Plaid Crochet

Earlier this week (end of Jun 2009) I couldn’t sleep much at all one night. I was thinking about crochet all night long, and even dreaming about it when I did manage to sleep for a few hours. I’ve thought for awhile that I’d like to design something in plaid but didn’t know how to do it…until this particular night. I figured it out during the night. I made this swatch the next day to try it out. It worked!

You have to have 3 different colors to make this particular plaid. You could use more colors, but it would get complicated. Each of the vertical stripes has to have its own strand of yarn. You use that strand of yarn for each of the stitches in that stripe. The back doesn’t look pretty because you have a little bit of that yarn that gets carried up the back between rows. The horizontal stripes are just as easy as any other horizontal stripe–you just join that color and do the number of rows you want, then switch back to the base color. I made my red stripe one stitch, or one row (of sc) wide. The black stripe is 3 stitches or rows wide. All of the stitches are sc. You have to choose which color you want on top when the lines cross.

Well, I’ve figured out how to do the plaid. I’ll probably design something with that in the future.