Colorwork Using Extended Single Crochet

Hi, I'm Brenda K.B. Anderson. Thank you for joining me. In this video, I want to demonstrate how to use extended single crochet to work from a color work chart. Here is my sample that I'll be making up.

This is repeats of this color work chart here. You can see there's three repeats across, and first let me say the reason that I want to demonstrate extended single crochet color work is because this is such a great stitch to use for color work. And I don't know why it isn't used more often for color work. One of the things I love about it is that it's a little bit of a taller stitch, but there aren't gaps between the stitches, and so it has a nicer drape to it than just single crochet would. Another thing that I love about it is the way that the stitches are made, they end up stacking vertically up, straight up your piece, even though you're working in the round.

Oftentimes, you know, when you work single crochet in the round, or many other stitches, most other stitches, actually, they end up kind of drifting off to the right, if you're a right-handed crocheter, or to the left, if you're a left-handed crocheter. But your stitch pattern will just start to sort of slide over. And if you're working something like this, where you want nice vertical square lines, and you want them to stack up on top of each other, this is like the perfect stitch to use because you get these perfect vertical lines and you don't have to worry about your image just sort of drifting off. So let's get started. To begin this sample, we're gonna chain on seven stitches for each repeat.

So that's 14, because we're doing two repeats. Plus we're gonna add two more stitches at the beginning and two more stitches at the end. So we'll have one, two. Those are the two at the beginning, and 14. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, and two at the end, one, two.

And then just to make this a little bit easier, I'm gonna add one more stitch for a turning chain, and I'm gonna work across this row. Now we are gonna be working in rounds, but I'm gonna work in a row first so that it just makes it a little bit easier because that way I can work into the bottom of my stitches. So we're gonna start with the extended single crochet in the second bottom bump. So there's one bump, two bumps. Those are the ones that are just directly across from the Vs.

So you're going to insert your hook, yarn over, pull up a loop, and a normal single crochet would be yarn over pull through two, but we're doing an extended single crochet, so it's a little bit taller. So we do the loops one at a time. So we do one loop, and then yarn over, two loops. Okay, so that's the first extended single crochet. We're gonna do it again.

Insert your hook, yarn over, pull up your loop. Yarn over, pull through one, pull through two. Insert hook, pull up loop, one and two. Insert hook, pull up loop, one and two. Okay, we made it all the way across.

I often like to start out my projects that are worked in the round just by doing a row first, just like that so I can work into the bottom bump, and that way it gives me a nice edge on the bottom as well as on the top. So now to be able to start working in the round, we're just gonna curl this around and we're gonna start here. And remember, we added two stitches at the beginning and two stitches at the end of the round that aren't even on this chart, they're just kind of like a selvage. So we're just gonna work those in regular. We're just gonna use the white yarn for those all the way up the edges.

But now it's time, so we're gonna start working from our chart here. We'll do two stitches in white in extended single crochet, and then we'll work across the chart rows twice, and then do two in white at the end. So, because we know we're going to start switching back and forth between colors here, we're gonna add the second color. We just lay it across the top like this. Basically, I'm laying it on top of all my Vs, and we're gonna work around it.

So we're gonna insert our hook, one and two. See, we've crocheted that strand right into there. And now we're gonna do the second one, one and, we're gonna wait for a minute, because when you change colors, as you're working across, you need to change your color on the very last yarn over of the previous stitch. So what that means is if you think about each stitch as being like a little guy with a hat on top, right? So here's your little guy, and here's the hat on top that we just made, well, this guy is actually creating the hat for the next guy.

As you watch, we want to make the next stitch in blue, so we have to change colors right now. We're gonna drop the white, pick up the blue, yarn over and pull through. Now see, this guy over here already made the hat for that guy, so it's white on top of white, and now we have a blue cap for the next guy already made, ready to go. So we're gonna do one blue stitch and change colors and do one white stitch. So here we go with the blue.

So since we're gonna change colors on the next, we gotta drop the blue, pull up the white, pull through, and then we're gonna do a white stitch. And here we are, we've got our two selvage stitches, and we've started our pattern. We have those two, and now we're going to do five more blue stitches. One, two, and this whole time we are continuing to crochet over this strand that's just being held on top. Three, we're just encasing that yarn.

Four and five. And do we need to change colors? We'll look at our chart. We're gonna start here again because we've already continued here, and we're gonna do one more repeat, and it is a blue stitch, so we don't need to change colors, so we can finish that one, and then we're gonna do the first blue stitch of the chart, and we do have to switch colors. One thing I want to note is if you are able to keep in mind to drop the darker color to the back and the lighter color to the front, then your yarn will not get tangled.

That can be really hard to do when you're also counting stitches and making sure that you're not making mistakes. So later on, I will show you how to untangle your yarn as you work. But if you can try to remember, and actually you could do the light to the back and the dark to the front. It really doesn't matter. You just need to decide ahead of time.

So for this project, I'm gonna try to put the dark in the back and the light in the front when I drop my colors, and that will keep it from getting tangled. Okay, so here we are making one, two, three, four, five, and then this stitch. So we have to pull through one, switch, dropping that to the back, pulling this one up, and now we're gonna do that one white stitch, and we're gonna drop that to the front. And now we're gonna do five blue stitches. One, two, three, four, five, and at the end of this repeat, we're doing two white stitches.

So we are gonna change our color, dropping blue to the back. We'll do two white stitches, and now we're gonna do two white stitches from the beginning, and we're gonna start working across row two of the chart. One, and we have to change color here, so drop light to the front, pick up the dark, pick up light. One thing that you need to take note of as you're working around, you want to have the strand that's getting crocheted around, that needs to be basically just laying across those stitches, encased by your stitches. But it can't be constricting these stitches, or it's gonna start to buckle.

And if it's too loose inside there, sometimes it can peek out between your stitches and you don't want that either. So what I like to do is I will crochet a few stitches, and then give this, or even just two like that. I can give this a gentle tug. You don't want to pull it so tight that it starts to deform the stitch over here, 'cause this white is coming from over here. You just want to pull on it a little, and then you can stretch it back out with your fingers if you feel like you pulled it too far.

So you just want to maintain, like, you know, you don't want any tension on this. You just want it to be laying in there. Okay. So we have one, two, whoops. I just realized I started doing this round.

So we're gonna back up. We're on this third stitch here. So if you make a mistake, you can slide your hook in the stitch that you want to save. You can slide it in through this top loop and through this front loop to kind of hang on to that stitch and then just pull it out, and there you have it. So then we're gonna switch back to white on this stitch, and we're gonna do four white stitches.

One, two, three, four, and switch back to blue. And we're doing the second repeat of this chart right here, where we've just finished that one and we're gonna go white. And it can be kind of hard to keep track of where you are at, so I would recommend, you can get a chart keeper. That's something that where you can, it's like a magnet and you can lay something on top of it so that you only see the row that you're working on. Or you can just use another piece of paper, which is totally fine, and lay it down.

And you don't want to put it below, because you want to see where you came from and what you did. You want to put it right above it. Let's see. So we have those four stitches, blue, white, blue, blue, white, blue, and then four white stitches. Oops, I didn't need to change to blue because we're at the end, and we're just gonna do those four white stitches, two at the end, two at the beginning.

See how this is kind of sticking out a little here? It's 'cause I need to pull it tight, like that. Just have to constantly be monitoring how that strand is laying in there. Okay, now we're gonna change to blue. We're doing the third round here.

Blue, white, blue. So sometimes when I'm looking at a color work chart and trying to work my color patterns, I will say to myself the numbers. So what we say one, one, one, one, two, one. So one, one, one, one, two, one. One, one, one, one, two, one.

And so you can get kind of a rhythm as you work. So one, one, one, one, two, one. And then we're gonna start at the beginning of the repeat. One, one, one, one, two, one. And then I'll do.

And now we're starting round four. And now we're gonna do the second repeat of row four. And now we're gonna work our four selvage stitches, two at the end, two at the beginning. And we're on round five. And we're gonna repeat round five one more time.

Now see, I stopped paying attention, and we have this twist happening here, which I knew would happen. I can only pay attention for so long before this twist happens. So when this twist starts to happen, you can take your yarn balls and unwind them. I would, you know, don't let this become a great big knot, 'cause then it starts to get really hard to deal with. But what I like to do is once I notice this happening, I take a look at which way it's twisting, and then I can fix it on the next few color changes that I make.

So if I continually put the yarn to the back, the yarn to the back, the yarn to the back, it is going to untwist this. So I'm gonna try that. Hopefully I will remember. Okay. Let's see.

Where are we here? We're starting the second, then white, blue. Okay. Here, right here. Nope, that needs to be blue.

Yeah. Okay. One, two, three. So we've done these three stitches, those four across, now we're gonna switch to white. So remember what I said about trying to untangle, we're gonna try and put everything to the back for a while.

So that blue goes to the back, and that's going to untangle our yarn for us. All right, we're at the end of our color work. So we're gonna do our selvage stitches. Put the yarn to the back, even though it's light colored. There we go.

So round six, if you can just take a look at this, it's blue, and then all the rest are white. So one blue and then six white. So we've already done one, two, three, four, five, six. Then we're gonna switch to blue. One, switch to white.

Okay, so that's enough of a pattern that I think we can see what's going on when we cut it open. We don't need to follow it all the way up, because I think you understand by now what the types of stitches that you need to do. So we're gonna cut the yarn here. And if you're making a swatch like this, if you have to make a swatch for a color work project, I recommend just adding those selvage stitches, and then you can cut it and then you still have enough stitches to measure your gauge. If it's something where you really need to be able to reuse the yarn, then you're gonna have to make a much wider swatch so that you can lay it flat and measure your gauge when it's flat.

But for this video, I just wanted you to be able to see how we can add those selvage stitches in there and just cut right through there and open it up, and then you can see what we did. So that's the bottom of this, repeated twice. And if we had kept going, it would have looked more like this. And now you know how to use extended single crochet and work from a color work chart.