Why is my crochet getting wider? It is a great question and is a common mistake many beginners make.
You may want to make a blanket; its sides are widening, whereas it should be a giant square.
This can be a frustrating task. If you’re anything like me, you want to learn the best way to fix it.
In this post, you are going to learn what you are doing and how to fix it.
Is extra good?
This is the key to why your crochet is widening. You are adding too many extra stitches forcing it to go outward. But don’t worry I have a solution.
This is a technique called increasing, where you intentionally add extra stitches to create a desired shape/design.
This is a real shocker if you weren’t intending to do this. These are common mistakes beginners make and are crucial to your growth.
With increasing, you have to pay attention to detail and notice if you placed two stitches in one placement.
It’s easy to see the increase in double crochet. You must develop the eye to catch it in other stitches such as single crochet.
Should I frog?
If you don’t know this crochet term, frogging is the process of unraveling or undoing stitches in a crochet project. You call it “frogging” because you “rip it, rip it, rip it” which sounds like a frog’s croak.
Once you frog your work, you want to continue where you left off and count each stitch individually to ensure the number is correct.
If your crochet project is getting smaller, there are ways to work around that to fix it. This includes adding stitches to its border.
Because this already has too many stitches, we shouldn’t cut it nor can we decrease it. But the solution is that we should only frog it.
Let’s fix it
We want to frog the entire section from the last increase row to where the increase started.
You do that by counting the very first row created to see how many stitches were in it.
Depending on how many stitches were in that row, should remain the same until you reach the row of increase (the widening begins) You want to count each row to make sure there are “x” amount of stitches there.
If you have 33 stitches of half double crochet in the first row, in the next row you should still have 33 stitches of half double crochet. If you count more than 33 stitches in one row, you have found where you should start frogging.
As a beginner, you sometimes have to take a long route to develop good habits. As always, it’s easier to develop good habits now than it is to break bad ones later.
This post answers your question “Why is my crochet getting wider”
