Toni Lipe: I am Toni Lipe with Toni's Design Studio. Today, we are talking about how to crochet. Now, we are going to talk about using the stitches that we have learned to create crochet fabric. First, we will discuss the single crochet. When you start you start with your slip knot and as many chain stitches as necessary to do the crochet project. When we do the single crochet fabric, we go into each chain stitch and do a single crochet. When you are at the end of the row, you have to turn your work around. Now, what you have to do before you begin single crocheting again is to make one chain stitch and what that does is bring the yarn up to the height of the next row.

So at the end of the row I am getting ready to do another row of single crochets; I will yarn over and do one chain stitch, then I will start my single crochets by going into the chain, yarn over, pulling through the work, pulling through the two loops, going into the next chain, yarn over, pull through the work, pull through the next two loops and we continue that across.

Crocheting is a nice, easy project to carry with you as long as the project isn't too large. It only requires one crochet hook. So it makes it an easy portable project and if you start crocheting at any time, you can pull that loop out to a nice large loop and just stuff everything into your tote bag without worrying about that loop coming undone. Alright, I am just about to finish the single crochets across this crochet fabric. Chain, yarn over and pull through and at that point we have turned our work around again and since we are doing single crochets, we create one chain stitch and proceed single crochet all the way across the fabric and that's all there is to it. You do have to remember to make that single chain stitch at the beginning of each row; so that you will end up with a nice fabric edge, otherwise it will draw into itself down here and not be nice and flat. So, that's how we create fabric with a single crochet.

Now, let's move over to the half-double crochet. Now, remember the half-double is a bit taller than the single crochet. So at the beginning of the row -- and I am just going to pull back to the beginning of the row. Instead of one chain stitch, we have to create two chain stitches to accommodate the height of the row. So I have just finished one row and I am getting ready to start the next. So I have one two chain stitches and that's the way it looks stitches kind of hanging there and then we start by the yarn over first, going through the chain stitch below, yarn over, pull through the work with our three stitches on our crochet hook, we yarn over and pull the hook and yarn through all three stitches. Yarn over through the chain, yarn over through the work, yarn over through all three stitches. I'll do a couple of those so we can see the height of the stitches and you can see by doing those two stitches we have brought our yarn up to the height of the row. The same goes with the double crochet and the treble crochet. With the double crochet at the beginning of each row you need to chain three chain stitches before you start, continuing knitting your crochet fabric. With the treble stitch you need to chain four of chain stitches because that is much taller than the single, double and half-double. So that's how you create crochet fabric. Next, we will talk about increasing and decreasing crochet stitches.