Flying the flag

Recently I figured out how to use two or more colours in a row of crochet. I call this technique tapestry or Fair Isle crochet. I googled the terms and found that this isn’t a new way of doing crochet, in fact it’s been around for a long time. There are various ways of doing it, including my version of carrying the yarns along the back of the work. This means that with a flat piece of crochet the back is a mess of strands of yarn. Other methods fix this, so I’m going to give them a try.

Stranding the different colours along the back of the work
does produce something of a mess.

Anyway, I decided to use my new (to me) technique to create an iPhone cover in time for the London Olympics. The obvious motif was the Union Jack. So I sat down with some 4ply cotton and dutifully made my gauge square. This is important with tapestry crochet, as you need to know exactly how many stitches and rows you have to play with when designing your image.

Just in time for the Olympics!

Next it was a case of finding a picture of the Union Jack and drawing it onto grid paper. This is the simplest part - one grid square equals one stitch, so you just draw a rectangle with the right number of squares to stitches. Then draw a few straight and diagonal lines to make the flag. Next I copied the grid onto an Excel spreadsheet so it could be saved as a colour PDF.

Plain blue back.

I followed the grid to crochet a Union Jack, and Hey Presto! I had the front of an iPhone cover. In order to save time, the back of the iPhone cover is plain double crochet, which can be done in red, white or blue, for obvious reasons. The edging is single rows of double crochet in, again, red, white and blue.

Available from my Craftsy store.

The finished article in use.