My goal in this Crochet for Knitters series
hasn’t been necessarily to turn you in to a full-on crocheter, but to show you the most
techniques that you can use with crochet, in your knitting. And over the next few weeks we’re going
to go over a few crocheted edgings. My favorite crocheted edgings. And if you learn nothing else in this series,
this is maybe the most useful thing you can learn in crochet to make your knitting even
better. Because adding a decorative crochet edge to
your knitting is much easier, much faster, much easier to rip out if you make a mistake
than it would be to add a knitted edge, or a knitted bind-off all the way around. Um, the first one I’m going to show you
today is a scalloped edge. In my experience, this is maybe the most traditional
of the decorative crocheted edgings. Let’s go ahead and take a look. I have this little sample done up here, and
this is, um, this knitted stitch here in the middle is what I call long moss stitch. And I’ll give you instructions for this
in the video description below. It’s just very simple. And this is the scalloped edging that we have
in the darker color. This is all it is, little bumps around, and
then I’ve added a few more stitches when you get to a corner. I’m showing you this on a flat piece, but
you can really think about adding this to anything. Like the neckline of a V neck sweater, or
even the cuffs of sweaters or the bottom of a baby dress or something. But there’s the scalloped edge. Let me go ahead and switch to my bulky sample. I have the same stitch here, and I’m going
to show you how to work this now. And this is a one, two, three, four, five
– I think it’s a five stitch repeat. We’re going to start here in the bind off
row. And I’m just going to pick a spot here to
start. And we’re going to talk about spacing. You stab your crochet hook under both legs
of the bind off row here. Make a loop and pull that through. And I’m going to start with a single crochet
stitch, if I can find my working yarn. And if you need a review of the single crochet
stitch, I’ll give you a link right here. Actually, I’m going to chain one this time,
which is going to count as a single crochet. Then I’m going to look at the Vs that I
have here and skip two of them. And I’m going to stab in to the third one. So there’s one, two, stab into the third
one. And I yarned over because I’m working a
double crochet. If you need a review of the double crochet,
I’ll give you a link right here. So there’s one double crochet stitch. To make the scallop, I want to work five double
crochets into this same loop. So yarn over, stab into that same spot for
the second one, same spot for the third one, same spot for the fourth one, and the fifth. And I just dropped everything there! This bulky sample, of course, it’s very
easy to pick the stitches back up again. Okay so you can see that I have this curved
scallop going here. I’m going to skip the next V, skip the next
V, and then single crochet into the third one. And that’s the scallop! To continue, I skip two, work 5 double crochets
in the third. Skip two, and single crochet into the third. Now, let’s talk a little bit about gauge. The instructions that I give you for this
are for using the same weight of yarn that you used in your knitted piece, and a hook
size that matches the needles that you used. And the way you can figure that out is you
can take your needle gauge and find the needle size that you used, and find a crochet hook
that fits in that same hole. If you are using a lighter weight yarn or
a heavier weight yarn for the decorative edge, then you’re going to need to change up your
gauge a little bit. But it’s so easy to do. Here I skipped two stitches before the double
crochet. You might find with a heavier yarn that you
need to skip three. Or with a lighter weight yarn that you need
to skip one. It’s easy to figure out. If you see that your fabric is stretching
a little bit, you need to include some more stitches, or if you see that your edge is
kind of ruffling a little bit, you need to skip more stitches. And you can always just work up a little bit,
and see how it’s lying, if it’s not flat, you can just do this, and try a little bit
more of it again. That’s so nice about crochet. Because you’re just left with one loop to
pick up when you’re done. Um, the other thing is as you’re working
across this, you may not have the exact number of stitches you need to get across. So you just fudge it. You figure it out, if you need to skip an
extra one, or skip an extra few over the next few scallops, so that when you get to the
edge, you’ll work a scallop here in the edge. Whoops, that’s the wrong side. Like I have here. And I found that working eight scallops in
the corner makes for a nice corner turn. I also want to show you how this looks from
the back. It’s also pretty from the back. A little flatter looking, but still pretty. And that’s it, a simple scalloped edge. I’m working on next week’s video right
now, and you’re not going to want to miss it. You should probably subscribe to make sure
that you don’t! [music]
