Left Hand Motif of the Month March 2015: Square Filler Motif Crochet Tutorial

Hey everyone, it's Deja from CrochetEverAfter.com. Today we're doing the newest motif of the month. This is March 2015 and this is a square filler motif. So this is kind of a basic two round motif that can be made in one or two colors. And it's great for using in place, or not in place, but with other motifs. So it's a nice small motif that its dimensions can be changed pretty quickly So you can move it and grab it and. If you use it in between bigger motif shawl or a scarf or a blanket or whatever it may be, it comes handy because it's so fast and simple and small that it will work for many. If you're making this in worsted weight yarn, you can make it in any kind of yarn for your project that you need. I'm using a 5mm hook, the same exact size. Okay, we're going to start off our motif with a chain and join it with a chain 6 is going to create a center. I always put my hook straight down to get through nice and easy. And then once you have your six chains, you're going to go ahead and slip stitch in the first chain you made. So six, insert my hook anywhere there, because we're going to cover it up with round one. Yarn over, kind of lay over, yarn over your hook. This is a pretty easy ring to work into, it's nice and large. So we're going to, I'm just moving the tail out of the way. We're going to go ahead and start round one. So the very first thing we're going to do is chain one. And then single crochet right into the ring, and the chain 1 is just to bring the single crochet up to a good height. So now we're going to chain 3, and bring up the height for a treble crochet. So the next thing is we're going to treble inside the ring. So we yarn over twice, and you'll see that there was a star right before. This is part of a bracket, so this is part of a repeat that we're going to do all the way around. So we're going to yarn over twice, insert our hook through the center, yarn over, lay over, and pull up a loop. We're going to work off our loops two loops at a time for a treble crochet. So yarn over back to front, pull through the first two loops on your hook, yarn over, pull through the loops on your hook, pull through the last two. You'll notice I always put my hook down when I go through everything. It makes it easy to get through and you don't get caught on your loops. So you'll see I did another three chains. This is kind of the corner for the next round, so just remember that the three chains between the two trebles we're doing are our corners. So I'm going to do another treble crochet, so I yarn over twice, insert my hook in the center, and there's a full band. I'm going to point down, point down to get through nice and easy. I'm always turning sideways and up and then down, kind of like a rowing motion here. So then I'm going to chain 3, and then I'm going to go back down to the ring, so that's bringing our height back down. And then we're going to repeat what's in the brackets. So that was the end of the bracket there. Now we're going to repeat this whole thing again. So I'm going to single crochet into the ring, and you'll notice that the brackets say 4 times. I'm going to be making four. These little petals, I guess you could call them. I don't really know what to call them. Three chains, and then another treble. Chain three. Do that two more times to get all of our corners, petals, or whatever you want to call them. And then we'll finish off. Okay, I'm on my last chain three. Then it's telling me to finish the round off by joining with a slip stitch in my first single crochet. So I'm just going to go into both of those and fasten that off because we're switching colors. The next stitch that we have is our little four-pointed motif so far, and we're going to join in the new color, and we're going to do it with a standing stitch, which is a cool stitch where you don't have to chain. Let me show you how to do that. So what we're going to do is we're going to put a slip knot on our hook. So normally when you join a new color, you usually slip stitch it to your old color, so you might insert your hook, pull through, and pull through. I'm going to start chaining, so if you're going to do double crochet here you would chain three and then double crochet, but we're not going to do that, we're going to join with a standing stitch, so we still slip stitch, and this is, we're going to start crocheting kind of in mid-air is what it's going to be, so it tells us to join with a standing double crochet in any of our single crochet spaces, so you can pick any one of the four, I'm just going to pick this one right here since it's already in front of me. And I'm going to start double crocheting. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to yarn over like I would for any double crochet. Hold onto your tail loop. If you don't, you're going to unwind that yarn over you just did. So make sure you hold onto your tail so you have two loops on your hook, your hook into the single crochet. So make sure that this working yarn is behind you. Insert your hook into that single crochet, and you'll see my working yarn is on top here. Then I'm going to yarn over, I'm going to pull up a loop, and just like a regular double crochet, I have three loops on my hook. I'm going to yarn over and I'm going to pull through the first two, and then I'm going to yarn over and I'm going to pull through the second two. So this standing double crochet created our round. So we have the height of the double crochet, we have a double crochet, there's no chains so we don't have the awkward chain 3 that doesn't look like a double crochet standing there, and it's really easy to join at the end of the round because it's like a regular stitch with the V on top. The only difference is your tail is at the top instead of down here, but it's still simple to weave in, not a problem at all. So then it tells me to double crochet again into that single crochet single. Insert my hook right back in the same spot and do another double crochet. And my next instruction is to single crochet in the top of my chain three. So it's kind of like we're acting like this is kind of a double crochet and we're putting a single crochet. So I'm going to go right through the center of that chain. It doesn't matter if you catch one or two loops, it's up to you. Yarn over and single crochet. Then we're going to single crochet in our treble. So if you notice, when we work into chains, it kind of pulls our next stitch a little bit out of whack. So it doesn't quite look like a V-stitch afterwards. You can see I have one loop here and then one loop over here kind of getting pulled away. So when I go into this treble, I want to make sure that I still catch both of those two loops. And you'll see when I catch them, they squish back together like a normal stitch. So we're doing a single crochet there. And now we're at our corner. Remember how I said in between each of the trebles is our little corner? So now we're at the corner. We're going to do five single crochets all the way around the chain. So that's going to cover the three chains, so that's like three stitches. And then we're going to do an extra two to make a corner, so we get to turn this corner here. So I have four, I'm going to do one more, that should cover all of our chain three stitches. Then we have the opposite of this side we just did, we have a single crochet in the top of our treble, and you'll notice that I pulled my stitches over on the chain before I got to this treble because, I'll show you over here real quick, that a lot of times this is going to kind of cover the top of your stitch. So you just want to pull it out of the way so that you can see your stitch so you can work into it. We have a single crochet here, and then a single crochet in the top of this chain three. Can we repeat everything? This is kind of the end of our repeat since we started with kind of a different instruction here. So we have two double crochets in our single crochet. You can just move your tail out of the way or crochet it into your work however you like to do it. So we did two double crochets and now our repeat begins over. This is what we're going to do all the way around but I'm going to show you over here real quick how that corner looks. So again I'm going to single crochet at the top of my chain three. So I'm just doing them quick like I normally would, and you'll see how they kind of get in the way of my treble. I just started trying to look for my treble, it's actually almost completely covered. These are all my chains, one, two, three, and my treble is covered by this last single crochet. So I need to pull that over, the treble stitch has just become uncovered, so that's the one that was covered. Make sure you do that so you don't miss that stitch. But continue this pattern all the way around and we'll come back right at the end and meet up. Okay I'm just finishing the very last single crochet of the round. So now I'm back to my standing stitch and you can see it looks just like all my regular stitches and we're going to join up the round by slip stitching into that first stitch. Then I'm going to fasten off because we are done. This is a great filler motif so if you have like really big motifs and you're making a shawl or scarf This is a good one because it's got these corners that will pull out. So this is not like a laying flat motif, you can see if I hold it. It's that the corners pull out really good so that if you need to connect weird shapes, this will move to how you need it to be connected. So it's a good motif for that. Not necessarily to make something all by itself because you can see how bumpy it is. So now I'm going to just weave in the ends and I'll show it to you when it's all done Let's see how it goes. Okay, I've got the ends all weaved in. You can see that the motif is very airy with all the chain 3s in between, but like I said, it's great for attaching to other motifs because you can make it quite a few different shapes. You can see if I just pull it this way, it can get quite a very pointy diamond out of it, or you can pull it at all corners and get kind of an interesting square shape. So lots of different things you can do with this. If you use it for anything else, let us know below. And if you have any questions, let me know below, but thank you for watching