I wanted to share my favourite trick for crocheting amigurumi. It’s probably something most experienced crocheters do automatically, but when I started hooking two years ago, I never saw anything ever written about it, so I share with you now. This is simply staggering where you put your increases in the round, in order to get more spherical circle shapes, and not hexagonal shapes.
When crocheting a circle, you start with a base number of stitches. This is the number of stitches you make in your magic circle, or chain 2 - however you start. This is also (usually) the number of “sets” that you will do on your increase and decrease rounds. In the above picture, I’ve outlined one set with yellow yarn. The black stitches are single SCs and the increases are done in white.
Basically, what you do is alternate where you put your increase, so they don’t sit all on top of each other. I like to move the increase on an even row, so that I can keep my spacing consistent. Take the picture above. In the outermost round, you can see I have 2 black stitches, an increase, and then two more black stitches in my set. That would be written as ‘4sc, inc around’. The row before it is ‘3sc, inc around’, which is exactly as I’ve hooked it. I don’t know if I’m explaining it very well, it’s simple once it sinks in, but I feel like I’m making it more complicated than it is.
As simply as I can say it, when doing an even amount of SCs before an increase, split the number in half and do the increase in the middle of that bunch of SCs. When you have an odd number to do before (or after, depending on the preference of your pattern author) an increase, do them as written.
It becomes second nature after a while, and really adds a level of professionalism to your work. I do it everytime I’m increasing now, for hats too, although if there is fancy shaping being done with increases, like a twisty neck of an ami or wiggly hips etc, you may need to leave things as written, or the shaping won’t work. Still, this is good for hats and balls ;)
I hope that helps someone out there. I'm really not sure how simple this is to understand from the point of view of someone who doesn't already know this you see. If I'm as clear as mud, and you want clarification, or if by some miracle you understood this and you want to let me know how much I've helped, I encourage you to post a comment on this post on the Facebook page. Of course you can always comment directly here, but Blogger tends to eat comments and hide them for ages without notifying me, and I check FB a lot more often than I do my Blogger dashboard. Just saying - either way I'd love to hear your feedback!
0 comments:
Post a Comment