working a Double Crochet – US term – (Treble for UK term) edge around both panels,
join the 2 panels with a Reverse Single Crochet – US term – (Reverse Double Crochet for UK term),
finishing the edge with the Reverse Single Crochet, aka Crab Stitch.
In this blog for PART 5 you will find:
a photo tutorial on how to work a Double Crochet – US term – (Treble for UK term),
a photo tutorial on how to work the Reverse Single Crochet – US term – (Reverse Double Crochet for UK term) .
Double Crochet – dc (UK Treble Crochet – tr)
The double crochet stitch is one of the most commonly used stitches together with the single crochet and chain stitches. When you master this stitch, the taller stitches will be much easier to understand and to make. It is a less dense stitch and forms a soft, flexible fabric.
Double Crochet (dc – US term)
1. Make a foundation chain of the required length, plus 3 ch.
The extra 3 chains will count as the turning chain
2. Wrap the yarn around the hook
(yarn over (hook) = yo(h))
3. Insert hook in designated chain/stitch.
For double crochet, always insert the hook into the 4th chain from the hook on your foundation chain.
4. Wrap the yarn around the hook
(yarn over (hook) = yo(h))
5. Draw a loop up through the stitch on the hook.
You have 3 loops on hook.
6. Wrap the yarn around the hook
(yarn over (hook) = yo(h))
7. Pull through first 2 loops on hook.
8. Wrap the yarn around the hook
(yarn over (hook) = yo(h))
9. Pull through last 2 loops on hook.
10. Repeat until you made one double crochet in each chain of the foundation chain.
Reverse single crochet stitch, also known as crab stitch, gives the appearance of a twisted cord and is mainly worked on the edge of an item to provide a sturdy, visually attractive finish. This stitch is traditionally worked from left to right (if right-handed) and from there the term reverse double crochet, but an alternative method is also available (watch the youtube video on: Reverse Single Crochet aka Crab Stitch).
Working the reverse single crochet creates tiny knots where the V’s of the stitch should be and for that reason you can’t work into a reverse single crochet row. It can create surface texture when it is worked in the front loops only of a piece, and then you can continue with working other stitches in the unworked back loops.
2. Insert your hook into the 1st stitch to the right from front to back. Hook over yarn – hoy (watch the VIDEO: Reverse Single Crochet aka Crab stitch to see the options of yoh or hoy.)
3. Pull up a loop.
Keep the hook facing towards you and to the left at all times! This will ensure that the loop that you pull up lies to the left on the hook and the hook should surface from your left and not to the right, otherwise it will not twist the stitch and the stitch will lie flat.
4. Yarn over and pull through the 2 loops on the hook.
5. Continue working the row or when you work in the round, you will work to the last stitch.
When you are done with working a piece and you want to give your last row a finished look, all you do is working a slip stitch row as follows:
Insert your hook in into the next stitch in the same manner as for the stitch type or stitch pattern you worked.
Yarn over an pull the loop directly through the loop on the hook, so that one loop remains.
One slip stitch is completed.
Continue in this manner with the forward pass and then bind off the yarn and pull tail through last loop on hook.
For stitch types that tends to curl a lot like the Tunisian Knit Stitch and the Tunisian Full Stitch, I prefer to work a row of single crochet (US) instead of slip stitches to finish of the edge. This helps to slightly eliminate the curl as well.
During my experience in crocheting over the years, the importance of great photos of your product or project stayed the same.
It is VERY important!
It doen’t matter if you take photos of products that you need to market, or just taking a photo of a hobby project, the photo can make or break the item.
I will share in very short and simple a few tips that can help you when you take your photos with your smart phone.
1.Clean your lens
This might sound obvious, but you have no idea how many times photos were taken through a dirty lens and everything seems out of focus. Clean your lens with a soft cloth, preferably from cotton or a soft synthetic fabric. Please do not your paper towel or tissue as those can scratch the lens.
2. Use natural light
Does not matter whether you shoot your photo indoors or outdoors, make the most of natural light as it is way more forgiving than artificial light. Consider the following:
do not shoot your photos at night,
best time to take a good photo is in the morning or late afternoon,
find a spot inside your home next to a window to the left or right,
choose a shadowed area when you shoot outside,
avoid direct sunlight beams on your object,
avoid strong lighting behind your object as that creates a silhouette,
change your position until you find the best appearance of your object in the available light.
3. Watch the background!
No clutter please!
The most painful photos to look at are those with background clutter. It takes away the focus from the object and it is simply not pleasing to the eye. Keep the background clear from furniture, stuff standing around, clothes, and even busy backdrops like a duvet cover with printed fabric. Your bed is NEVER a good background! Rather place the item, especially when it is large, on the floor. Keep the background clean and simple.
Here are a few ideas:
White background: This is the #1 option. This emphasis your item and keep the focus on what is important without distractions. Use:
a piece of white melamine board from your local hardware store or DIY store.
a white textured piece of fabric like fleece. Do not use a shiny fabric. Do not use a sheet that tends to wrinkle and crease. Knits are better than woven fabric as you can stretch out the creases or shape it better than woven fabrics.
a white or matt painted table. Do not use your oak dining table with it’s glossy finish, it reflects the light and the colour is not flattering.
a piece of vinyl. Some printing companies can print on vinyl you can get a plain white to use as a backdrop.
Textured background: Be careful when you use textured backgrounds as it might not always work well. Natural is best, but the most popular used for backgrounds are:
a piece of wood. Untreated, weathered, or painted.
a plain, neutral coloured wall. Painted bricks are also popular to use these days, but your raw, natural colour brick wall won’t work.
the beach, sand, rocks, stones, leaves, grass, most natural surfaces work well.
floors. This one is tricky as not all floors work well as a background. No tiles, no Persian carpets (doesn’t matter how beautiful they are to you). You can consider a cobble stone paving, wooden floor, white or untreated concrete floor, even mosaic, but no floor with too many lines and prints that can run down your project of product. You can even purchase a box of laminated floor planks or vinyl tiles which you can layout anywhere, whenever you need.
Take great photos with the right background
4. Forget the flash!
When you take product or project photos, please, pleeease forget that there is even a flash option on your phone camera! Rather play around with the “Exposure” tool in your favorite photo editing app (we will look a bit at editing in point #11) or take a step back to point #3 and make use of the tips I gave you on natural light.
Without the flashWith the flash
5. Get close, don’t zoom
Instead of using the zoom function of your smartphone’s camera, consider to take a few steps closer. You won’t loose as much quality of the picture and it might even improve the clarity. If you can’t get closer, take the photo from a distance and rather crop it afterwards.
Zoomed inClose-up
6. Use grid lines – rule of 3rds
Using the grid function on your phone’s camera will help you align the object and also to apply one of the popular principles in photography; the rule of thirds. This is when your grid-lines are made up of 2 horizontal lines and 2 vertical lines, equally spaces apart to divide the area into 9 equal blocks. To apply the rule of thirds, you will align the object with the grid lines and their intersection points or keep them as close as possible. This creates more balance in your photo and makes it easier to view.
Grid linesRule of thirds
7. Use different angles
Taking photos from different angles will give you different insights into the object that you capture. There are various options, but the following will work for shooting products or projects:
shoot from a high angle or top down. Place the object flat on the floor or a table and keep the camera directly over the object to shoot it straight down. (Also consider taking a flat lay photo. This is very popular among Instagram users these days, but is a whole technique of its own)
shoot from a low angle. Most of the time you will come in line with the base of the object from the floor or a flat surface, with the camera slightly tilted upward. This method is also easier to keep steady as you place the phone on the floor, surface or another object underneath it to keep the tilted position. This method could also create more depth and can put a surprising impact on the object.
shoot straight on. This is when your camera lens looks straight to the object and is better when it is something that you can place against the wall.
8. Get stable
Phone tripods are basically available anywhere these days and is a great investment if you like to take photos. If you do not have a tripod, find an object in your home like a chair and use the back rest or arm rest to stabilize your phone while you take pictures. This is really important when you take photos in low light conditions and will help with the quality of your photos.
9. Focus
Focus on the object and not the background. It happens many times when you take a picture and everything else is in focus except the object you wanted to take the photo from. Get everything else in order as you already learned beforehand and just before you take the actual picture, tap on the object on your screen so that the auto-focus feature of the phone camera will set the object as the focal point and then shoot away! The result will be a crisp and in focus object on your photo.
Out of focusTap on image where you want the focus
10. Drop the filters
Using filters is so last century. It does not do the object any justice, instead it might even look a bit phoney. So drop the kodak look and the shady frames and get your photos crisp and clear.
Different filters used
11. Editing
There are many photo editing apps available. You will have to choose some and try them out until you find the one that works best for you. Here are only a few tools that is available on photo editing apps, that I prefer to use or think that you will find interesting to try out.
UneditedEdited
Crop & Straighten: When you want to remove an area around your photo and straighten the lines of the photo. It is better to crop a photo afterwards than to zoom in before the photo is taken.
Exposure: Using the natural light as I already explained, without using a flash, you can use the “exposure” tool to lighten the photo a bit and getting clear object. This tool works especially well when you used a white background as well.
Brightness, Shadows, Highlights: Adjust Brightness along with Highlights and Shadows to add contrast to the object.
Contrast: This tool adjusts relative light and dark areas and can help make details stand out.
Vibrance: This is a tool which increases the intensity of the more muted colors, leaving saturated colors alone.
Sharpen: Increase “Sharpen” to add contrast to the details and lines within your photo
Now that you have a few guidelines to take great photos of your project or product, let’s just recap on what you need to do:
Clean your phone’s camera lens.
Find a spot close to a window to use natural light.
Set up the right background.
Turn off that flash!
Get closer and don’t zoom.
Use the grid lines and the rule of thirds.
Try out different angles to take your shot.
Stabilize your phone.
Get the focus right.
Don’t use filters.
Try out some manual editing and find an app that works for you.
Now you can get your phone out and start shooting those perfect pictures!
PART 6 (last part) will be revealed 12 April 2019. So you will have enough time to catch up if you fell behind.
Calculate Yarn Quantities for Yarn Substitution on the Patchwork Blanket
Many of you either could not get hold of the suggested yarns that we use for this TAL or you chose to use yarn from your own stash or buy a different yarn brand. Some of these yarns you chose are also not the same weight as the yarn we use in the TAL-kit and therefor your yarn quantities will differ.
I decided compile this information to help you with that and hopefully it might even help you with any future projects.
There are different ways to determine your yarn quantities for a project, but I chose this method for various reasons.
First of all I had in mind that you do not like to swatch, just like me. Even though I am a designer, I like to use shortcuts. This method can help even if you started the project halfway.
This method is good to use for simple projects, like this Patchwork Blanket, which are worked up in different blocks, but are all divisible by the stitches and rows of the small block in this pattern.
You will need:
The FREE worksheet for “Calculate Yarn Quantities” that you can add to your “My 2019 Crochet & Knit Planner” (see links below).
Print the worksheet that is given below and determine the information for the Project.
Make a swatch from the yarn and hook size that you will use, but make sure that it is bigger than 10cm x 10cm.
You can then determine the amount of stitches and rows for 10cm x 10cm and keep the information if you need to add or subtract centimeters or stitches from your project. (NOTE: if you started your blanket, consider the whole panel as a “swatch”)
Count the stitches and rows of your swatch.
Weigh the swatch.
Do the calculations on the worksheet as given and determine:
the total amount of stitches of the swatch by multiplying the stitches and rows,
the weight per stitch by dividing the weight of the swatch by the total amount of stitches of the swatch,
the total amount of stitches for the SMALL SQUARE on the Patchwork Blanket Pattern by multiplying the stitches and rows of the square,
the weight of ONE SMALL SQUARE (this is the amount of yarn you will use) by multiplying the total amount of stitches for the SMALL SQUARE by the weight per stitch.
This will give you the total amount of yarnin grams (or ounces if you used in the imperial system) that you will need for ONE SMALL SQUARE of the Patchwork Blanket.
7. Now use the sheet for the Schematic Outlines of the Colours that is also available as a PDF in PART 1 (see the link below) and allocate yarn amounts to each of the SQUARES & RECTANGLES.
ONE LARGE SQUARE will be the same as 4 x SMALL SQUARES and both the RECTANGLES are the same as 2 x SMALL SQUARES.
Colour changes are done to create 4 different block sections, a Large Square, Small Square, Vertical Rectangle and Horizontal Rectangle to give the Patchwork look to the Blanket.
The diagram to the suggested colours for each block will be revealed in sections. One section during each Part of this Tunisian Along.
For Colour Changes, watch the video on “Changing Colours on the sides”. The colour change transitions on the foundation chain and during each row, will be shown in the video for PART 1.
Block the finished project. Wet block for wool and acrylics, spray block for cotton and bamboo. A video will be shared about blocking at a later stage.
This step is omitted in the instructions for the start of the (Forward) and should be considered:
Skip the vertical bar of the 1st stitch with loop on hook and continue with pattern instructions.
(Return) is worked as follows:
“YO, pull through 1 loop on hook, *YO and pull through 2; rep from * until ONE loop remains”, except where instructions shows differently.
Instructions
For Patchwork Panel 1 and 2
Foundation Row:(These colours are for Patchwork Panel 1, but follow the same method to do foundation chain for Patchwork Panel 2) Ch 17 in Col A, join by YO with Col I and continue to ch 34, join by YO with Col H and continue to ch 34, pull up a loop from back bar of 2nd ch from hook and each ch across, doing colour change at relevant sts. (Return)(see Pattern Notes for omitted instructions). (85 Tss)
Row 1: (Forward)(see Pattern Notes for omitted instructions) Tss each st across, doing colour changes on relevant sts. (Return)(see Pattern Notes for omitted instructions). (85 Tss)
Rep Row 1, following the Patchwork Panel schematics for colour changes and the stitch- and row counts for each shape as shown below:
Stitch and Row counts
Block sizes
Stitch and Row count per Block
Vertical Rectangle 17 sts x 30 rows
Horizontal Rectangle 34 sts x 15 rows
Small Square 17 sts x 15 rows
Large Square 34 sts x 30 rows
Below is the SCHEMATIC for the COLOUR CHANGES.
Use the COLOUR KEY in the YARN INFORMATION CHART below to follow the recommended colour changes.
If you do not use the recommended colours and yarn, see the sections on “Yarn and Substitution” and “Substitute Colours” below.
If you are not able to use the recommended yarn, you can use any yarn with a WPI (wraps per inch) of 17. This classifies as a:
fine #2
sport weight (US)
4-ply (UK & SA)
5-ply (NZ & AUS)
If you can’t identify the weight of your yarn, make sure you watch my video on “Wraps Per Inch Method “ to determine the weight of yarn.
Here is a chart that you can use as a guide for Yarn Weights and the recommended Tunisian Hook Sizes.
Yarn Weight Chart and Recommended Tunisian Hook Sizes
Yarn Weight Classification
Yarn Weight
US
Yarn weight
UK, SA & Other
WPI (wraps per inch)
Recommended Crochet Hook Size
Recommended Tunisian Hook Size
0 – Lace
Lace
2-ply
22>
<2.75mm
3-5mm
1 – Superfine
Fingering/Sock
3-4ply
19-22
2.25-3.5mm
3.5-6mm
2 – Fine
Sport
4-5ply
15-18
3.5-4.5mm
4-6mm
3 – Light
Light Worsted
8-ply/DK
12-14
4.5-5.5mm
6-8mm
4 – Medium
Worsted
10-ply/ Aran
9-11
5.5-6.5mm
7-10mm
5 – Bulky
Bulky
12-ply/ Chunky
7-8
6.5-9mm
9-12mm
6 – Super Bulky
Super Bulky
14-ply/ Super Chunky
5-6
9-15mm
12-18mm
7 – Jumbo
Jumbo
Roving
<5
15mm>
18mm>
Recommended Hook
5mm Tunisian Interchangeable hook with
40cm cable if you make ONE panel at a time or
80cm cable if you want to make both panels at the same time.
Here is a chart for the different hook size systems:
Hook Size Systems for Recommended Hook
Metric Range
UK Size
US Size
5mm
6
H/8
Substitute Colours
What if you do not want to use the 16 colours we recommend and wants to use your own colour combinations?
Here is a diagram on how the different blocks are laid together, without any colour suggestions. Use it to add your own colours randomly or use the Colour Key in the chart above to allocate your own colour to each colour suggested and continue to participate in each week’s Part of the Tunisian Along, as the layout of coloured blocks for each Part will be revealed.
NO PHOTO TUTORIALS will be available. We are using a different approach!! YOUTUBE videos from BEATRIX SNYMAN channel!(Click here) I have a youtube channel where you please have to SUBSCRIBE to. All the links to relevant tutorials will be shared with you in each Part of the TAL. Watch the videos and share with all your crochet-crazy friends.
On the blog, thePATTERN will be shared in sections (click here) relevant to the specific Part that gets released. At the end of the TAL, the pattern will be available as a complete pdf on my Ravelry store.
On facebook there is a group for all Tunisian Crochet lovers to join and where you can interact with each other. We Tunisian Crochet (click here). Join the group as all the announcements will be shared there as well. There are rules to this group though. The important rule is that the administrators of the group and the TAL will not be able to answer obvious questions and complains that are addressed on the blog or the videos. The group will solely be for the interaction between the TAL participants, for the administrators to share the relevant information and keep you updated. Please read the rules.
What is the TAL all about?
Our main aim with the TAL’s is to grow the Tunisian Crochet community. I found that there are so many that want to try this skill, but never get around to actually do it. We want to motivate you to start if you are one of them.
Here are the basic info of the project:
We will make a blanket that consists of two panels that will be joined together. The original blanket was made in my own hand dyed merino yarns, but for the purpose of the TAL it will be done in the Nurturing Fibres – Eco-fusion that will give it a soft, luxurious look and feel.
There are 6 Parts and will run from 15 February – 12 April. Click here to see more about the schedule dates. During each Part, the colours that are used will be announced as we go along. This will make the project more of a mystery and a lot of fun. (See more info on the yarn and yarn amounts below)
We will focus on the following techniques:
How to start with the Foundation Chain.
How to work the Foundation Row.
Learn the Tunisian Simple Stitch.
What to do with typical troubleshooting areas.
How to change colour on the sides.
How to bind-off.
Work the double crochet (US).
How to join with the reverse single crochet or crab stitch (US).
Remember that the colours used in each Part will be announced as we go along. This makes the TAL more of a mystery and more fun. So make sure that you order your kit TODAY so that you have all the relevant colours available, otherwise you will have to wait on each Part for the colour announcement or have to select your own colours according to the Yarn info given above. The photo below gives you an indication of the colours used.
To start off, here is the first video to get you hooked and prepared on Tunisian Crochet and for the kick-off on our first TAL – the PATCHWORK BLANKET TUNISIAN ALONG!
