Left Hand Beginner Bias Scarf Free Crochet Pattern Workshop - Diagonal Scarf Beginner Pattern

Hey everyone, it's Asia from crocheteverafter.com. Today we're doing our free pattern workshop and this is the bias beginner scarf. This is great for anybody that is brand new to crochet. We're just going to make this scarf with some single crochets and an increase and a decrease on each row and it's going to give this cool diagonal stripe to it. So I'm going to walk you through everything so you don't have to know any of these stitches beforehand. But it creates... It creates this great looking scarf that's much more interesting than just a straight across single crochet. Plus, if you head over to my blog, you'll see the link below, you can win two balls of the yarn that you see this pattern made out of. So I used two balls to make this scarf, I'm giving away two balls so you can actually make this scarf with the yarn that you can win. So that'll be up for probably the month of January. So hurry over. To enter, click the link below. You'll also see the link to download the pattern, so do that and then you can go ahead and make it with me. So let's get started. Okay, to begin our scarf, we're going to put a slip knot on our hook, so you just turn your yarn to make a loop and pull the yarn that's attached to your ball through and tighten that down. Now I'll give you a sliding slip knot, so just pull the yarn that's attached to your Give your ball to close it up. Going over these basics, because this is kind of a beginner pattern, so if you're a beginner to crochet, I'll try to go a little bit slow because this is a really easy pattern. It's a one row repeat, so I'm going to make sure that you understand all the stitches. So the first thing we're going to do is chain 25. So to chain, you always take your yarn that's attached to the ball and bring it from back to front. So it's like a big clockwise motion around your hook. The easiest way to pull this through the loop that's on your hook, if you just kind of start pulling with your hook, you're going to get caught. Turn your hook straight down, and it's going to get right in between where your yarn is attached to your slipknot, so it'll pull through much easier. Then, after you make that chain, push your hook so that your loop is on the shaft of your hook, which is the main loop. Part and that's the millimeter that you get on your hook. Six millimeter is this main part of your hook and that's going to keep all of your stitches nice and even. So if you've been making crochet and your stitches are all different sizes, keeping your loops the size of your shaft will help fix that. Again we yarn over from back to front, turn your hook down and pull through and then push. I'm going to do that 25 times. As you're making your chains, pull down to give a little bit of tension with where on the bottom of your chain down here. Then as you get too far, your fingers get too spaced out, just bring your fingers up and hold your chain a little bit higher. So I'm going to go through and see that I push and pull every time. That's why I like these hooks, because they have a stopper, so when I push, I stop right on that stopper every time. I'll put a link for the hook down below too if you like these hooks, they're very comfortable, they're my favorite hooks to work with. But we're going to do 25, so if you need to count these, if you're not counting as you make them like I am, when you look at your stitches, and this is a little bit loopy so it's a little more difficult to see, just pull it tight, and there are Vs, so your chains look like Vs, the letter Vs stacked on top of each other. This has a little bit of a halo so it's a little bit more difficult to see. But when you're going, you can also just kind of count the loops, so even with this loopy look here, every bump here is one stitch, so we have one, two, three right there, and then you just kind of count those bumps, so you can use that to count your stitches. We'll get to 25, and then we will begin row one. Okay, I've got 25 chains now. This is about the width that my scarf is going to be, except it's going to be diagonal, but it'll still be about that width. So you can adjust the width, it does not matter how many foundation chains you make. Because we're using single crochet, you can do any amount of stitches for as wide or as skinny as you want this scarf. You're going to follow the same exact directions for these rows no matter what size your foundation chain is. So if you've made 24 chains accidentally, this is still going to work. So we're going to do single crochet for row one. So when you single crochet, you skip the first chain, or technically the last chain you made. So we have the loop that's on our hook, we have the loop that's on our hook, we'd never count that as a chain, that's our working loop. Then we have, remember just count the bump, we have one chain right here and we're going to skip that one, and we're going to insert our hook into the next. So you can go into the back loop. Or what I like to do, if I'm not going to put an edging on this, which I don't think I will, is work into the bottom bump. So this is a little bit more advanced, but not really. It's just a different bump to work into. It takes a little bit of extra effort, but it gives you a really nice edge. So we have this back loop, which is what I was saying to count. If you turn your work over, so we have our v's on the front, if you turn your chain over, you have these lines going down. And it's called the bottom bump. That's just a technical name. Not really, but that's what I call it. And we're going to work into that instead. So you can see that we have one up here. That's our very first one that's attached to the first chain that we're skipping. And then we're going to work into that second one. The reason we skip one chain is just to get our stitches to the correct height. If I worked into that very first one, my first single crochet would be really scrunched down, and then the next one would be a normal height. So with that chain one that I'm skipping, it gives a little bit of normal height to my very first single crochet. So I insert my hook in that bottom bump, I yarn over, but it's more like a layover. You take your yarn and just lay it right over the top of your hook. If you look at it this way, it's doing that clockwise back-to-front motion, but it's kind of more just laying over and catching it. So I turn my hook down to pull it through, but more it's kind of like I'm pointing out my next stitch, that's the easiest way to get through. So I pull that up. Now I have two loops on my hook. And to finish my single crochet, I'm going to yarn over back to front like we always do, turn my hook down so I can get easy through these loops, and pull through both at the same time. So there's my very first single crochet. Now my foundation chain is turned upside down, so it's easier to see these bottom bumps. So I go into the next one, which is right here, just look for that straight line, and it just takes a little bit of extra time to get under, but it makes a really nice edge. Lay over your yarn, pull up the loop, Yarn over and pull through two and what I get on the bottom is a nice edge so it looks like the top of my stitches so the top of my stitches look like the v's and the bottom row of my scarf is going to have the v's so that's why I work into this bottom bump. Then go into the next one I kind of use my fingernails hopefully you have some to push that bottom bump onto my hook. Pull up, yarn over back to front, and pull through two. Notice I'm pushing all of my loops to my shaft every time I make a stitch. So I have that one on there. I push the shaft, pull up, push to the shaft, yarn over, pull through, push to the shaft. That, as you can see, all of my single crochets are the same size. So if you see really wild looking stitches, it just might not be, they may not be using their shaft To the best advantage. Keep going across. The reason I'm doing single crochet is because a lot of self-striping yarn is made for knitting, and knitting takes a lot less yarn than crochet, so this same amount of work in knitting would probably take one-third the amount of yarn that we've already used. And what that means is they have a much longer color run in their yarn. So if they have five yards of pink in one line, they could get a full row out of it. But in crochet, it might take triple that to make one row of a single color. So using single crochet will get me the best Stripes for my self-striping yarn. If I did this all in double crochet, that's like four times the amount of yarn because it's a tall stitch. So I may not get a full row of color or one color as I'm trying to do if I use double crochet. So that's why I'm doing it this way. But you can substitute any stitch for this pattern. So if you want to do this in a solid color in double crochet, you can definitely do that. You just have to adjust your turning chains for the stitch you use. Almost to the end here, and then we're going to start the actual pattern repeat that is going to make this scarf look and go diagonal. Alright, I'm on my very last chain to make my single crochet. I really like the colors in this yarn. Alright, now let's start our pattern repeat. So the first thing that you're going to do in every single row that you come to is chain one. So it's just like that beginning foundation chain that we skipped. That's going to create the height for our single crochet so it's not all smushed down. We're going to do a special stitch in this very first stitch. So if you need to, turn it sideways. You can see we have those Vs again. Each one of these Vs is a stitch. One thing that you want to get in the habit of if you're brand new to crochet is count Vs at the end of each row. Make sure that you have 24. Remember we did 25 but we skipped one, so we should have 24 stitches across. Sometimes when you start crocheting, you might skip a stitch, the first one or the last one, if you're not used to working into them. And then you start decreasing your scarf. If you don't have a project where it's like going in and out, you're adding stitches or taking stitches away. So the best thing is to count each row until you're used to seeing your stitches and make sure that you have 24 or whatever amount you're doing. So the first thing we're going to do is an increase, which is Very simple. All we're doing is we're putting two single crochets in this very first stitch. So I'm going to go under both loops, so just those top two loops. If you see, if I pull on this you'll see that there's kind of a big hole there. So I don't go like into this down here, I only go under these top two loops. You can always pull them apart to make sure you only have two. You're going to lay over your yarn just like normal, pull up your loop, and do a single crochet. Then to increase, which means to put more than one in a stitch, I go right back into that big ol' hole. So now you can see it's nice and open from doing the last single crochet. So I go right back in there, yarn over, pull up my loop, and do another single crochet. And that's the first special stitch we're gonna do, and then we're gonna do one special stitch at the end of our row. So between that, we're just gonna do single crochets. So the next stitch I come to, you need to turn your work and look for that V. Just get under both of those loops, pull up your loop, and single crochet. We're just going to single crochet in each of these stitches across. And we're going to do this to the last two stitches. We're not going to do any single crochets in our last two stitches, because we're going to put a special stitch there. Okay, I'm down at the last two here. Let me see. We have two Vs that are left. What you can also do is if you are having difficulties trying to figure out which is the last two, count what you've already made. You should have 23, because we did that increase. So you should have 23 stitches already made, or just count as you're making them. So once you get to 23, stop, because remember we're making 24 for every row. So if I did two single crochets here, I would have 25. But we're doing our special stitch here, which is going to create our diagonal effect. And what we're doing here is a decrease, or it's also known as an SC2TOG. So single crochet two together. So combining these two stitches into one. And it's also pretty easy to do. So to begin it, you're going to insert your hook into the first stitch. Yarn over and pull up a loop just like you were going to make a regular single crochet, but we're going to stop. We're not going to finish the single crochet. Instead, we're going to insert our hook into the next stitch. So just one of those top two loops again. Yarn over and pull up a loop. So now I have three loops on my hook. Now I'm going to single crochet. I'm going to finish my single crochet. So yarn over from back to front, turn your hook down, and pull through all three stitches. So now I've taken those two stitches and turned it into one. So now I'm going to have 24 stitches across. All I did was I added one at this end and took one off at this end. And by doing that it's going to turn my work and make it diagonal. So you'll see when we start getting more and more rows of this how it looks diagonal. It's really cool. So now we're going to turn our work and start the next row. Now this is where our pattern repeat comes in. It's technically a two row pattern repeat because you have to do, depending on what you ended with, is what you're going to do again. So basically this side of our scarf is going to be all decreases and this side of our scarf is going to be all increases. So depending on if you started with the row or ended with the row is what you're going to do. So because we decreased here, we're going to decrease again. So to do that, we're going to insert our hook in that stitch that we just made, pull up your loop, go into the next stitch, yarn over, pull up your loop, got those three loops again, yarn over and pull through all three. You can already see that we're starting to go diagonal. Then we single crochet, so you can count to 22. And if you get 22, you should have one stitch left at the end at 22. So single crochet all the way across to the very last stitch where we're going to increase Okay, I've just finished my 22nd single crochet all the way across, and now I'm at my very last stitch of the row, and I'm going to increase. So I'm going to put two single crochets under those loops. And yarn over, pull up your loop, yarn over, pull through two. Head right back in and do it again. And you can see this side is starting to go diagonal that way. It's not diagonal now. Alright, now we're going to turn. And you just have to pay attention to what you've finished with. If you're used to looking at your stitches, you can also see, so if you put your work down, you're going to notice that both of these stitches look different from each other. So, the... The single crochet, three together, if you look closely when you see it, it's got three loops on it. So we have one, two, and three, which looks different than our increase because it's two single crochets put into one stitch. So when you're looking, you can see a little V here, which is the first single crochet, and a little V there, which is the second. Plus you have two stitches coming out of one. It's also the kind of the fan out and this is the fanning, so the diagonal you can kind of see which is increasing. Increasing think of the diagonal going out and decreasing think of the diagonal going in. So put your work down you need to know which row you left off on if you didn't write it down so that you can remember what to begin with. So this is our increase row because it's fanning out so we need to do an increase in that very first stitch again. So I use single Single crochet once. Single crochet twice, and then I'm going to single crochet across 23 stitches. 23 by the end of the row again, because I'll have to decrease those last two stitches. Okay, I've just finished my 22nd single crochet all the way across, and now I'm at my very last stitch of the row. And I'm going to increase, so I'm going to put two single crochets under those loops. Yarn over, pull up your loop. Yarn over, pull through two. Head right back in and do it again. And you can see this side is starting to go diagonal that way. It's not diagonal. Alright, now we're going to turn. And you just have to pay attention to what you've finished with. If you're used to looking at your stitches, you can also see, so if you put your work down, you're going to notice that both of these stitches look different from each other. So, the... The single crochet, three together, if you look closely when you see it, it's got three loops on it. So we have one, two, and three, which looks different than our increase because it's two single crochets put into one stitch. So when you're looking, you can see a little V here, which is the first single crochet, and a little V there, which is the second. Plus you have two stitches coming out of one. It's also kind of the fan out, and this is the fan, so the diagonal, you can kind of see which is increasing. Increasing, think of the diagonal going out, and decreasing, think of the diagonal going in. So if you put your work down, you need to know which row you left off on, if you didn't write it down, so that you can remember what to begin with. So this is our increase row, because I've gotten quite a few rows in on the scarf. Don't worry if your scarf is curling. It looks really skinny, but I have a bunch over here that's curling up. That tends to happen with this bias stitch. So at the very end, we're going to block it. I'll show you how to block the scarf so that it will lay flat. I'll tell you what we'll do and how we'll do that at the very end. But I just wanted to go over how to count your rows in case you've just been going and not paying attention. For whatever reason, they need to know how many rows you have. So the best thing, or the thing that I like to do, when you're looking at this, you can kind of see a little line here, a delineation. That is two rows put together. That's two rows of single crochet kind of on top of each other, and they create a line in between. So I usually count by twos when I'm doing single crochet work. And then at the end you'll see If it has, so you can see we have a line here, if I flip this over, you'll see that I have my line beginning at the bottom and I have that first line. So depending on what side you start with, you'll either have your line beginning a little bit up, which means you have one row of single crochet by itself, and then you have a row of two. But if you flip your project over, you'll have, you'll begin with a double row. So it's just which side of the single crochet is facing forward. So just take it by twos, just go 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, and just keep counting by twos until you get up to the top, and then you'll see on this one, I have my line here, and then I have a row of twos, so I ended up nice and even. I'll keep going with this. I also wanted to show you how to re-gauge real quick, just in case you need to. For this project, it's not really important because it's a scarf, so it doesn't really need to be a certain exact size. But using a gauge swatch, this is my favorite Susan Bates Knit Check because it's metal and it's very easy to read with this cutout here. So you'll notice all my patterns have 2 inch gauges because I use this and it's easy to count my stitches inside of this. So what I do is I lay it on top of my stitch, so I'm going to go all the way to the beginning of one of my stitches. And put the end right there, a little better. And then I count across. So for the single crochets, you can see this little line that's coming across right here? We're going to count those, because that's about the easiest thing to spot when you're counting. So we have one, two, three, four, five, six, a smidge of the last one. Um, I'll probably go for, let's just say six. I'm holding this with my hand and not laying flat so you can see it. So it's probably closer to six single crochets for two inches. And then remember we have the two rows each. So bring the bottom part right to that line and bring it down a little because this blue is a little bit brighter and easier to count. Then we're going to count up. So we have two, four, six, and eight. So we have eight rows and two stitches. So when you see a gauge, when it tells you stitches, you're reading across and rows reading upward. So this is important if you're making something that needs to fit, because if you're off by even a quarter of a stitch, if you keep going, that two inches, say it's a sweater that's going to be 40 inches wide, you could end up reducing it. So every two inches, that'd be 20 sections of this if you were a quarter of a stitch. If it's too short, you're going to reduce it by five full stitches, which could be a whole inch. And if it has to fit perfectly, you're going to end up having a sweater that's too tight or too loose. So gauge is really important when something needs to fit exactly, not so important for a scarf. But that's how you're going to read it. So I'm going to keep on going. I'm going to come back probably near the end so that we can go ahead and block this. So keep working your 24 stitches, and I'll see you in a bit. Okay, I'm at the end of my scarf. All I have left is one decrease and I basically just went till I ran out of yarn. So I'll show you right after this. You'll see that I have just a short tail left. So I'm just going to go ahead and fasten off. So to fasten off you can either make your loop big and pull your loop through or I like to just do a chain which is basically the same thing and then I just pull. I can cut the tail. I'm going to pull this all the way through since it's kind of short. Then you just tighten that down. So that's going to fasten off your scarf. Then we're going to weave in our ends. So you can see that the scarf is very rolled up, and that will happen when you're making this bias scarf. So you're going to need to block it to get it to its full width. So we're going to weave in these ends. It's a little shorter so it's easier to sew with. When you're weaving in, sewing in your ends, you just put your yarn on your yarn needle. Because this yarn has colors, I want to kind of keep my end in the same color, which there's only about one row of that, paired. Try to hide it between stitches if I am going into the other color. So you'll see, if I go on this side, you don't see my needle, and if I go on this side, you don't see my needle. I'm in between the stitches. Because these are pretty dense, it's pretty easy to weave this in. You just go back and forth different directions and lock it in even more. This yarn, if you're using the exact same yarn that I have, a single ply, which means if you look at it, you'll see that it's kind of just twisted on itself with all the different colors, so if I do this it comes apart. It will kind of lock into itself. It's a little... So you're just going to do both ends, well you probably have a join in the center too, I have a join in some yarn, I have a couple more tails, so I'm going to weave all these in and then I'm going to show you how to block your sweater, your sweater, your scarf. Okay, I have started to pin down my scarf. So if you see up above, I have one whole side pinned and I'm doing it dry. So there's lots of different ways you can block. You can wet block, steam block, spray block. I'm gonna spray block, which means I'm going to pin my scarf completely dry and then I'm gonna spray it full of water. So I'm gonna soak it with a spray bottle and then let it dry completely. The reason that I'm starting dry for the pinning is that when you do a wet block, if I let it sit in water, it wants to get real stretchy, especially if it's wool. Wool will try to, it'll bloom and it'll be a lot stretchier than when it's dry, so I can get a nice edge. I don't need to shape this into anything, I just need to lay it flat and spread it out so that it will lay flat, so you can see it's curling right here where I haven't pinned it yet. Because I want to just lay it flat, I'm going to do it dry because it's a lot easier to handle. I don't have to stretch it out. I don't have to worry about it stretching out on me. I can get a much straighter edge. So I'm doing it dry, and then I'm going to come back after I get it all pinned and show you how I spray it. And then once it's completely dry from the spray, I'll come back and show you how flat it is. So let me finish pinning, and I'll get the spray bottle. Okay, I've got my spray bottle full of cold, plain water, and I have my whole project pinned out, and then all I'm going to do is just start spraying, so put it on whatever setting you like, and just start spraying your whole project as much as you can. You want to get it as nice and soaked, you can press down to make sure that the water is seeping through the whole project, but just keep spraying it down until it's completely saturated and then wait until it's completely dry. I have these blocking boards, these are from KnitPix.com. You can also use a towel if you only have carpet, just put the towel down, spray it Just try to keep it on the scarf so you don't saturate your towel and your carpet below. But blocking mats like these are great. You can also put like a plastic bag underneath the towel to kind of protect the carpet. Whatever you have handy. You don't need the blocking boards, but they are very handy. So I'm going to spray this all up, let it dry, and then I'll show you how it looks after it's completely dry. Okay, I've finished the scarf. You can see it's laying nice and flat after the blocking. It's a nice easy blocking with the spray blocking. This scarf can be altered in a lot of different ways. So if you get down this basic single crochet and you want to make another one, try making it in just the front or back loop of the stitch instead of going under both loops and you'll get a totally different look. You can also substitute for half double crochet or double crochet. You'll just have to do a different kind, same basic. Increase and decrease is just a double crochet. Decrease is a lot different than single crochet decrease, but you can check out my tutorials to see how to do those kind of decreases, and then you're just going to do the same exact thing with the rest of the stitches. So if you have any questions, let me know below, and thank you for watching!