14-Day Learn to Crochet—Working in the Round Beginning with a Magic Ring

Hi, welcome back to the 14 day Learn to Crochet series. I'm Brenda K.B. Anderson, and in this video I will be teaching you how to work in the round beginning with the magic loop. There are some other words that people use to describe the magic loop. They call it an adjustable ring, adjustable loop, magic loop.

There's lots of combinations of loops and rings and magic going on here, but it all means the same thing. So there are a couple different ways to do it, as well, but I'm gonna show you my favorite way, 'cause I think this way is pretty foolproof. So, you're going to make a circle with your yarn, like this, and then you're going to take your yarn and flip it over onto the yarn that is coming from the ball, okay? This is just like making a slipknot or the beginning of making a slipknot, so you have that little line in the middle. Then you put your crochet hook underneath that line, and instead of tightening the whole thing, you're gonna leave it loose.

You might tighten it just a little. We're gonna bring this loop over here, and I'm gonna pull on this yarn tail just to make that loop just a little smaller so I can hang onto it just a little bit. See, I'm pinching it with my fingers right here, where it kind of twists around itself. And then we are going to yarn over and do one little chain here to anchor our loop to our ring. And now you can start working into this hole that we made here, this little circle.

So for this stitch pattern, we're just gonna be working in simple single crochet. So you will just insert your hook as though this were a stitch. You just put it inside the hole, wrap your yarn over, pull up a loop, yarn over and pull through two. This can be a little awkward when you first start because you're kind of managing this loop at the same time that you're trying to make your stitch, and it's kind of wiggling. But, you know, give it a couple of tries and I bet it'll come together easily for you.

So I just made my ring just a little bit smaller 'cause I felt like it was too hard to hold on to. You just need to have it big enough so that you can put all the stitches you want to inside. So we did one stitch, and in order to make a flat circle, a flat circle in single crochet when you're starting from the magic loop, you would need six single crochets in that circle. So we've done one, we'll do two, three, four, five, six. So the taller the stitch you make, if you wanna make a flat circle, the taller the stitch you make, the more stitches you're going to need to put into that ring.

But for single crochet, you just need six. So we've got one, two three, four, five, six. And it sometimes is a little hard to see that first stitch. So if you're unsure about if this is the stitch or that's the stitch or this is the stitch, you can't tell where the first stitch is, I would recommend counting backwards from your hook, 'cause you can see those clearly and you know you did six. So one, two, three, four, five, one, two, three, four, five, and six.

So this is the first one that you made, right there. So, at this point, you need to decide if you are going to work in joined rounds, which means you work a slip stitch, and then chain up and continue around. Or if you're just going to work in un-joined rounds, just working in the round in a spiral. So I will show you the joined rounds first, and then I will show you just working in a spiral. So to do the joined round, you're going to insert your hook in that first stitch, yarn over, pull through a loop, and you're gonna pull through that loop on your hook.

Now be careful because this join is not going to count as a stitch. It will not count as a stitch. It's just gonna be a little horizontal bar used to join the last stitch to the first stitch. So then you would chain one for a beginning chain, because single crochet is not very tall, you just need one chain, and you're going to start by putting your next single crochet into that same stitch as you worked your slip stitch into, the same stitch where you joined into. So on the next round, we are going to need twice as many stitches because when you work from the center out, every time you move out, you need to add stitches in order to make it lay flat.

So if you take a look at our stitch chart here, you can see that when you start in the middle, here's our six stitches, one, two, three, four, five, six. And then in the next round, round two, you have two single crochet stitches into that one on each stitch, so you have double the amount of stitches on round two. So we're gonna put two single crochet stitches into each stitch around, beginning with that first stitch. So insert your hook, pull up a loop. Yarn over, pull through two.

That was the first single crochet and the second single crochet, and we're gonna do that all the way around One, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two. So we should have 12, 'cause we started with six, and we have double the amount. Now, you can see with this ring here that I had tightened, it started to loosen. So all you have to do to tighten it again is just pull on that yarn tail, and it'll tighten right up to nothing. If later on it has loosened up when you are weaving in your ends, just pull it tight, and then you weave in your ends.

And once you weave in your ends, that's gonna anchor that stitch and it'll keep it from opening. Okay, so we have worked 12 stitches around, and we are going to work our join 'cause we're working in joined rounds. So, this was the first single crochet that we made, and we're gonna slip stitch right into that single crochet. And if you have trouble seeing where your first stitch is, I would recommend putting a stitch marker in the top of your stitch every time you begin a round. So there's the join from last time, here's the joint from this time, and on the next round in order to make it flat, you put an increase in every other stitch.

So we're gonna chain one for our beginning chain to make it tall enough. And so we're gonna do two single crochets in the first stitch, one, two, and then one single crochet into the next stitch, one. And then we're gonna repeat that all the way around. One, two, and one. One, two, and one.

One, two, and one. One, two, and one. One, two, and one. And so we've made it all the way around to the beginning, and we would slip stitch into the first single crochet, which is right here, slip stitch, and that slip stitch creates, see those little horizontal bars? So that's on every stitch.

So if you didn't want to see those horizontal bars, because they can be a little bit distracting if you're making a nice smooth hat or something and you don't want to have that, this ends up kind of going in a swirl, like a diagonal, because of the anatomy of the crochet stitches. If you don't like that line veering off to the side, then you can simply just crochet around and around and around without joining. So what that looks like is, let's say we didn't join here, you would begin at exactly the same way, with the magic ring, six single crochets. And then instead of doing your join, you just simply start crocheting in the first of the six single crochets. So we've already worked up three rounds, so we're just going to begin working here in that first single crochet, without doing a join, just like that.

So we just worked a single crochet without doing the slip stitch join. So this round, we're going to do two stitches in the first stitch, and then two stitches where there are no increases. So you increase, and then you work two stitches. So, one, two, and then work one, two. One, two in the same stitch.

And one, two. One, two. One, two. So, if you are working on a flat circle and you don't want to be counting, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, you can put a stitch marker into that increase stitch and move it up every time you go around, when you work into the first stitch of your increase and you make another increase, then you move the stitch marker up to that one. So you would have stitch markers in every single increase to remind you to increase, so you would not have to count.

So we've worked all the way around, and instead of doing our slip stitch join, we just keep working. So on the next round, we would do two stitches in this stitch, and then three, one, two, three. And let me show you what that looks like. So you can see here, we have those horizontal joins, and that was because we joined the first couple of rounds. And after that, there's no more joins.

You just work around and around in a spiral, and then you don't see those little tiny little horizontal lines. So this is an example of single crochet worked in the round without the joins. You are still continuing to go around and around and around and you're just making a spiral around and around. So let me show you what that looks like on a stitch diagram so you can understand how all of these stitches relate to each other. So, we began by working that magic ring or the magic loop in the middle, and we worked our six single crochets here.

Then on the next round, we worked two single crochets into each one of these single crochets. On the next round and every round after that, if you're making a flat circle, you can work an increase into the first part of the increase from the previous round. As you go up, you will have more stitches in between that are just worked even, but in order to know where to place your increased stitches, just remember that you work it into the first increase that you come to. If you have trouble seeing where your increases are, you can always mark every single increase so you don't have to count. So this is a great way to start out something like a top-down hat, where you're beginning from a circle and working down, or it's also super popular in the world of amigurumi.

Many amigurumi, that's a stuffed crochet or knitted toy, they begin with this type of magic ring and working out from the center, just like that. So, in our next video, we are going to be learning all about working into the front loops of our single crochets and working into the back loops of our single crochets, so please come and join me to learn all about that.