Motif of the Month May 2014: Ruffle Flower Crochet Tutorial

Hey everyone, it's Deja Yet Mere from crocheteverafter.com. Today is the newest motif of the month and it's this 3D flower. Super easy to make. It works up really fast. I've left the tails on because I'm going to talk about how you can attach this to different things to make different projects But we're just using some worsted weight yarn. at the end of it. We're using a four millimeter hook for the center ball part and then a five millimeter hook for the flower part. So just grab your worsted weight yarn and your hooks and we'll get started. Okay so we're gonna start our 3D flower by doing the back ruffly part of the flower. I'm doing that in this worsted weight red. And I'm going to start off with a magic adjustable loop. So to do that, I hold my yarn in two hands and I take the hand that has the actual loop and just turn it down and it crosses my yarn over itself so that I can get my loop started. So I'm using the yarn that's attached to the ball. I'm going to reach through that little loop that I just made and grab the yarn and bring it forward. And then I always like to slip stitch my magic adjustable loop. Because it holds it together, and that way I don't have to worry about it coming undone as I'm working. And then I'm going to start single crocheting. So my very first round is just six single crochets in my magic adjustable loop. So I reach through the center, and then I yarn over, but when we do this first yarn over, it's more like a layover. It just kind of lays right over the top of my hook, and I turn my hook to catch it and pull up my loop. I have two loops on my hook. And I yarn over and pull through both loops. You'll notice that I'm always pushing all of my loops to my shaft, which is the even part of my hook. That'll give me nice even stitches. I also turn my hook straight down as I pull through. When I do that, I don't get caught on any of the loops that I've already made. If I hold my hook the same way as when I maybe do my yarn over, I'm going to get stuck on all my loops. So just turn it straight down at your stitches, and you'll pull through nice and easy. We have three so far, and how I can count these if it's difficult to see the front stitches, if you're new and you're not sure how to count those, turn your work sideways and look for those V stitches. It's the top of your stitch and it looks like a letter V. So you can see I have one, two, and three of those. We don't count the one that's on our hook, that's our working loop, but we have three Vs so far, which means three stitches. So I'm going to do three more. You'll notice I kind of grab onto my loop as I work and it keeps it from moving around too much or flipping over on itself. So hold onto everything as you're doing your magic adjustable loop. And then once you finish all six, grab your tail. So I usually grab the tail and I usually grab that last stitch and I pull them apart from each other so that my loop closes up nice and easy. Now we're just going to work in a spiral. Because it's gonna be real roughly and you won't be able to see the end part of it. So when we work in a spiral, we don't join our rounds. We just start our next round by starting to single crochet into it. So we're going to start round two without joining anything. Okay, so for round two, we're going to start increasing. And that's what we're going to do for every round of this roughly flower, is just increase in every stitch we come to. What that means is I'm just going to do two single crochets. In every stitch I come to, but I still want to keep count because I still want to keep my flower roundish on the end even looking. We don't want to just make up our stitch count, so we're going to keep count. So if you're not sure where you're supposed to be placing your hook, To begin your next round, use your v-stitches again and count backwards because we made six so we need to work into the very first single crochet we made. So we can just count backwards one two three four five six to find that very first one. So you see it's a little bit over there but as you start working it's not even gonna you're not even gonna notice any kind of gap or anything. So we're going under both loops of our The V-stitch, or the top of our stitch, you can always spread it to make sure you've only caught two loops because you can catch extra. Then again, we're yarning over or laying over. It always goes just over the top of the hook. Turn it to catch it. Pull up your loops. This is more of a real yarn over because it's going all the way from back to front. You always yarn over back to front. You should never yarn over from front to back. So whenever you hear yarn over, it doesn't matter what kind of stitch it is, it's always going to be back to front. I'm going to pull through those two. Then, I'm going to place a stitch marker in that stitch I just made. Some people like to put their stitch markers in the last stitch of the round. I like to put it in the first stitch that I do because I can just keep working all the way through that last stitch and not have to worry about removing it until the beginning of my next round. Now what this stitch marker does is it tells me where I need to stop, so if I'm not counting very well or if I'm not paying attention. I know that if I put two stitches in every stitch I come to, when I get to the stitch marker, I know I'm at the end of my round, so I don't have to keep count as much. So, I'm going back into that same stitch. It's not super large because we're using a small hook. We're using a 5mm hook, which creates tighter stitches. But, you can still see where that previous stitch was. So, you're going to go right back in that same spot. Yarn over, pull up your hook, and pull through both loops. Then we're going to do that five more times. We're going to do two stitches in each of our five remaining single crochets. So this whole project is all single crochets. It's very simple, as long as you understand that when you increase, you're just doing two single crochets. In the next stitch you come to, if it's difficult for you to see where to put your hook, remember just turn your work sideways and you have that top of your stitch that looks like a V, it's upside down right now, so it's kind of like a little mountain. You're going to go under both of those loops, I can even do it sideways. And if you need to, check to make sure you've only caught two. It's a little bit harder to catch more than two on a single crochet, but it's a good habit if you're doing other stitches because you'll be able to I'm see how they look and you can check if you have two or not, two loops. starting So as you can see, here's my stitch marker, which was the first stitch. Now I have one stitch left, so I just put two in there. to speak And I should have 12 stitches now all the way around because we increased each stitch by one. now. So we had six, we doubled them, now we have 12. Round three, same exact thing. We're doing two stitches in every stitch we come to. So at the end of this round, we should have 24 single crochets. So again, I'm going to start off my round by doing my first single crochet, then grabbing my stitch marker and putting it back in. And you can stick your stitch marker anywhere, it's not important. Just don't get the stitch markers that are fully closed, where there's no opening to them. Those are for knit. If you get those, they're going to become part of your work because they do not come out. So make sure you only get, if you're a crocheter, only buy stitch markers that can open. Knitting the closed ones, they come off as you work each row. So again, just put two in every stitch around. We'll have 24 at the end of this round. I'm on the last stitch of round three. As you can see, we're still laying pretty flat. When you put extra stitches in each round, it causes the ruffle because there's too much fabric for it to lay flat. So that's how you get the ruffle. So as we do round four and round five, you're gonna see that this is gonna start to wave up some more. So it's not too wavy yet, but it will start looking very wavy after this round. So round four, same as the last two rounds. Put your stitch marker in and start single crocheting two times in every stitch. So we were at 24, now we're going to be at 48, so keep on going. We're at the end of round four and you should be looking pretty wavy now. If you happen to be off on your stitch count, we should have 48, but if you're at 47 or 49, don't worry about it too much. It's a really forgiving pattern. It's not going to make that big of a difference. You just want to keep track of your rounds so that you don't just keep increasing by two and have no idea when to stop. So that's why we're using the stitch marker. But if you accidentally miss a stitch or add a stitch, it's not going to be a big deal, so don't worry about that. So this is our final round. We are... Double, I'm sorry, single crocheting twice in each stitch around again. I just already did two in my first stitch, so I'm going to put my stitch marker in second one there. And after this round, we will be done with the ruffly flower part, and we're just going to make the center of our flower a nice bright yellow. Okay, we're on the last two stitches of round five. And what we're going to do is something called a slip stitch fasten off. I don't know if that's the technical name, but that's what I always call it. And as you can see, when we finish, because we're working in a spiral, The end of our round is higher than the beginning of our round, so with this slip stitch fasten off is going to help bring that down so it blends better when we fasten off. So all we're going to do is just a slip stitch in the next stitch we come to, which is technically the first stitch of round five. So we're going to pull through and just slip stitch that closed, and then I always do a chain to fasten off instead of making the big hole and pulling the tail through. Now we have finished the front part of our ruffly flower, so now all we need is our center seed. Um I'm not gonna call it a seed actually, but it'll be kind of like a seed pod when we're done. So we're going to grab our yellow yarn, and we're going to switch out hooks. So we're going to trade our five millimeter For a four millimeter, so grab your four millimeter hook and we'll do the middle part of our hook. Okay I got my four millimeter hook. Make sure that you're going off of the millimeter reading for this hook. Sometimes it's a G, sometimes it's a US F hook, depending on the manufacturer, why I'm not sure. So check for the millimeter reading, that's what you want is the four millimeter, that's the size of the shaft. We're going with a smaller hook because we want our stitches to be even tighter because we're going to stuff our center and we're actually going to use our extra yarn. So kind of leave a big tail that you can stuff inside of your center. So again, we're going to do the magic adjustable loop, same as we did for the first round. We're going to reach through and do our slip stitch. We're going to do six single crochets again. Make sure you get around all of your strings, yarns, whatever So this is going to be a smaller hook, which is going to make smaller stitches and tighter stitches. So when you're working this, it's probably even more difficult to count the fronts, so use those side, use your side stitches, your V-stitches to count. Okay, so I got six, close that up. Then, round two is the same as round two in our red. We're working in a spiral still, and we're going to do two stitches in every single crochet we come to. This first one sometimes can be quite tiny, so I always use my fingernails to get under both loops if I need to. pitfalls of the magic adjustable loop that first stitch can be pretty small, but once you make Once you make your first stitch into it, usually it will open up and be easier to get into. Again, I'm going to use my stitch marker, locate it, there it is. These are a little bit more important to keep track of than the ruffle flower because we want to create a little ball, and if we have crazy stitch counts, it's not going to look too much like a ball. So make sure you're doing just two in each stitch around, so we're going to have 12 at the end of this round. And once you get to 12 stitches, Now we're going to start cupping this into an actual ball, and we're going to do that by doing just one single crochet in every stitch. So now we're going to do just a round of 12 single crochets. The stitch marker is really handy now because I can just not even pay attention to counting or what I'm doing and just put one single crochet in each stitch. So remember, if it's tough to pull through, turn your hook down. Because these are tighter stitches, it's going to be a little bit more difficult to get through them. So when you're going through those loops, point your stitch or point your hook at your stitches. When you're coming through this portion here, under the loops, pull it kind of towards. Don't go straight down because you'll get caught. Pull it directly facing your next stitch and you'll get through easily that way. The last stitch of round three. Round four is just a repeat of round three. We're going to do another 12 stitches in single crochet. We're going to start closing up our ball thing after this round. So we finished round three, three, four. Now we're on round five. This is technically the last round of crochet. We're going to decrease our stitches because now we want to get back to six stitches so that we can close this ball up. So to do that, we're going to turn each two single crochets into one. So to do that, I'm going to insert my hook in the next stitch I come to. Yarn over and pull up a loop, and then I'm going to stop and I'm going to go into the next stitch I come to and yarn over and pull up a loop. So I have three loops on my hook, I'm going to yarn over and go through all three, kind of just like a half double crochet. And that's going to bring those two stitches and turn them into one. Because this is in the round, it can get a little difficult to work these stitches. Which is, just kind of flatten your ball out, and kind of just... Push them, you know, push your stitches how you need them to get through each of those two stitches. You'll kind of twist and turn your ball as you go. It's about the easiest way to get through. So I kind of open up my ball and then I turn it so I can get to the next two stitches. And you probably want to put your stitch marker in there just in case, but these are pretty noticeable. These are pretty easy to tell from a regular single crochet because they look slightly different. Two more. And then we're going to stuff our ball. You'll notice when I point my hook down, I get through those stitches nice and easy. And then I'm going to pull my loop really long. I'm going to cut it because I'm going to use this tail to close up the end of my ball. So make it long enough to weave in real easy and to weave it in through our ball. So now we have that tail that we began with that I said make nice and long, and you're going to start stuffing it into the center of your ball to kind of poof it out. Don't worry if you did not cut enough or if you cut too much. Just stuff it in as much as you can if you have too much and cut off the extra. If you don't have enough, which I probably don't, I'm going to cut a little bit from the yellow that I just detached and add some more. So, using the yarn to stuff these small little projects is a great alternative to using polyfill because polyfill is really difficult to get a grab on in these small projects. Trying to stuff it into a small little hole, you'll find that you'll be shoving your hook through the polyfill instead of catching it because it's so slippery that it's really difficult. Let's see. Not too bad, actually. You can stuff it really stuffed or not too stuffed but I kind of like how it is right now so I'm just going to leave it like that. Now you can see that we have this weird loop. We need to close off the end of our hole so we're going the same direction as if we were crocheting. We're going to take this end piece and we're going to weave it in and out of our last six stitches. So to do that, you can either start from the outside in, so stick your hook into your next stitch, either from the outside in, or you can start from the inside out, whatever is easier for you. I'll just go outside in, and then I'm going to grab that loop and pull it through that stitch. So now my string is coming out, so now I need to send it in. So I'm going the opposite way, I'm going inside out, grabbing my loop and pulling it through, Into my next stitch, and this is weaving in and out, so whenever you see a stuffed project or an amigurumi where you have to close up a hole, this is the most likely way that you're going to be doing it. So you just go all the way around in all six stitches. Once you get back to that first stitch, take your end and just pull it tight. It's going to close up your hole. Now this is really easy to put together. So I already wove in the outside, um, tail that I had, it's over here is where I joined. Because I have this center tail, and I have this center tail, and I love to double knot things, I'm gonna reach my hook right through the center of my flower, grab that yellow tail, and pull it through, and then I'm gonna double knot these two ends. And, if you're going to use, or if you're going to attach this to something, leave these ends uncut, because you can sew them onto whatever you're attaching. Let me get a little glimpse. This is my Mother's Day present for my daughter. She made me a little bracelet. Very cute. So I just, I think that was a triple knot, actually. So I can use these to attach this to whatever I want to attach it to. But this is going to be the actual finished 3D flower. So you can put it on beanies, you can put it on a scarf, you can put it on a headband. That would be really cute for like a little girl with a little headband. Lots of different things that you can do this with, you can put it in the center of a granny square and make like a 3D flower blanket, that would be really cute too. Let me know if you can think of any other uses for it, leave me a note in the comments. But thank you for watching!