Multicolored Spirals in Crochet

In this lesson, we will work a beautiful spiral motif. This really grabs your attention, doesn't it? First, we're going to start at the center with four different colors. Then we'll grow the spiral out working the colors on top of each other. We'll finish off the spiral by tapering stitches for a perfectly circular motif.

For this awesome spiral, it looks more complicated than it is. We're going to begin at the center with an adjustable ring or a magic loop. And once we do that, it will be really easy for us to begin putting stitches into that loop. When we pull the loop close it'll make a really nice tight center to our spiral. Then we'll begin to make our stitches on top of the color next to each one.

And to keep track of where our colors are and where we are in pattern, we're gonna use stitch markers of the same color for three of them, and one different color to show us where the beginning of our round is, or the end of the round, totally up to you. So let's go ahead and we're gonna jump in and begin to build the foundation of this spiral. I'm gonna move this out of the way and I'm gonna pull in four different colors that I'm gonna use for the spiral. I'm gonna start off with color A being my purple, and I'm gonna start off with an adjustable loop. I put the tail on the palm of my hand.

Take the working iron, wrap it around the forefinger and middle finger. And when I come back up, I cross over. When I flip my hand over, I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna grab my yarn right there and pull it underneath that front loop. And when I take my fingers out I'm not gonna let this hole right there close, okay? That's where I'm gonna begin to build stitches.

So I'm gonna take the loop I just pulled up, I'm gonna put it on my hook and I'm going to begin. So I'm gonna start off here. It's a little fiddly at the beginning. Be patient, you can do it. And I'm gonna start off with a chain one.

So I started with the chain one, and then I'm going to work in pattern, which is a single crochet, and I'm putting them all right there into that big space that I have. So I'm doing a single crochet. Then I have double crochet and then two doubles. So there's one, and two. Now this color is set.

It's ready for me to move on to the next color. So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to grab a stitch marker and I'm gonna place it into my loop right there. So it doesn't go anywhere. And I'm gonna set this color aside, okay.

So color A is complete. Now I'm ready to start color B. So I'm gonna use this pretty pink color. I like pink. So this works really well.

Hopefully I can get the yarn to come apart. And I'm gonna begin with a standing single crochet. So for that, I like to put a slipknot onto my hook. You can see I'm creating my slipknot just like I did the magic loop but now I'm not letting that loop stay open. I'm just putting it right up to my hook.

Now I have a slipknot on my hook. I'm gonna come over here into the magic loop put my hook into the loop, yarn over, pull up a loop. I have two loops on my hook, just like you do when you have a single crochet. Yarn over pull that too, that is a standing single crochet. I'm going to do my half double, just like I did the purple and then two doubles and grab myself some more yarn here.

And all of these are going into this magic loop. So even though this loop is getting a little bit bigger 'cause I'm just pulling on it a little bit. it's all right. It's exactly where I want things to be. That color is complete.

I'm going to go ahead and grab the same color stitch marker as this one and put it in this loop. And I will explain more about that in just a minute. I don't wanna confuse you yet. So now we have two colors going on, okay. This is where we want everything to be.

Grab the third color, pull a little bit out and we're gonna once again, do a standing single crochet. You can see here, I'm just building each section of color with the same stitches. Put the stitch or the slip stitch on my hook, go into my loop. You don't over pull up a loop, work my single crochet and then my half double. And then my two doubles.

I'm gonna do that one more time. You'll see here with green I'm using the same color stitch marker yet again to mark my loop. And the next color is where I'm going to switch the color of my stitch marker. The reason I'm gonna do that is because that will signify that that was the last color of my round. So it's a way for me to really be able to keep track of which color is used when.

If you decide to put the different colored stitch marker on color A, the first color I did, you could do that too. Whatever you need to do to allow you a better way to know which color is your first color, that's what I need you to do. When I finish off with this last color here I'm gonna do my two doubles. You all know how to do double crochet so I'm not going super slow here. And I'm gonna go ahead and mark this and I'm gonna grab a blue stitch marker, pop it right in there.

I love these little removables stitch markers that look like safety pins. So I look like I have kind of a little mess here going on but it's really cool. 'Cause I want you to watch this. 'Cause I think this part is super magical. I'm gonna take the tail of the adjustable loop and I'm going to pull on that tail.

And when I do that it's going to tighten up this loop, right? The hole, I'm just gonna keep pulling it really tight. And it draws all the colors in right on top of each other. It was kind of like a pinwheel and I'm ready to carry on. So this is where yarn management becomes very important.

As you look here, you can see I have yarn a little bit everywhere. And typically if I was working in the rounds I would rotate my work just to the right and I would move on so that I could get back to the purple color. I keep wanting to call color B or color.. See I did it again. The purple color or color B, its color A.

But instead of rotating everything to the right I actually wanna rotate it to the left. And when I do that, if I move each color, just like this I'm back to where I have my color B and I can begin to build. So I rotate and I go to the pink, rotate go to the green, rotate go to the blue and then I do it all over again. So it's really easy to keep all of your work on the table and just keep rotating in that manner. If I were to constantly rotate like this, look at that mess.

Nobody wants to do that. That's no fun. So when you're dealing with colors it's really important to maintain yarn management and being able to have your colors not become a tangled mess. And this is the best way to do it with the spiral. Just keep everything in the position it needs to be in all separated out just like this.

And whenever you're done with your very last color, rotate towards the left, begin with the first color again. Now that you know how to do the foundation, let's go ahead and jump forward and begin to build on that foundation. To grow the spiral we're going to build stitches on top of each color. So color A will work onto color B, color B will work onto color C so on and so forth. If you look down here you can see I'm using different colors.

And I did this on purpose because that way you can see the importance of using the stitch markers. Even without knowing what color I have here as color A or D or whatever it may be. You know that because I put a different color stitch marker on my last color I used, you can detect that color A for me is this pink. So this is really helpful if you put your work away for a couple of weeks because life happens and you come back and you don't remember which color was the start. If you always use that stitch marker into the last color you've used, or if you wanna put it in the first color, you will always know the place you are in pattern.

So I can go ahead. I'm gonna begin here. I'm gonna shift everything around. Number it for yarn management. I'm gonna remove my marker and I'm going to place this loop onto my hook.

Now I'm going to be really careful and make sure I always have the right side of my work facing me when I put the loop on my hook. I have not tucked my ends in yet because I know some of you don't like to do that right away. So what I did is I took the tails and I just tied a knot in them. And I put them in the back of the work to give me a visual cue that that's the backside. I'm right here.

And as I'm following pattern, it states I'm gonna put two double crochets into the single crochet of my color B. So I'm gonna go ahead and yarn over my hook, find my standing single crochet, go into it. And I'm gonna put two stitches by putting two ditches into this one stitch, I'm increasing. If you've made a crochet hat before or made anything circular you understand that by increasing at regular intervals you're able to get a circle, right? So I've done two stitches, I've put one double crochet in the next and I'm gonna put two in the next one because that's what it says in pattern.

But I also know that I need to have an increase every other stitch in this round. I'm gonna finish off with one single crochet and I'm at the end of my row or end for this color, I should say. How do I know that? Because I have worked all of my color B. See I'm at the end of my color B there's nowhere else to go.

So I go ahead, I put my stitch marker back in place and I carry on. Rotate over and I go onto color B and I do the same thing. Go ahead, remove my marker, put my hook back into my loop. And I'm going to do a double crochet into my first standing single crochet here. Okay, you guys get the point.

I will know at the I'm at the end, when I'm at the end of color C. If I set this aside, I'm gonna pull in a sample showing you that particular round, all complete. And I rotate this, you can see here's my color, A, B, C, and D. I still have different stitch to marker colors, right? Although now I've changed that where this blue is the last one, right?

Like it's a blue marker instead of purple but you get the idea. And I've completed my first round of increases. And you can see none of the stitch markers meet, right? Because I only worked each color until I was at the end of the color next to it. Okay, really super simple for this round.

Have go ahead, go back to my color A, put the loop on my hook and then begin to build until I'm at the end of my color B. With my regular intervals, I'd have two double crochets, double-double, two double crochets, double-double. When I finish that, I keep growing my spiral until it reaches the size. I want it to be. Now that can be anything you want.

If you're following a pattern, follow along until the pattern tells you to stop. If you're doing something on the fly maybe you wanna make a baby hat. So you figured this is the crown of the hat, build it out until it's this round as you want it to be. And we will learn to finish off your circle here in just a minute. And we'll begin to just work regular rounds without the increases and you'll get a nice hat.

But looking at this one, you can see that with each round of building exponentially on top of all the stitches we're still a nice flat round circle but none of our colors are working onto one another. So go ahead and continue working in this manner until you've reached the desired size of your spiral motif. Once you've reached that, you have to know how to finish off. So I'm gonna show you how to do that next. You've created the spiral to the size you want it to be and you're ready to finish off all of these colors.

I'm gonna show you how to do that. We have so far been working with double crochets which are all the same height. So it makes sense if I were to tell you we're gonna work some double crochets and then slowly go down to a double or a half double and then a single crochet so that the size of the stitch is actually getting tapered down really tightly. I'm gonna come over here to my color A, which is pink. I'm gonna put the little loop back on my hook and I'm going to this time, not do any increases.

I'm just going to work the stitches as written in the pattern. So I'm gonna a double crochet into the first three stitches here of my color B, right? So I have three double crochets. And this is where I begin to taper down the stitches with their height difference. So I'm going to do a total of two half double crochets, one, two, and then I'm gonna finish off with three single crochets.

That will take me to the end of my color B just like you've been doing all along. Only notice we didn't do any increases. So this will just finish off the circular motif. And I'm going to chain one to finish off, cut my yarn, pull through, and I'm done with color A. So I move on to color B.

Just leave color a hanging out there. And I do the exact same thing. I'm going to do three double crochets into my color C. Two, three. I want you to see what this looks like at the end.

And I'm going to do two half doubles. Pull this out. If you guys are working with full skeins. You won't have to fiddle with little bobbins like this. I'm only using bobbins...

Oops, I'm talking and I didn't. So I'm doing single crochets now. I'm only using bobbins because it's easier to demonstrate on camera without having the big balls of yarn. So you don't have to create bobbins for your motifs. You can absolutely use the full skeins of yarn.

I'm gonna go ahead, snip that, pull through and finish off. Once you finish all the four colors you're gonna have four tails to weave in. So I wanna show you how to do that. So that way you can see how the single crochet will seamlessly work next to the double crochet of the next color. I'm grabbing my darning needle, and I'm gonna go ahead, I'm gonna thread my yarn directly onto my darning needle, and all I'm going to do...

I love these bent tip darning needles. I'm gonna insert my darning needle right into the the stitch next to, it's actually it's the stitch that my single crochet is in. And I'm gonna pull the tail down. You can automatically see just by doing that it's pulling that stitch down flush with the double crochet. I'm gonna make sure that I have my yarn on the opposite side, so on the wrong side.

I'm gonna flip my work. And at this point I can take my darning needle and just weave it directly into those stitches of the pink, pull it through. And that even pulls it in a little bit more snug and then make sure as I go through a couple of those stitches that I'd go back the opposite direction. So that way my tail is nice and woven in. I absolutely hate to work over top of my tails.

So if you choose to make a border around your motif when it's all complete, which the instructions for that are in your class materials, I do not recommend working over top of your tails 'cause it will inevitably come undone. Take the time to grab your darning needle and actually weave in your ends. Once it's all woven in, you can snip it nice and tight and your motif is ready for viewing, whatever you wanna call it. I really hope you enjoyed making this circular motif from the center out in beautiful spirals. This adds a lot of color to your crochet and I just love the way it works up.