How to Join Motifs or Make Seams | Crocheting

Watch more How to Crochet videos: http://www.howcast.com/videos/472095-How-to-Join-a-New-Ball-of-Yarn-or-Color-CrochetingLearn how to join motifs or make seams from Lion Brand Yarn's Andrea Lemire in this Howcast video.Hey, I'm Andrea Lemire, the education coordinator here at the Lion Brand Yarn Studio. I'm going to show you some really cool techniques for beginning crochet, and hopefully, you'll have as much fun as I have with it. Okay, lets get started.So, I'm going to show you how to seam or join in crochet. It's used to join motifs, to seam pieces of a sweater together, anything where you need to join two pieces together, you can use one of these methods. The first method I'm going to show you is a sewn method and to do this type of seam you need what's called a large-eyed blunt needle. It has some other names like, you may see yarn needle or darning needle, they all mean the same thing. And you may find them in metal, in plastic, they do come in different sizes. Sometimes you might see a big package like this, this is the package of 6 that's available on lionbrand.com, but you really only need one per project and so you can choose the size of the eye that you need to accommodate the thickness of the yarn, so you'd use the biggest eye for the thickest yarn and the smallest one for the thinnest yarn. So, to sew two pieces together, the easiest way in crochet is to do what is called a whip stitch seams. So, to begin I'm going to come in underneath one corner of one side that I'm joining, and I'm going to do the same thing with the other side. So, I've just come through the bottom corner of both of these pieces. Now I'm going to start my whip stitch and the whip stitch has a very fluid motion, you go down through one side and up from the back through the opposite side. So, what the yarn is going to do is loop over the top like this. Keep it loose to begin with because you want to see where you're going and then later you can pull it tight. So, I'm going down on one side through the entire fabric, and I'm coming up from the back of the fabric on the opposite side. Another easy way to position your work when you're doing this is to put the pieces together with the fronts facing each other on the insides so, you should be looking at the back of the pieces and this way you can go through both layers in one fluid motion, so that sort of makes it a little bit faster as well. Come back round to the front, through both layers with the darning needle, and your yarn loops over the top. And what this seam does is it makes a nice flat seam, it's perfect for joining motifs like on this afghan here. It's also really great to use for joining pieces together on a sweater or a garment because then you don't get these big bulky seams like, at the shoulder or areas where you don't want to add more bulk. Another type of seam that's faster than the sewing seam is a crochet seam and you can use 2 different stitches for them. These do create a ridge on the back side of the piece but they are faster and a little easier to do than with a darning needle or yarn needles. So, some people really like to use the crochet seam instead. So, you are going to use a crochet hook for this type of seam and you want the outside of whatever you're seaming facing each other on the inside so you should be looking at what's going to be the inside or the wrong side, the back of the piece so that way you hide the seam. So, I'm going to take my crochet hook and I'm going to insert it through both layers of the fabric, just right through both. And I'm going to pull up a loop. I'm going to do that again, and pull up another loop. And now I'm going to work basically a single crochet stitch by yarning over and pulling through both of those loops. So, what I'm doing is I'm single crocheting these two pieces together, essentially. So, now I'm going to work a slip stitch seam, it starts the same way as a single crochet seam, through both layers of the fabric. Grab the yarn, but this time keep pulling it through that loop. So, you can see where it's already coming together, and how those seams look. So, there's a sewn seam and then there the two main types of crocheted seam, the single crochet seam and the slip stitch seam. So, those are just three basic ways to join pieces together.