welcome back to be hooked crochet calm I'm your host Britney today I'm going to be demonstrating how to crochet the bullion stitch flower Society patterns available at be hooked to crochet calm you get the link to that pattern in the description below I will be demonstrating the bullion stitch using a latch hook so to follow along with this tutorial you'll need a latch hook also be using a size 5 and 1/2 millimeter crochet hook and any worsted weight yarn to begin our bullion stitch flower we're going to start off with a magic ring and if you absolutely hate magic rings or you just can't quite get the hang of them then you can do the alternate method to the magic ring you can get that link to that video in the description below or you can just make a circle however you're most comfortable with and we need to have six single crochets so if you want to follow along with me the way I make my magic ring is just wrap the yarn two times around my two fingers just like that coming towards me and then I'll just hold on to the working strand with my two fingers back here and then I'll just place the hook underneath both of those strands and then just hook that back strand and pull it forward then we can use the working yarn to lock it into place by simply just creating a chain then we'll chain one because we're working in single crochets now you can just grab ahold of the magic ring with those two fingers there and then now we're ready to work our six single crochets in the center of this magic ring now I do have a slower tutorial for the magic ring and I'll also provide that link below this video that way if you're having a little bit of difficulty then you can have a slower tutorial to practice along before you start this object okay so once you have your six single crochets if you're working the magic ring just close it up and what we want to do is join with a slip stitch to the first single crochet that we made okay now before we start working with the bullion stitch we need to chain two and that's because the Boyan stitch has quite a bit of height to it now you can actually make it taller or shorter depending on how many times you wrap your yarn but for this particular pattern we want to have two chains and that's to accommodate for the height so traditionally speaking when you work a bullion stitch you would use your regular crochet hook and you would wrap the yarn a certain number of times for this pattern it's going to be eight however that number can vary anywhere between like seven all the way up to like thirteen or fourteen wraps depending on how tall you want it to be so we'll go ahead and wrap eight times okay so I'm just quickly demonstrating just the how you would do the bullion stitch with the crochet hook so you can kind of understand why I'm using this this latch hook and why it makes it easier so with all of these wraps then on your hook you would go into your first stitch wrap the yarn pull it through then wrap the yarn and now you need to pull that through all of the loops on your hook so these first two come off super easy just like we're used to but then you're like okay how in the world am I supposed to get this loop through all of these and so some people will tell you to walk it through one at a time so you maybe grab this one walk that through grab the next one and the next one and you know you just do this over and over and can you imagine it takes this long to do one stitch what if you're working an entire project and then you're thinking oh these loops are getting really loose and really messy at the bottom so you've got a bullion stitch that looks not very attractive doesn't look very good the tensions all crazy and so I thought to myself there has got to be an easier way to do this so that was kind of a long and reduction - why I use the latch hook okay so this is a an amazing tool for this particular stitch it's a little bit tricky to work with so I'll be completely honest and saying that when you've got the the little latch there sometimes it gets in the way sometimes it works properly and other times it doesn't so this takes a little getting used to but watch how much easier it is I've got this loop on the latch hook and we're not counting that as one of our wraps so I'm just going to wrap eight more times okay and I've made sure that my when I was wrapping I was doing so pretty loose I want this to be able to flow pretty freely up and down the latch hook okay so looking at our magic ring here our little circle that we have we don't want to work our first stitches into the same stitch where we slip stitched okay so we're going to skip that one we're going to work into this one now sometimes you can get the latch hook to go through the stitch when it's closed other times it likes to open so you just want to insert that into the stitch then grab the working yarn and then pull that through the stitch okay and now pull everything down we want to open up that latch again drop that loop that was in there then grab the working yarn again and pull it through now I like to pull through those first two stitches with the latch hook facing down and then I like to turn it up at this point and then you want to make sure you have your working yarn really loose through your hand okay because as you're pulling the latch hook back out you're actually pulling the working yarn so that'll hurt you in the long run if you're not careful that you're just letting that flow through your fingers then I just simply help walk the stitches down make sure the latch hook stays closed and then we're just going to finish it off with a chain saw push that loop back up grab the working yarn and pull it through now isn't that so much easier than trying to do it with the crochet hook and it looks much better even with the latch hook this stitch takes some practice especially working with a tool like this were not used to but it looks so much better and I'm going to put this down for just a second to demonstrate I've got two of the same flower one that I worked with the latch hook and this one I worked using the crochet hook now one might argue that it looks pretty cool because you know as I said the loops at the top end up being much looser so it kind of does look pretty cool as a flower but it's so much neater when you use the latch hook so this is completely up to you you can use either method but I am going to continue using the latch hook for this demonstration so for this pattern what we want to do is make two bullion stitches per single crochet so we'll have a total of 12 since we started off with six single crochet okay once we've wrapped we're going to go into the same stitch and then don't forget your chain at the end to finish it off you want to make that chain real loose so that way you're not scrunching your boy and stitch down sometimes that's the objective in this case we want to make sure we've got a nice tall stitch now we're going to go into the next stitch Boyan stitch actually works really great with this variegated yarn it this is a a very short colorway as you can see here that each each color is only about a couple of inches or so and it actually looks really cool with these bullion stitches it kind of gives it a a rainbow effect as far as your yarn choice goes for this demonstration I would definitely recommend that you use a worsted or medium weight yarn and you want to make sure that you get a yarn that does not come apart or come unplug easily so I'm working with Super Saver here it's a really durable yarn it never seemed I mean if you really uh then you can get it too you can get the plots to come apart but you actually have to try to make that happen there are some yarns out there that are just really easy to come unwound and you really want to stay away from those because since we're wrapping the yarn around the latch hook so many times what we're going to do is actually unplug take it apart and that doesn't work out very well you it's really difficult to work you can make it happen but I will say that it's you probably need to have a little bit of experience under your belt especially working with this particular stitch it also works great for roving style yarn so that the roving style is the type of yarn where it's just basically one strand that's twisted into you know a single ply now one thing you do want to watch so you just saw how easy that was for me to just for the left hook to close in the wrong spot so that's one thing you want to keep an eye on if you find that your latch hook is caught on two loops like it is here you just want to make sure you open that up and walk it back out so what what happened there was I didn't have that loop all the way off the hook Spray Foam most worked our way around and so I'm just going to go ahead and finish up my last few boolean stitches using the same techniques that we've talked about and you go ahead and do the same go ahead and finish your boy in stitches okay so once you have finished your last boolean stitch again you just need to count make sure you have 12 then we can just pull up on that loop and remove your latch hook and then just replace it with your crochet hook and we need to join with a slip stitch in order to close it off and to finish up and so I like to slip stitch to the very first Boyan stitch because I want to cover up this chain because it's not really a part of the design but rather it's just something that was required in order to make that first petal of this flower and be straight so I'm just going to insert my hook into that very first stitch and then just slip stitch that closed okay and so you can still see the chain a little bit but for the most part it stays pretty well hidden behind those boolean stitches so from here we can just go ahead and bind off so just trim yourself a small tail I just pull that tail through the loop on my hook and all that's left to do is just to weave in our ends now if you're sewing this to a project you may actually want to keep one or both of the ends and that way you can just use them to directly sew them onto the Hat or whatever it is that you're working on but just for demonstrational purposes I'll just show you how I weave these in it's a little bit different with bullion stitches because as you know they're they're kind of strange they're not something that we normally work with and so weaving in the end kind of seems like it's a bit of a challenge so what I'm doing is just working that first tail that we had from the beginning just under the first round of single crochets now the real question comes with this second one where on earth are we supposed to weave this in so what I like to do is bring it down through the boy in stitch so I'm just making just putting my needle in that entire stitch and you don't want to pull too tight and make the shape you know come in a little bit so we just want to pull that just tight enough that way we can reach the middle and then work it under these single crochets like we did before this concludes our demonstration on the bullion stitch flower please stay tuned for more free patterns and video tutorials at be hooked crochet you you