Crochet Around Fleece Using a Skip Wheel

Hi, I'm Mary Beth Temple and I'm going to show you the absolute quickest way to crochet easily around fleece squares. What I like to use is this blade in my rotary cutter, depending on what brand you purchase. It's called a perforated wheel or a skip wheel. And it goes right in your rotary cutter handle. So I have a little tiny quilting ruler here.

I have already cut my fleece squares. Now, I used to do a quarter inch but I felt like that was cutting it a little close in some instances and I feel like a half inch is too much because you get too much fabric around the end. So I'm going about 3/8 but I'm not being that picky about it. I like to line my wheel up so that there is a blade right against the end. I don't want to cut into the very edge of the fabric because if I do that, it'll be flapping in the breeze.

So my blade is lined up right against the end and then I'm going to put some pretty serious pressure on this and I'm going to run the wheel down the side and I'm going to do that on all four sides. I'm gonna take my ruler away and put a little bit of tension on here and you can see the teeny tiny holes. Now, I'm using a 3.75 millimeter crochet hook, which is a US size F and I found that that was the easiest way for me personally to get my hook into that hole. I think anything much bigger than that, you might have a little bit of difficulty. And I'm using um, a worsted weight acrylic yarn.

It's a little bit on the light side. I wouldn't go with something that was air and weight or heavier because you'd have a hard time getting it through the hole. So I did some experimentation earlier and for me, I needed to put a chain one between each single crochet to have the work lay flat. So I made a single crochet and a chain one. And then I went looking for the next hole.

Once you have gotten a couple of stitches in, it's like muscle memory, your, your fingers kind of figure out where the next hole is. You might have to experiment a little bit to find out what works for you. You want your work to lay flat, but for me, it was single crochet in each hole around and chain one in between. Now, when you get to the corner, if you're working in single crochet, you want to put three single crochets in the same little hole. And you want to do that to make sure that you can get around the corner that it still lays perfectly flat.

Once I get around the corner, I'm going to go back to my chain one and single crochet in my next little hole. You can do this all the way around. Join your round with a slip stitch in your first single crochet. That's what we were working on. And here's the one I did earlier.

Again, the trick is you want it to lay flat without any ruffling or any pulling tight. And you have a couple of choices here, you can sew your squares together. Now with just this neat little border on it or if you wanted to use a piece of fleece in the center of a project, perhaps a scarf or a shawl, you can use the single crochet round that you have put on as the base for your subsequent stitches. Once again, I'm Mary Beth Temple and I hope you had fun putting crochet on fleece.