Crochet Toys and Techniques

Hello everybody, and welcome to the Creative Crochet Corner live Q&A. If you are new to the brand, creative Crochet Corner is your online resource for all things crochet, where you can find everything it is that you need, from basic instruction all the way to advanced techniques. My name is Leah, I am your moderator, an every month, Creative Crochet Corner streams live for about an hour to answer all of your crochet questions. If you are viewing on our website, make sure you submit your questions and comments into the chat box you find below the video player. You can also participate by submitting your questions into the chat on Facebook or YouTube.

Now, today, with us, we have our crochet instructor and the managing editor of the Creative Crochet Corner, Brenda K.B. Anderson. She's in the studio today, ready to answer all of your questions live during this Q&A session. We have to say welcome to Brenda. We're excited to have you join us.

I'd love for you, as usual, to start by telling us just a little bit about yourself, and then I'm gonna have a couple questions for you before we get into the chat. So let us know a little bit about you, Brenda. Okay. Hi, everybody! I'm excited to be here, answering questions.

Well, I learned how to crochet when I was very young. My mom taught my sister and I at the same time, probably to keep us out of trouble. We made lots and lots of really long chains for a long time. And then I moved on to making clothes for my Cabbage Patch Kids that were all kind of, well, they were very creatively put together 'cause I didn't read patterns and I also didn't find any instruction on putting anything together, sewing things together, so that, you know, I just kind of did it my own way. And then I stopped crocheting for a while, I kind of moved more into sewing for a long time, and then when I was in college, at some point, I found a crochet hook and some yarn packed away in a box somewhere, and I thought, "Do I know how to do this?

I don't remember." And then I actually did, weirdly, I remembered how to do it from when I was a little kid. But this time I was like, "Okay, I'm actually gonna figure out where I'm supposed to be putting my hook for these stitches and how many yarn overs to do," and I didn't really know the difference between different stitches when I was little, but I learned all that stuff and I just kept going. I just really loved crochet, and I still stuck with sewing, and I learned how to knit. I just really love all the crafty things. All right, now I can see a couple things to the side of you, Brenda, that I'd love to talk about before we get into our questions.

So if you missed it and you're viewing right now, Brenda was live earlier this morning, providing a tutorial on how to make those little crochet hamsters that you see. They're so adorable! If you missed it, you can catch the replay at any time, and of course, download the free pattern right now for yourselves. You can find that link available in the description of today's video, but I'd love, Brenda, if you could tell us a little bit about this pattern, your inspiration, anything that maybe hit you at the end of the tutorial that you'd like to share with our viewers now. Floor is yours for that.

Well, I really enjoy making toys, it's one of my favorite things to do. I love the fact that you can take a ball of yarn... I mean, balls of yarn have personality a little bit to me, but probably not to most people. Although for many of you, they probably do, too. But I love that you could take this ball of yarn and a little stuffing and you can make something that has all this personality, and looks cute, and it makes people wanna hug it.

Like, why would you wanna hug a ball of yarn? Because it's so cute now! So I've always loved making toys, and for a long time, for about 20 years, I worked in the industry of making full-body costume characters. So, you know, like mascots, or, you know, the full body, the head, the feet, the body, the everything. So I was around super cute shapes all the time, and that kind of informed some of my ideas about what makes things cute and how to achieve total cuteness in your critters.

But now that I'm focusing more on crochet, I'm just kind of channeling that back into my crochet projects. This is a really fun project. it may look really complicated, 'cause there's, like, a gazillion pieces here. You know, two ears, tail, two feet, two arms, a muzzle, a head, a belly patch, a bo- Like, there's a lot of pieces, but none of the pieces are that tricky to make. It's actually pretty simple if you just take it step-by-step and make one piece at a time, and then yeah.

And then watch the replay if you haven't already, if you weren't already with me earlier today, then you can watch the replay of the video for some of those tricky spots to help you learn how to put your pieces together, pin 'em on, and all that sort of stuff. Oh, they look so adorable, Brenda. I'm really excited to see those. And like Brenda said, if you were with us earlier and you have a few questions, you can ask her those, as well. Brenda, we do have some questions already dropping into the chat box, so before we dig in, one more announcement from me.

This is pretty exciting, today we're filming live on the first day of summer, and our friends at Craftsy have a fun new summer collection ebook and it is 75% off, so that's a pretty big deal. You're going to want to use the coupon code "SUMMER75," and the collection includes 28 festive crafts just for you to make, from DIY 4th of July crafts and cool treats to beach gear galore. You are guaranteed an entire summer full of making and an unforgettable season of sweet treats and playful projects. So that's 77 pages of summer making content, 28 projects with templates and instructions, and you can find the link in the chat, make sure to use that coupon code "SUMMER75" for 75% off, and that's good through July 5th, 2022. So I'll make that announcement again towards the end so that everyone gets a chance to jump in on that deal.

But in the meantime, we've got time for some questions, Brenda. So we're gonna dig right into the chat box. We have one question that came in a little early, and I'm gonna ask it first. This comes in from Mary, and Mary is wondering how you finish off for straight edges when you're crocheting. Okay, so Mary, you can correct me if I'm going off on the wrong path here, but I think what you mean is when you work back and forth in rows and then you end up with an edge on your project, maybe it looks something like this, and it's kind of bumpy, like, how you would make that a little tidier after you've made the piece.

So you can crochet all the way around. That's the cool thing about crochet, is you can be working in one direction, and then you can turn it this way and start working in this direction. So what I usually do, I usually don't consider a square of fabric, like a dish rag or whatever, or a swatch like this, I don't consider it completely finished until I do a little edging all the way around. You can see this piece, all the edges, they look the same, they have those little V-stitches across each one of them and that makes the rows nice and tidy. So let me show you how to do that on this piece since it's not finished on the edge.

You can just, after you've crocheted your last row, you can just turn your work and start working into those row ends. So let's just imagine we've worked across the row, and just imagine we're still working in the same yarn, and then you can just start doing a single crochet across. So in order to know where to put your hook, you can put it anywhere that kind of makes sense. You'd put it about as far down as you normally would for a single crochet. And you're looking for places that are not a large space, like, you might think to yourself, "Oh, that's the big hole right there.

I'm just gonna put my hook in there and then I'll make my stitch." And then look what happens, it gets even bigger. So when you're working into those row ends, you wanna just insert your hook into a tighter space, yarn over, pull up a loop, yarn over, pull through two to do a single crochet, just like that. And you can just single crochet all the way across the row. Just make sure that when you're doing that, your edge isn't starting to ripple like this, 'cause if it's rippling, that means you're putting too many stitches all the way across. You could use the same amount of stitches if you really want to, but you have to go down a hook size.

Basically, you're getting too much width on that edge, and you need to either do fewer stitches or use a smaller hook in order to make that a straight edge. The other thing you wanna check for, if you're not making enough stitches across your edge, it's gonna start to cup and kind of curve in. See, that looks pretty good, but if your piece was started, if your piece was looking like this, that means you don't have enough stitches if it's kind of bubbling here and then tight across there. So putting an edging all the way across your work, that makes it look very smooth and tidy. Another thing is, to keep those edges nice and straight, every time you turn your work at the end of a row, if you do exactly the same motion, so, you know, you do your turning chain, choose whether you're doing your turning chain first, and then you're turning your row, or if you're doing it after you turn.

I myself like to do them first because it's, for some reason, easier for me, so I will do my turning chain, and then I will always turn my work like I'm turning the pages in a book, in this direction. So if you turn your... I almost said pages. If you turn your work exactly the same way every time, then it makes the edges of your row, or the edges of your row ends become a little bit tidier because it's the same repeating twisting of the yarns. Any little thing can make it look a little bit, like, make the bumps on the edge look a little bit less uniform.

You know, if you do a turning chain and then turn it the other way, sometimes you can actually see that. So, you know, that's something to keep in mind, too, and just make sure that you're actually stitching into the last stitch of the round and you're not accidentally adding or subtracting any stitches. You can use a stitch marker on each end of your row, and that will help things be a little bit tidier, too. I know a lot of people do struggle with their row ends being kind of wonky or, you know, even if you do it perfectly, even if you crochet perfectly, you're still gonna get that sort of bumpy look along your row ends unless you do some sort of edging. Okay, let's move on to Fran's question next.

Fran's question, I don't believe, correct me if I'm wrong, Fran, is specific to the project that you just finished your live tutorial on, Brenda, but it's got some similar themes. So Fran made a bunny head blanket, but has struggled with how to attach the head and the ears and stitch the face onto the bunny, and the pattern that Fran was using didn't have instructions for that. So Fran's looking for the best way to add those body parts together to the blanket, and also how to stitch the face. Okay, well, I can show you, actually, a little bit on my sample that I was making here. This is the little guy that I was working on earlier.

He's missing an ear and has some body parts missing, but right now, I am in the middle of sewing on some of my pieces. So you will have, you know, instead of sewing things onto a round piece like this, you'll be sewing it onto a blanket. Actually, here, let's make something really weird, you guys. We're gonna just sew this foot onto this blanket. This will help, right?

So I don't know if the bottom of your head is closed like a ball or if it's open. If it's open and you have some sort of edge to stitch to, that makes it a little easier. So all you'd need to to do is, you know, put your needle through the blanket, and then put your needle through the edge of the head, you know, and take a stitch. You can just do a whip stitch here, put it through the blanket, take a little tiny stitch, take a little, you know, just a little bite out of it, and then come up through the bottom of the head. So you may have a completely closed head.

I don't know if your head is just a round ball that you're trying to sew on. If that is the case and you're trying to sew something that is enclosed and you don't have an edge to sew through, you can still do a whip stitch into it. Here's the head that I'm sewing onto this body. And what I was doing is just basically the same thing, here, I'll just grab a little strand of yarn, here. And, you know, this works for the ears, this works for the head.

The main thing is you wanna pin your pieces on and look at them first before you just start sewing things together because moving things around can really make a big difference in how your toys look. You know, how your little, I'm assuming this is kind of like a lovey project where you have a bunny head attached to the blanket. All right, this head is enclosed, but you can still take a tiny stitch out of the head, and then take a tiny stitch out of the body, just like that. Whoops, I should've anchored my yarn a little better. Here, let me try that again.

Anchor it in a couple directions. All right. Okay, so you can take a little stitch out of the head. Just grab a little bit and then take a little bit outta the body. Or the blanket, either way, little stitch out of the head, and a little bit out of the body.

So you're just making your needle go into one and then out of the other. So you're kind of doing like a loop of stitches, around and around like that. And if you're sewing on an ear to the head, you know, I'm assuming you have two ears, so you probably want to pin them both on, and take a look at them, and see if they're in the spot you wanna be in. And when you're pinning things together, if you haven't done a lot of this work before, you may not know that when you're pinning something, like an amigurumi toy, it doesn't help that much if you just take your pin and stick it in there. I mean, it'll kind of hold it, but the best way to pin your pieces together is to use your pin and act like it's a sewing needle.

So you'll go, I'm gonna take a little bite out of the head, a little bite out of the ear, and back into the head. So you're sort of sewing with your pin. And that really anchors it a lot better, it holds it tighter to your project. I'm gonna do the same thing back here. Into the ear, into the head, and then...

See, I'm using my finger here to push the fabric down so my pin can come back out, and then pushing it back into the ear. And then you can take a look at where you put it, see if it looks good, and then you can do the same process where you are just basically doing a whip stitch. Here we go. This came out of the ear, so we're just gonna go right into the head, take a little, you know, a little bite out of that with the needle, and then take a little bite out of the ear. So I'm sure your ears are shaped like bunny ears, but I think that this process should work pretty much the same on your project.

Just get it pinned on, pinned into place, make sure it's in a place you like it in, and then you can just do a whip stitch. And then when you're done, you can just weave in your ends, and there you have it. Oh, fantastic, that was a great little demo there, Thank you. Ooh, Rhonda was actually watching the last tutorial, she says. She's got our next question.

Rhonda's wondering if you can show us the magic loop again. Oh, sure. Okay. Yes. So there are quite a few different ways to do the magic loop.

I find this way to be the most straightforward, but if you look at the Creative Crochet Corner website, and you look up "magic loop," there are at least, I think there's at least two other versions on there that you can look at. All right, so this is how I do it. So here's my ball of yarn, and I just have the strand coming off of it. I just draw myself a little cursive E shape, a little loop. Okay, so this is on top, and then I take the loop, and I fold it over onto this piece of yarn, the piece that is connected to the ball, okay?

So I just flip it over like that. And then I just put my hook underneath that center strand. And I'm gonna hold where, you can see right here, this is where your pieces of yarn are crossing, I'm gonna hold that to my hook with my finger. Okay, so I'll put this here, and I kind of just grab onto that little part with my finger, just gently. And then you can pull, I have my hand around here, but I'm also pulling here to kind of shrink that up a little bit, okay?

And then I just do one yarn over, pull through just a little chain, and that anchors it to my magic loop. And then when I start working, I start working across here. So the thing with my method is you're really only crocheting over one strand of yarn. There are other methods where you're actually crocheting over the part that twists, and that may be a little bit sturdier, and it might un... Let's see, it might not come apart or open up as easily.

This method, when you do your single crochets in here, and then you pull it tight, like this, you do have this little hole here, and this could work its way out. So the only thing is you have to just make sure you weave this end in when you're done with your project, or when you've gone a little further, you know, you have something to weave it into. I just weave this in back and forth so that this loop won't just come apart. All right. All right, thank you for showing us that.

These demos are fantastic. So, of course, if you're just joining us, Brenda is here to answer all of your questions. She's very good at providing on-the-fly hands-on demonstrations of things you might be curious about, so don't be afraid to ask a stitch question or anything you've really been curious about. Brenda is gonna have you covered. A couple things from me before we get to our next question.

Just drawing your attention to the chat box. Our team behind the scenes has put in that link to the summer crafting ebook from Craftsy, so you can find that there along with the coupon code, but you can also find the magic loop link on the Creative Crochet Corner that Brenda just mentioned, so if that's something that you're interested in, you can find that link in the chat box as well. And, of course, keep your questions coming. We've got plenty of time and we'll get to as many as we can. We're going to Mary's question next, Brenda.

So we're going to go back to the theme of trying to keep things straight, and on this question, Mary wants to know, how do you keep a chevron stitch straight? Okay, so that kind of depends on what specific chevron stitch you're doing, but you don't want to increase or decrease at all on that row. Actually, I think this might be a little more clear if I drew you a picture. I don't know if you ever look at charts, stitch charts, but this is a very helpful thing to do if you need to visualize something, like where your stitches are going, how they interconnect to each other. So chevron stitches usually have- Okay, so they're zigzaggy like this, we'll draw that first, okay.

So I can get my stitches in the right spot. So usually what's happening here is you start at one point, and you are doing some sort of decreasing. So let's say we have two single crochet stitches and they're decreased into one stitch. Then we have some single crochet stitches. This is just very simplified, okay?

And this may not be the same stitch pattern that you're working in exactly, but this is just sort of the theory behind it, so I think understanding how it works will help you. So when you get up to the top of your chevron, there's some sort of increase going on here. So let's say we have three stitches going into one stitch. Here, let me make this a little more clear. I didn't bring my eraser today, I forgot, so guess what I'm gonna use, this little piece of crocheted fabric, ooh!

Look, look it, I made myself my own eraser. Okay, so let's just imagine you're going back down the chevron, and then there's some sort of decrease happening here. So let's say that this is three stitches going into one stitch, okay? And then some more stitches going in this direction. Again, at the top of the chevron, we're gonna have, like, an increase of some sort, maybe three stitches going into the center stitch there.

Okay, so these little plus signs all stand for "single crochet." Okay, so then on the next row, we're gonna have the same sort of thing happening. It's the same, every row is the same. You're not doing... Well, for most, I should say for most chevron patterns, you're just gonna keep repeating that same row over and over. So then these two stitches will join into one.

But how do you- So if you're doing a decrease here, that must mean you're doing an increase over here, so we're gonna do one, two, three stitches all going into that one stitch. So every time you make another row, you need to maintain your stitches. So you're increasing in one place, you're decreasing in another place, but ultimately, you should have the same number of stitches across your chevron. So I'm not sure which exact, you know, like, what your stitch pattern is, that it could be... It could be, you know, double crochet, or single crochet, or it could have waves instead of zigzags, but basically, you need to take a look at what your stitch pattern is, and if the pattern didn't come with a chart, you can draw your own by just doing what I did.

Like, if it says "decrease two," or, you know, "single crochet two together," and then some single crochets, and then three single crochets into the next stitch, like how all three of these were placed into this stitch, you could draw your own to understand how many decreases you're putting over here and how many increases you're putting over here. 'Cause some, you know, if you have a really steep chevron stitch, you might have two decreases in a row, or you might be decreasing by three stitches, I don't know. And then you're adding, you know, enough stitches to make up for it up at the top here. Let me know if that doesn't answer your question. I know that people think in different ways, but it's...

Showing you a chart of it is the best way I can think of to kind of explain what's happening. So if you wanna make sure you're not losing stitches or gaining stitches, that's what, you know, if your chevron, or if anything you're making, is kind of going, in or out, or off to the side, that all has to do with you're either getting an extra stitch on the edge or not enough stitches on the edge, that's pretty much almost always what the culprit is. So just knowing exactly where your last stitch is, using stitch markers to mark the first and last stitches of the row, that can help a lot. All right, well, I will keep an eye out. Mary, if you want any more clarification, let us know in the chat box, we can always revisit this.

Brenda might get the chance to use her eraser again. Yeah, my super fancy eraser. Part of a hamster head. I really love that. Alright, we've got Jan next, and Jan has a few questions, so we're just going to go piece-by-piece through her comment here in the chat box.

Jan says she's crocheted quite a bit in the past, but there were a couple things that she was never officially taught. So first, Brenda, if you could talk about what you do when you come across knots in a stain of yarn, Jan wants to know if you cut them out or do you just crochet through them? Usually, I cut them out. So if, you know, you're crocheting along, and you have something... Yeah, usually if I come to- Usually in a ball of yarn, they will have like this sneaky little knot in there.

You know, you almost don't even notice it at first, and then all of a sudden it's in your work, and you're like, "Ugh!" So usually, as you're crocheting along, you come up to a little small knot like this. Let me just... Let me just pretend we were crocheting along here. All right, so we're working along. Oh, I just felt the knot on my finger, boo!

Okay, what do we do? So at this point, I would wanna leave enough yarn here that I can weave it in. So usually, what I do is I just make a loop, really long, like that. I'll back it up a little bit so that I can do my last yarn over with the yarn that's on the other side of the knot. I'll just pull through with that.

And then, usually, I'm the kind of person who likes to work over my yarn tails as I go. Then I just kind of hold them both here. Unless it's making your project look too bulky, then don't do 'em both at the same time. You can do one on one row and one on the next row if you want, or you can just weave them in later. That's totally fine.

But I usually just do this, and then I weave in my tails if needed, or just let them hang on the back of my work, and then I weave in my tails later. But I almost never let the yarn just be in my project, because you don't know... You don't really know how strong that yarn is, or that knot is gonna be, and usually, you don't have a lot of a tail after the yarn. So I have seen, some people will intentionally, when they're joining a new ball of yarn, they will intentionally tie a knot in their strand, but I feel like that's only a good idea if you leave yourself a, you know, long enough yarn tail. Okay, let's just say.

Let's just say. You know, if you left this much, or if for some reason when you come across your yarn, and it's been tied off with this extra, you can just keep going and let that... Let me pull it out. You can just keep going, and let that not come up next to your work, and then weave in those ends, as long as your knot doesn't bother you. For me, it would bother me 'cause I don't, I don't know, I just don't like to see that lump in my fabric.

But see how I just crocheted and there's the knot? If the tails are long enough, then you can weave them in. But if you have this super short tails, or no tails at all, and the knot, then I don't trust the knot. I just don't trust the knot. It could come apart at any moment, and then you're just gonna be like, "Ugh, why didn't I just weave those in earlier?

And now I have to go back in and fix the hole in my thing." You actually kind of bumped into Jan's next question already. She was wondering, how do you weave in ends? Can you just crochet over them as you add new yarns? So we kind of saw that, but talk about some other options. Yep, so you can definitely weave in your ends, like how I was showing you, like, by just crocheting over them.

You just wanna make sure that it's not constricting your work or making a big lump in your work, but otherwise, you can just weave them in that way. But one thing about yarn ends is that they oftentimes will find ways of working themselves back out. If they just go in one direction, and one direction only, meaning you just crochet over it, you better make that a pretty long yarn tail. Like, I would say two, three inches long, probably three inches long, something like that, to keep that in there. Otherwise, you can crochet over your work for a little ways, and take the remaining yarn tail, and weave it back in the opposite direction through a different path, okay?

So let me show you. Let me show you what I'm talking about here. So let's say... Let me back this up. We'll make these a little bit longer this time.

All right, so let's say we were crocheting along with this piece and then we ran out a yarn, all right? La, la-la, la-la, we're just crocheting along, Oh, isn't this awesome? And then you're like, "Oh, there's nothing in my hand. Okay, I guess I gotta add a new ball of yarn." So here we go. So we can just add that by doing our last stitch, and then yarning over with the new ball of yarn, like that.

Then we have these two yarn tails, right? So we can crochet over them, and if we crochet over them, you can crochet over just one, you can crochet over two if it isn't too bulky. But if you don't crochet long enough, they might work their way back out and you may end up with a hole. So what I like to do is I like to just weave them in in the opposite direction so that they don't wiggle their way out. Usually when I'm weaving in my ends, I weave them in multiple directions, like three ways, but it just depends on the project and how sticky your yarn is, how much you trust it.

So since we kind of stitched over it there, we'll just go down here, you just kind of choose some place to thread your yarn through that's not gonna show on the front. And it's best if you can get your needle to split the yarn strands apart, like, see how I'm just getting a little part of the strand? If you do that, then it gives you a little bit more friction and it won't make your yarn pull out quite so easily, your yarn won't slip out. So I like to go in at least two directions, if not three. I've gone a little ways this way.

You're gonna wanna go, like, an inch or two, and then turn around and go back the other direction, or maybe go down here. Another thing is that, you don't see too often, is weaving in your ends vertically. So normally, because all of our stitches are in that horizontal row, it's just easier to just send your needle through. But if you're weaving your end into something that needs to stretch a lot, like this, stretching it a lot like this is gonna make those yarn tails work their way out a little bit, or it's gonna constrict your work. So if you wanna rely on the stretch of your piece, you can just weave in your yarn tails, like, by just sort of finding some strands in a vertical direction, even though it doesn't seem...

You know, like, it might seem a little bit trickier at first. Once you get used to that, it's not so bad. So that that way, when you stretch it this way, it doesn't matter at all, there's just a strand going that way and you still don't see it on the outside of your work. I hope that explains the weaving in the ends thing. Those are great demos.

Thank you again for sharing those with us. This one's a little bit more of a generic question. Do you have any suggestions on crocheting looser? Yeah, that is something that a lot of people struggle with because, especially when you're learning, or you're, you know, working really hard on something, you kind of have a certain amount of tension in your body. It's hard to just be like, "Oh, I'm gonna crochet looser!" It's just really hard to do that.

So if you wanna crochet looser, I recommend taking your time and looking at what's happening when you're crocheting. So say I was crocheting along, and when you make your stitch, let's say we're just doing... Let's say we're doing a single crochet stitch. Okay, so we're gonna insert our hook, yarn over, pull up a loop, it's this loop right here that's going to make your stitch taller or shorter, and this loop right here is kind of the loop that controls how wide things are. Because watch what happens, when we yarn over here, see how that loop becomes the height of the stitch, and this loop sits on top, it's the little hat on top that kind of controls how wide it is.

So if you're just looking at your work, you can pull up a little more than you normally do, and yarn over, and pull through, see if that fixes your problem. A lot of times people don't pull up quite as far here. Another thing is when you do that final pull-through, you can pull it through just a little bit more to get a wider loop. So you're basically, when you're trying to loosen up, what you're trying to do is just make everything a little bigger, make all those loops a little bigger when you go through. So if I, on purpose, try to crochet tightly, I'm pulling on this really hard right here and that's making this loop really tight, pulling it through.

It may have something to do with how tight you're holding the yarn. And then we pull through there and we make a very small stitch. So this, where your yarn feeds from, if that isn't loose and able to slide right through, it could just be, you know, that could be the culprit there. So you may wanna look at how you hold onto your yarn. This is my favorite way to hold onto my yarn, where I have my yarn going over, under, over, under, like that.

Like this, over, under, over, under, it's kind of woven. Because you can have a lot of control over the tension of your yarn. If you put your fingers together, I mean, that really can't even slip. If you let your fingers be a little looser, it comes, it just feeds through. So I would, you know, if you don't already do this, try it and see if that helps because you may be able to- It may be just something like when you're holding onto your yarn, you may be pulling this a little too tight.

That's not allowing the loop on your hook to be big enough. And it, you know, when you make this pull-up motion, it might just be too tight here, but if it's able to just slide through, you can make all those loops a little bigger, making your tension a little looser. All right, we are to Jan's very last question here with this one. This is a good one, we actually do get this from crocheters of all experience levels. If you are gifting pieces, especially blankets, Jan wants to know, do you need to launder and block those prior to gifting them?

I think it depends on, first of all, who you're making it for, and what fiber you're using. I feel like, yes, getting everything wet and blocking it, you know, if you're using a wool, my preferred method of blocking wool is with water and not with steam. But you can certainly steam wool. That means you would put your iron on the highest steam setting and just sort of hover it above. Like, you can even get it, you know, you should test it out so you don't hurt your fibers at all, but usually when I'm steam blocking something, I'm about an inch, maybe an inch and a half away from my work as I'm sending the steam out.

You don't ever wanna just put your iron directly on your work 'cause that's not good for your stitches. But if you're doing something in wool, you can just wet block it, you can get it wet, and let it dry, but a blanket is so big. I don't know if people really wet block their blankets very often. You'd have to have a very big place to spread that all out. Unless you're making, like, a pieced blanket, and then you block all of the pieces first, and then crochet or stitch them together, that would work.

But I think, you know, it wouldn't hurt to launder. Like, if you're doing acrylic, it wouldn't hurt to launder it. With acrylic projects, I almost always steam block those instead of wet blocking those because I just feel like wet blocking acrylic doesn't really do that much. I mean, it does do a little bit, but it's not... You'd be surprised, when you steam block acrylic, it gives it so much more drape and makes everything look so much more uniform, it's surprising.

I don't know, if it were me making a blank- Actually, I'm making a blanket for someone and I don't plan on blocking that blanket, but I think a lot of it just depends on how your blanket looks. You know, if you're happy with how your stitches look, if they look neat and tidy and you think it looks nice, I don't think you need to worry about blocking it. If your stitches look like they could be evened out a little bit, or maybe there's some particular kind of pattern in it that you wanna highlight a little bit more, like if it's cables, or lace, or something like that that might benefit from the blocking, then yeah, you can try blocking it if you have a big enough area to do that. All right, well, best of luck. Always, we like to crowdsource here, too, so if anybody has experience, specifically blocking maybe a large blanket, and you have tips, you can drop those into the chat box as well.

We love to hear some of your own projects, and some of your successes, and maybe some of your lessons that you've learned, as well. A quick hello to Mariana. Mariana doesn't have a question, but she said "hi" and that this project, I believe she's talking about those cute little hamsters, looks really nice. And a reminder from me, the link to that can be found in the description of this video, I believe also in the chat box, as well. So you can go ahead and check out the link to Brenda's tutorial from earlier today.

If you missed it, go ahead and download that free pattern. Check out out the tutorial, as well. Really cute way to get a little project going. I love looking at those all the way through today. We've got a couple more questions to get to, as well.

We're gonna talk amigurumi next. I know, Brenda, this is one of your favorites. And Winnie Lee is wondering how you change the colors when you're working in a spiral and have those colors' ends meet evenly. That's a good question. Let's see.

Okay, so when you're doing that, you can work in joined rounds. So even if you're working in a spiral, like you said, you're going around and around- So the difference between working in joined rounds and working in a spiral, the spiral, it just means you're going around, and around, and around, and around, and you're not at the end of your round, you're not doing a slip stitch joint into the first stitch and then a beginning chain. That's the only difference. So say you're working around and round in a spiral. When you're doing a stripe of a color, you really do need to start that not in a spiral.

So even if, like, this has been worked in a spiral, you can see it ended here, there was a join, a slip stitch join, and then we can change color to this green. So we would just pull up a loop, chain one, and whether or not you want that to start as your first stitch or not, I almost never have my beginning chain, it's just count as a stitch because it's just personal preference. So I'm gonna just start doing my, um... We'll just do single crochets into this loop, here. So what that does, when you have that slip stitch join, and then you chain one, it's like a little ladder that brings it up so you have an edge on that piece of your stripe.

So let's say you've worked all the way around this thing, I'm not gonna do it. We're just gonna tuck that towards the back, and we're coming around to finish up our stripe, okay? this is gonna get real messy for a second, but I'll figure out how to resolve it. All right. There we go.

So we're still just single crocheting around our piece. And we get to the end, and that's where we need to do our slip stitch join. Okay, so we've worked into our last stitch, and then, we're gonna do a slip stitch in the top. And some people will tell you, actually a lot of people will tell you, when you do this- Say that I was gonna have a green stripe here, and then I was gonna do a different color above it. Actually, I have another color, so we'll just try that.

Some people will tell you that you need to insert your hook to do your slip stitch and switch to the next color. I don't really like doing that. I like to join it with the same color as what I've been working in. So then I have this extra loop. The reason they tell you to change is so that you have this loop here, and that becomes your next chain, and then you work around, and you have this color that's already coming up into the next row, and if you don't want that, that's why you change on the last yarn over.

However, I really like to just join it with the same color, and then I will yarn over with the new color, like this, and then I just pull on that yarn tail until it just completely disappears. So it doesn't matter that it was there. And then I will do a chain one, and then begin working a round again. So basically, if you're working around in a round, if you're working in a spiral and you wanna do a stripe of another color, you have to join your stitch at the end, and then start with the new color, the stripe you're gonna work in, like we did here with the green. Here, let me pull on these a little so you can see how well it blends.

Got a lot of funny loops back here, which wouldn't have happened if I had just worked all the way around. But you can see how the green connects all the way across here because we slip stitched into that. Let me just do some chains across to the other side, we'll just do another stripe in this, maybe you'll see it a little more clearly in this lighter color. Trying another method of cheating the system here and just working over here, 'cause that last loop got a little crazy. All right, so we're just continuing around and we're finishing up our stripe.

We get to the last stitch of the round, and then we're gonna join to the top of that first stitch right here. I like to join, like, you could do your join with the new color of what you want the next row to be. I like to just join with the same color, and then switch it to the new color at this point, and then I just pull on that color to make it disappear. And then you do your chain. And mark your next stripe.

So, you know, it isn't absolutely perfect. You know, you can see there's a little bit of weirdness here where you do your joins and things like that, it's just a little bit different. But you do, you know, that line will visually connect all the way across instead of being split. Like, if you start working a round, you know, you end up up here, and then your stripe is not gonna connect. That's why you have to join it and then step up to the next row with that beginning chain.

I hope that helps. All right, that visual was really helpful, there. Fran, or Jan actually just dropped in that you're doing a great job of explaining, thank you for answering all of her questions. This is the first day Jan's been able to watch live, so it's been just video before today, and playback, but thank you for joining us live, Jan. This is all the good stuff that you get from Brenda when you get to ask her these questions and get these live demos.

Yeah, I'm always so happy when people join us, especially, you know, if they were at the other thing earlier that I did, and then they come here and ask questions. I just feel like, "Oh, good, okay. They checked out what I had to say earlier and they came back!" Yes. All right, I'm going to put a little reminder out. We're getting a little bit close to the end of our time, so if you've been sitting on a question, this is where you wanna drop it into the chat box for Brenda.

We have a couple that are still sitting there to get to, but I wanna make sure that you drop your question in and we'll run right up to the end of our time with all the questions that we have. Our next question comes in from somebody that's watching on YouTube. This is from Sparkle's Hope Chest. And the question is, Brenda, when doing a three double crochet two together, are all three of those complete stitches? A three double crochet two?

Yeah, so 3dc2-gether. Oh! Okay. I think you're meaning like a double crochet decrease with three double crochets, three double crochets turning into... Three double crochet, two together.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, so if you're, say you're working in double crochet, we're just gonna start with this beginning chain. So we're gonna do a double crochet three together, which I think is what you mean. Correct me if I'm misunderstanding you.

So you'll do a yarn over, insert, yarn over, pull up a loop, yarn over, pull through two, and then you stop. And then you repeat the next, in the next stitch, you do the same thing. So yarn over, insert, yarn over, pull up a loop, yarn over, pull through two, and stop. Okay, this is gonna count, this is not counting as a stitch, this counts as our beginning chain. All right, so we're gonna do another, another leg of our double crochet three together.

So yarn over, insert, yarn over, pull up a loop, yarn over, pull through two, and stop. Then you yarn over and pull through everything on your hook. So that would be a double crochet three together, a decrease stitch where you're decreasing two stitches into one stitch. Does that seem like I answered your question? I hope so.

I'm keeping an eye on the chat box to see if anything else comes in, but I'll just read it again for you, Brenda, to make sure that it is specific. Maybe I'll write down the letters you're saying. So double- Yes. It says, "When doing a three DC two gether." See, this is the part that I'm not confused, or that I'm confused about, because I'm, you know- Okay, so in crochet patterns, people abbreviate things in all different kinds of ways, and I've never come across this particular chain of all these things put together. So I'm just assuming that they mean, that this means, like, the two together would refer to putting things together and decreasing, so I think what they mean is you have three double crochet stitches, and you're decreasing them.

So that's why I think it's- To me, it would be a three double crochet, like, together. Like this, or actually how I really write it. Oh, I'm gonna use my hamster eraser, here. A double crochet three together is usually how I write it. And that's how I've usually seen it.

But I don't know, maybe this means something else. I wish I could see the pattern that you're working from, 'cause then I could figure it out, but maybe you're doing three double- Oh, maybe there's a space here! All right, hold on, wait, I think I figured it out. I think it's three and then double crochet two together. Is that what it says?

Is there a space between the three? There is not. So it's in the comment all together, the number three, D, C- Yeah, that- The number two, G-E-T-H-E-R. Oh! Okay, that's a whole 'nother thing.

So two, yes. Okay, I think what I first showed you is what this means. Okay. Together. It's like they wrote together, but with a two, like, it's like Prince wrote this, right?

So I think what I showed you- Whoops, sorry, I should put- I'm being all confusing here, I'm sorry about that. I think... Is this what it actually says, Leah? That is what it says, yes. Okay, so I think this just means "together." So I think what I showed you before was correct.

If there was a space, and it said "three double crochet, two together," which is what I thought it was for a minute there, then it would be like three, you know, decreased stitches, three double crocheted two together stitches. But I think this just means you're double crocheting three stitches together into one, which is what I showed you. Okay, great. Lisa is thinking that it might be saying to decrease three times, but again, I'll just keep an eye out. If that wasn't what you're looking for, what Brenda demoed, go ahead and drop in an additional question and we'll revisit this, as well.

We have a final, maybe not our final demo question, but probably the last demo question that we're gonna have time for, and Fran wants to know if you can demo for us stitching a face. Oh, sure! Okay, so... Okay, this is from earlier, the hamster? It could be for the hamster, but I also believe Fran was the person that is making the bunny head blanket, so I think just in general, stitching a face onto some of these projects.

Could you demo an option to do that? Well, we can kind of talk- Okay, let's talk about that a little bit by looking at this face. So if you just have a regular head that's just a ball, and you're trying to make a face onto it, I would probably use some sort of French knot to do the eyes. Or you can just do, like, little lines. Here's some easy ways to make faces that look cute.

So if you're using embroidery floss and a needle, and I'm gonna sh- Yeah, I'll show you how to make the eyebrows, and do a little bit of the stitching on here, and you can kind of translate that to your piece. But, you know, there's different types of shapes that you can make. Here's your bunny. Whoop, hi! And then if you wanna make just, like, little French eyes, French knot eyes, you can just make little dots for the eyes.

But make sure that you are leaving very long strands in there and you really knot it very well so the kid doesn't rip it out with their teething teeth. And then you can make just like a little V, and a little straight line, and a little V. Or maybe that's too grumpy and you don't want a grumpy bunny. So you could change that, see how easily you can... Doot, look, I'm so happy!

So there's just these simple little shapes that you can do, that are easy to make, that can completely transform the look of your piece. And I realize I just drew that and I didn't actually stitch it, but we can talk about the stitching here, too. So if you make little french knots for eyes... Actually, maybe you don't know how to make French knots, so I will show you that, too. So you probably wanna use some yarn, black yarn, or something like that.

So you'll come out, weave in your ends ahead of time, so go back and forth, and back and forth so that it is stuck and you can actually pull on it, and then you can make a little stitch. I wonder if you can... You can see this, right? Okay. Make a little stitch, and then you're gonna wrap your yarn around a few times.

If this was black yarn, you would only need to do it, I don't know, six times. The more you wrap it, the bigger the eyeball is gonna be. And then you can just hang onto that thing you wrapped, and pull it through, like this. Then you have this little knot that you made, like a little blob of yarn. Okay, so you can just do that for the two eyes, and then you can just use your embroidery floss to make these little stitches in here, and I will show you how to do that on this guy.

So, and what I was saying before about weaving in your ends ahead of time so you can just kind of pull it through, you don't need to tie a knot, but as soon as that end pops through, stop pulling, and take a little stitch, and have your needle go through some of the- Try to split some of the strands. You're basically kind of just weaving it in back and forth. And it does not matter where you do this because it's not gonna show. And then from wherever you ended up, you can put your needle in, and I realize I have this little three-dimensional nose thing, but I'm not sure, you probably just have a ball, maybe, for the bunny, but it's the same process. So you can come out at the bottom of the V and make a stitch for one side of the V, like that, and then you can make another stitch for the other side of the V.

You don't even need to fill this in with a contrasting yarn, like how I have this here. You can just make a little V, like, right on the front of that ball and it'll look super cute. Okay, and then I feel like that's not really thick enough, it's not showing enough, so I'm gonna do just one more line. I like to do my embroidery on my amigurumi with just one strand, 'cause I think too often when I'm doing two strands, one of them gets all loopy, and weird, and sticks out funny, and this way, I have a little more control. So this needs to move over to the center of my V just a little.

Okay. And then you're gonna do that vertical line, so that little connection line. So you just take a little stitch at the bottom of your V. My V kind of ended up getting a little bit more like a relaxed V that spread open, but that's because I already had this here, but just, you know, if you did a regular V that was more of a V shape, it'd be super cute. Either way.

So I just did a little stitch there, and then I'm gonna come out down here for the bottom of the V. I'm making a slightly grumpy-looking hamster, so my V is gonna be upside down. Did you see how I drew it upside down before? That's what I'm making here on this little guy. Just like that.

"Oh, I'm so grumpy. It's 'cause you're putting needles in my face!" All right, so here we have a little grumpy face, and then, maybe I don't want it so grumpy, so then I'm gonna make a slightly upturned- You don't have to do this, this is just, you know, I just wanna show you all the things. All right, so then I'm gonna just do this little tiny, like, a little tiny bit of an upturned line, there. So what I really did was this, on my guy. Here's the little muzzle, I did that, did a little of this, and then I did this, and then I did a little boop!

Just a little like that to make him look just a tiny bit less grumpy. But I like making grumpy animals for some reason. All right. See, isn't that cute? Okay, and so another thing that I wanna add, too, this guy has eyebrows, and if you're feeling like overachieving a little bit on your bunny, if you wanna play around with putting eyeballs on- Eyeballs.

You should probably put eyeballs on your bunny. If you wanna play around with putting eyebrows on your bunny, it gives you so much expression. So this little guy, his eyebrows slant downward a little bit, but if you wanted to make an angry bunny, which I'm pretty sure you don't, but maybe you do, you would put your eyebrows like this. Like, see how even if you just look at how my needle looks, slanting downward, it makes it look very angry. I'm not gonna do that 'cause he already has a grumpy face and we just don't need to add that extra.

But adding these little eyebrows, it's just surprising how much extra emotion you get out of just literally two lines of embroidery. It takes almost no effort. I'm gonna just double 'em up 'cause it's not quite enough. Two stitches, maybe. Look at him.

See, he just got so much cuter! Oh, that's fantastic. Now, Brenda, you using the whiteboard, to me, seems like maybe a tip that viewers can use as well. If you're not sure what a line in one direction might look like, do you recommend just sketching it out first before you get that embroidery? Absolutely!

When I make my amigurumi, I almost always draw it first. I'm the kind of person who likes to skip steps sometimes, but I have to tell you, after working for, like, 20 years in the industry where you're trying to create a cute face, having the image to work from and look at, I mean, it makes everything. So you can, you know, you play around, draw a little face, maybe you'll feel kind of silly about doing this, but, you know, you can just, if you put the eyes, look, watch what happens here. So if you put the eyes really close together, and then you make this little nose, see how he looks totally different than this guy? Like, what if you put the eyes way far apart?

You know, it just, they look really different. So draw yourself a picture, yeah, for sure, absolutely, Leah. That's a really good point because you can sort all this out while it's on your head and you're working on it, but you might have to undo some stuff. Once you make those French knots and you try to cut the French knots off, you might end up, you know, kind of ruining the yarn underneath it. So it's so much better to have something to work from.

You know, another thing that makes a difference is, like, how high up, or, you know, how much space there is between the eyes and the nose. You know, when you draw a face, like this, and they're down here, and the nose is there, like, it just makes a huge difference. Oh, this guy's frowny. He doesn't like his eyes up that high. That just happened by accident, I was having a frowny moment, there.

Like, just see how just moving the eyes around, these are all the same shapes, but they all look like different bunnies. It just depends on where you put all the stuff. How far away the eyes are from each other, how far they are from the top of the head, that stuff makes so much... Makes all the difference in the world for their expressions. Alright, well, Brenda, I kind of can't believe it.

Time has flown, it is time to wrap up. So before I send everybody away with a couple more reminders, as always, I wanna give you the floor for any final thoughts, anything you'd like to give us a heads up about. I know you've got something coming up on July 6th, maybe you wanna talk about. Sure, yeah. So I'm gonna be back with another live tutorial, and that project is super fun.

Don't let this scare you away, it is a felted little clutch purse that looks like a watermelon. Oh, there it is. But don't be scared away by the felted part. This literally just means you crochet something using almost all single crochet stitches, and then you throw it in the laundry twice. It's really not anything scary.

You know, some people hear the word felting and they're like, "Oh, I don't know about that, I feel like I have no control over my project." But this is a really good one to learn how to felt. And this is actually a really good project for, like, an adventurous beginner 'cause it's really just basically making a big single crochet circle, and folding it in half, and throwing it in your laundry. It's very, very easy. Oh, that's fantastic, I can't wait to see that. Brenda, thank you so much for all of your expertise today.

Before I let all of our viewers go, just a reminder, even if you didn't have a question for Brenda today, come back another time with your questions. We always do these about once a month. Also, check out the chat box for a number of links, some of the links that Brenda mentioned, but also I want to remind you about that ebook from Craftsy. Very exciting, It's a new summer collection ebook, 75% off if you use the coupon code "SUMMER75." And again, that's 28 crafts that you can make, DIY 4th of July projects, treats, beach gear, pretty much anything summer, you can probably find it in this ebook. So go ahead and check out the link in the chat and use the coupon code "SUMMER75." That's going to get you 75% off by July 5th of this year.

Also, make sure to click the link in the description to download that beautiful and adorable free crochet hamster pattern. Brenda gave us that tutorial earlier today, which you can also go back and view. And, of course, we'll be seeing Brenda again in about a month for another Q&A. Thank you so much, Brenda. Thank all of you for joining us today.

My name is Leah, and until we see you the next time, happy crocheting.