In last week’s Craft Corner we told you how to make crocheted yarn spirals, and promised that if you mastered the spirals we’d offer some suggestions in this week’s column for putting the spirals to good use.
Of course, we have no way of knowing whether you mastered the spirals, but we’ll give you our yarn-spiral craft suggestions anyway.
We’ll begin with a tote bag decorated with rosettes made from spirals (see illustration).
Bag: For this project, you’ll need a plain tote bag, yarn and one pompom per rosette.
Using a crochet hook that will give you the size you desire, crochet a chain of 15 stitches and make a spiral for each rosette. When the spiral is completed, use a large needle and a double strand of yarn to run a couple of tight stitches from bottom to top and top to bottom to condense the spiral into a rosette. Leave long ends of the yarn for streamers.
Attach the rosettes to the bag in a pattern of your choice, using the large needle and a single strand of yarn; tie off on the inside of the bag. Run a single strand of yarn up through the back of the bag, through the center of the rosette, through a pompom, back down through the pompom, through the rosette and back to the inside of the bag to form the center of the rosette; tie off inside the bag. Repeat for all rosettes on the bag.
Frame: To make our frame, purchase a plain fabric-bordered frame and follow the same procedure for making rosettes as with the tote bag, but using knitting/crocheting ribbon instead of yarn and omitting the pompoms. Pull the condensing center stitch a bit tighter to form the flower, and trim the ends of the ribbon/yarn closely to the base of the rosette.
Using a hot glue gun, attach the rosettes to the picture in a design that you choose. We gathered some strands of ribbon together to use as a base for the rosettes, but you might choose to use fabric leaves or other items instead.
Clowns: Our clowns are a bit more time-consuming, but you can use the same technique to make dolls, animals and other toys. Begin by crocheting four 15-chain spirals, using a hook that will give you the size you want. As with the rosettes, run a double strand of yarn through the center of each spiral (up and down) to tighten the spiral, but not as tightly as necessary for making rosettes. You just want to pull the layers of the spiral together a bit so they aren’t lanky. Attach a large jingle bell to the tightening yarn before running it back through the spiral, which will form “hands” and “feet” for each limb.
Crochet one more 15-chain spiral, but this time using a hook one size larger than the one you used for the first four spirals and, instead of double crocheting three times in each chain stitch, you’ll be doing a treble crochet. This is a cinch, as you simply yarn-over twice instead of once (as in the double crochet) and complete the stitch in three steps instead of two. This will create a wider body than the spirals for the arms and legs; tighten the body spiral as you did the arms and legs.
Sew two of the smaller spirals to the top and two to the bottom of the body spiral to form arms and legs.
Next, cover a Styrofoam ball (you’ll need to base the size of the ball on the size of the spiral body parts) with yarn and add eyes, nose and mouth, if desired. We tried adding several kinds of eyes, but they all looked goofy to us, so we went with the simpler – but somewhat creepier – blank faces.
You can decorate your clown as desired. We used long, white strands of yarn to form a collar on our darker clown and pompoms around the neck on both clowns. Attach the pompoms by running a single length of yarn from bottom to top through each, through the neck of the clown, and through each pompom until all are secured.
To crochet a hat for the clown, as shown in our darker sample, begin by crocheting a 4-crochet chain and join it, then double crochet in the circle formed by the chain until it’s the tightness you desire, join, then continue to double crochet in each double crochet around, adding a chain stitch every other row or so to form a cone. Attach the hat to the head with invisible nylon thread.
To use a purchased hat, buy one that fits the head of your clown, then cut strands of yarn (for hair) and glue them to the inside of the hat. Glue the hat to the head (you can attach it with nylon thread, but this will be a bit harder to do than with the glue), then trim the “hair” to the proper length and tie a length of yarn around the hat crown and make a bow.
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