side of the loop going down this way, and then I'm going to work on just this side of the loop coming back up so that way I don't get a big hole in the middle if I were to catch this back loop and the bottom bump, these two loops. And then I work into just this loop on the other side. When I come back, I'm going to have a big hole in the middle. So by not working into that bottom bump, I get kind of a little bit of a middle, round, little, middle piece of yarn there when I work into this loop coming back, so it's not such a big hole in the middle. But you do whatever you like, as with all crochet, it's totally subjective. So I'm going to pull up the loop so I can start my double crochet. Yarn over, pull through the first two. Yarn over, pull through the second two. So we're doing five? Did I say five? Yeah, five of these. So we're doing another four in here, same loop, two, yarn over, go back into that nice big hole we're making, third one, then we're going to start making the length of our leaf. So we're going to double crochet in our next four chains, so we're doing one double crochet in each of the next four chains. So just like the previous stitch, we're going to go in just that back loop and do our double crochet chain. So you're just catching that back loop, just look for the next one that you come to. See this one's been worked into, so you look for the next one, and it tells us to HDC in the next two chains. So we're half double crocheting, so we're bringing Getting our leaf down a little bit, so we yarn over again. Insert our hook in the next chain, pull up a loop, and then for a half double, we'll pull through all three loops at the same time. So yarn over and pull through all three. Notice I always point my hook down when I pull through these loops, and it keeps me from getting stuck. You'll point it straight down in your stitches, and you'll get through all of them nice and easy. So after those, now we have a single crochet in our second-to-last chain. So you should have two chains left still. Single crochet. And now we need to make our turn, so in this very last stitch we are going to single crochet three times. It's going to give us a turn to our leaf. Turn us all the way around so we can get to the back side of our foundation chain. Three times in that same chain and you'll see that it's kind of made this turn and now we can work coming Okay, so now we're going to kind of do what we did on the other side coming back this way. So look at your stitches. This is where we made this very last chain. It kind of covered both sides of our chain. So now we have that next loop here. So we're going to single crochet in there. One single crochet on the other side. Then we're going to do two half double crochets, one in each of the next two stitches. Half double. to the double crochets, so now we're going to do four, or we're going to do one double crochet in the next four chains. Alright, now we're at our last chain right here, we're going to do five double crochets like we did here, so it's going to kind of give us a little heart kind of look. I've got all five done. Now the very last thing that I want to do is I want to chain three and then I'm going to slip stitch down here where we began the very beginning of our leaf. And the reason that I do that is I bring the height, which is how we kind of have this curve here, we want that curve on this side. So this chain three is going to come down and I'm going to put my hook into this big I have a big hole right here, and I'm going to slip stitch. And that's going to give me, and I'm going to tighten that down, and that's going to give me that curved over part that I have on the other side. So I'm going to fasten off here, just laying it around, and see that we have that kind of curved leaf, 3D kind of leaf. So let me weave in these two ends we have here, and then we'll take a look at it. Okay, one thing before I weave in the ends, just in case, if you don't, because all of those double crochets, they kind of create this big hole here. If you don't like that gap that it has, use your weaving in to close it up. So you can come across down here to your stitches, so I can pull my stitch through here and then I can come across and I can kind of mattress stitch or whip stitch this little gap closed. Just go right down to the next side, so I can close up this gap if I don't like it. Depending on what project you're doing, you might want it open to stitch it closed. That's one thing you can do while you're weaving in, is get rid of that gap, and then go ahead and just weave in the rest like normal. Okay, I got my ends weaved in. You might want to go further than I did, I was just trying to finish faster so you don't have to keep watching me weave it in, but that's how your leaf is going to look, so you have that kind of heart look up here, you can flatten it out or you can have it curl up more if you like the curling effect. So you can use this as kind of a spacer in between things on scarves or shawls, so if you had a bunch of different flowers and you kind of spaced out these leaves in between, that could be a pretty little breakup or pieced together part of your scarf or shawl. Um, appliques are good, you can make a whole scarf out of these, so you can keep them and make a little pretty kind of leafy, ivy looking scarf. Lots of different things you can do with this. But that is the motif of the month, and thank you for watching.