Motif of the Month August 2014: Star Flower Crochet Tutorial

Hey everyone, it's Deja from crocheteverafter.com. Today we're making our newest motif of the month. It's August 2014 and this is, I'm calling it a star flower because it reminds me of a star with its pointy edges but it looks like a flower as well so I gave it a yellow center with a red outside. I'm using worsted weight yarn and a USJ or Six millimeter hook, so grab those, get your pattern from the link below, and let's get started. Alright, so to begin our flower, star flower, we're going to put a slip knot on our hook. I want an open center for this flower. You can substitute a magic adjustable loop or magic adjustable ring if you want, if you want a completely closed hole, if you're familiar with that. Otherwise, we're going to go ahead and chain four. So we always... Yarn over from back to front, then I like to grab my tail as I pull through to kind of keep everything from moving around, yarn over again, we're going to do four total chains, there's number four, and then we're going to join our ring together to make, we're going to make a ring, so we're going to go ahead and put our hook in that very first chain, you can put it wherever you want because it's going to get completely covered. Then we're going to yarn over and pull through that and pull through the loop on your hook. So now we have our ring. Doesn't look like a ring right now, but once we start crocheting into it, it's going to open up. So my very first round one instructions is to chain three, and this is going to count as a double crochet. If you've seen my other tutorials, you can do a tall chain and a double crochet. So if you know what that is, otherwise you can search tall chain to learn about that. But we're going to do 11 double crochets inside this ring. So with our chain 3, that's going to give us a total of 12 double crochets. I'm going to yarn over back to front, insert my hook in the center. If it's difficult for you to see the center, just grab your chains and pull them apart and you'll see that hole a little bit easier. Push through the center hole, lay over your yarn, pull it up. Yarn over, pull through the first two loops. Yarn over, pull through the second two. And we're going to do that 12, or 10 more times, 12 all together. Go through, pull up your loop, yarn over, pull through two, pull through two. That is my 12th double crochet, technically 11th. And now I'm going to join my ring with a slip stitch in the top of my chain three, so those very first chains you made. So just insert into the very last chain. Yarn over, pull through, and pull through. And I just like to tighten it down. I'm going to go ahead and fasten this off because I want to change colors for my next round. So I'm just doing a long tail that I pull tight. And then I cut my tail and then pull that back out. So I got my first round done. Now we're going to move on to round two with our new color. So to join this in, you have a couple of options. If you've seen my standing stitch tutorials before where you just start working your very first stitch, you can do that, but I'm also going to just show you how to do a slip stitch join. So you can go ahead and put a slip knot on your hook, and then we're going to join in. You can join anywhere because it doesn't matter for this part of the instruction, so I'm just going to go right to the left of my tail because I always like to, and I'm going to put it under both loops. Front to back, yarn over, and pull through, and then pull through the loop on my hook. So now I've joined in my new color, I'm just going to tighten that down, and that's a slip stitch join. Now I can start my round two instructions. So round two says to chain four, and that's going to count as a treble crochet. So again, you can do the tall chain and a treble if you want to do that instead. But a treble crochet, instead of one yarn over, we're doing two yarn overs. And then we still work off two loops at a time. So yarn over twice. We're doing some increasing, so you're going to go back into that stitch that we just joined our yarn with. Go right back in. Yarn over, pull up your loop, and then work off two loops at a time. So yarn over back to front, pull through the first two, notice I always push to my shaft to keep my stitches even, pull through the next two, and then yarn over and pull through the last two. So now we've got technically two trebles because we're counting that chain four as our first one. Now we're going to do the same thing, we're going to do two trebles in our next stitch. So this is going to be kind of our pattern repeat. After we do this here, we're going to start our repeat. We're going to do two in here, then we're going to chain three, and we're actually going to start right after this. So we have chain three, and it's going to create a space. Then our pattern repeat, which is brackets, which tells you repeat what's in the brackets over and over again as many times as it tells you to do, and it tells us to do it seven times. So we're going to do our two trebles in our next stitch. We're not skipping any stitches on here. We're working every stitch that we have. I did two trebles in that first stitch, and then two trebles into the next stitch, and then we're going to chain three again. We're going to do that six more times around, and you'll see how it kind of gives us this group of four trebles in between our chain three. Okay, I've got my last stitch. I just wanted to show you how to work into one of the stitches that you fastened off because you get like a lot of different loops. You have your fasten off, which is that little chain. Then you have the loop that you slip stitch and where you slip stitch into. What you can do is just kind of pull on it and you can see that hole. Just work into that hole and it'll cover everything up. So we're going to do our last two trebles right through that hole. You can just push your tail out of the way. You can weave it in later. And then we're going to join up our round, and we have one round to go. Oops, sorry, we need to chain three first. Chain three. Because we need three chains in between all these groups of four. And then we're going to join with a slip stitch at the top of our chain four. So if you're counting, sometimes that very first chain can be a little small. So make sure you don't miss it. One, two, three, and four. Or you can look at where that first treble is made. Here's the stitch sitting on top. Go right to the right and find that very first V. That's how you can find the top of your chains. Slip stitch. Then we're going to move on to round three. Round three tells us to single crochet two times in our, or sorry, single crochet in our next two stitches. It says skip the stitch where the slip stitch was made. So that is this treble here. That's right where the chain four that we slip stitched into. We want to do single crochets in these two center trebles. So we're just going to go right into it and start single crocheting. One, then go to the next stitch and do two. Then it says skip our next stitch, which is this treble. And now we're going to be working into our chain three space. So what we're doing here is three double crochets. So we'll do three first. Yarn over once for our double crochets. Then we're going to do a picot. Picot makes a little pointy top. It's very simple. We chain three. So we yarn over, pull through. Make them nice and tight so that they don't look real floppy. They're the same size as your shaft, so I have all three. Then you go back to the first chain you made, put your hook in, and do a slip stitch. So yarn over, pull through, and pull through the loop on your hook. Then we're gonna do three more double crochets in that chain space. You're gonna yarn over, go back in, two and three. Then you can see the picot. I made like a little point to our flower, star flower. So these little picots are very handy when you want to make pointy kind of points. So then it says skip our next stitch and we're going to single crochet in those two center stitches again. So that's our pattern going around. Each of these two center trebles we're going to single crochet into them and then we're just going to work in our chain three space. So we're going to do this all the way around making those picots right after our three Three double crochets. I'll show you that one more time. Chain, chain, chain, insert back into that first, through, and picot, double crochet again. So all the way around, and then we're gonna join up at the end, three double crochets. And since we began with those single crochets, all we have to do after these three is join our rounds. We're gonna join with a slip stitch in that first single crochet we made. So you can see them sitting right there, just go right under both loops. Of your stitch, yarn over, pull through, and pull through your loop, and we're all set. So I'm going to fasten off. So again, I do my little chain. That's how I like to fasten off. Not too many ends to weave in, we've just got four all together, so I'm going to go ahead and weave those in and then we'll check out the final project. Here we've got all the ends weaved in. If you're making this for like an applique or you're going to put this on a scarf or a beanie or whatever, make sure that you can leave those tails unwoven and then use those to sew it to your project. This would be a really cute applique. You can make it in a fingering weight or a sock weight so it'll be even smaller. More compact. This is with a J-hook, so it's nice and floppy, but if you wanted it more stiff, use like an H-hook with your worsted weight. So the bigger the hook, the floppier it will be. So if you're making this to connect in the ends like a scarf or a shawl, the J-hook is good because you'll get a nice drape to it. But if you're going to use it for an applique... Then I would change to like an H hook so it's nice and tight and flat so when you put it on it's not going to look lumpy or anything. And that is it! If you have any questions, leave them below and thank you for watching!