 Hi everyone, Tasha here from Start of School Crochet. Welcome to my YouTube channel where I do crochet tutorial videos and how to stitches. I throw out a podcast here and there and we do a lot of crochet alongs. If you like my tutorials please go ahead and subscribe and hit the little bell button down below and you'll get notified of all future video tutorials. Let's get down to the video and how to create this beautiful X Marks the Spot bookmark. I'm going to give you a few details about what I've done. Here I added a little bit of a picket down at the bottom. I'll show you that. Picket stitch. It's just a simple picket stitch. So this bookmark was inspired by my boyfriend. He's an avid book reader and so am I. And I wanted to create something that was just fun and simple but also functional because I'm very into functional crochet patterns. Your materials that you need to create these bookmarks is a three millimeter crochet hook, a pair of scissors, a darning needle and I'm using a three weight yarn. This one is by Shipiz and it's called Stonewashed. I really love this yarn. It's one of my favorite yarns because of the colorway. The things I don't like about it though, unfortunately, it's very hard to frog. If you make a mistake and it it's very, I'll kind of try to show you what it looks like. It has a lot of fuzzies and they catch on each other so when you try to rip it out it can be a little cumbersome. So my tip to you is make sure you don't have to rip out your stitches. Count carefully, use your stitch markers. I'm going to show you, these are the bookmarks before I added the X. Right now I'm in the process of adding the colors to these two bookmarks. So I decided to use purple with the pink and blue with this kind of gold color. This one is called Yellow Jasper. Let's go through the colors. The blue that I used for this pattern is color 813 and I actually got this before they started naming these colors. This color is color 811, 836. This one is Yellow Jasper color 809. Let's see. For the tutorial, I think I will use the pink color. First thing you want to do with this pattern is we're going to create a foundation row of five and we're going to do foundation single crochet. The foundation single crochet is your chain two. Insert your hook into the first chain, yarn over, pull up and you're going to yarn over, pull through the very first chain, yarn over and pull through both. Then you repeat that by going through the bottom two loops. Yarn over, pull up once, yarn over, pull up once, grab those little loops down at the bottom there, yarn over and pull through two through both loops. Then you repeat that five times. It's a little awkward at first but once you get the hang of it, it becomes very easy. And you realize, wow this is so great to know this. I believe that this is my fifth one and always feel free to pause the video anytime you want to pause. So there's five, one, two, three, four, five. The next row, we're going to chain one, turn it and work a single crochet into each of the foundation single crochets just across. And there we have our first two rows of the pattern. We have our first two rows. We're going to work on row three by chaining one, turn single crochet into the very first stitch, then you're going to chain one. We're going to skip one chain one stitch and single crochet into the next stitch, chain one, skip one and single crochet into the very last stitch. That's going to create our little holes where we're going to put and weave through our chains. The next row, we're going to chain one, turn it, single crochet into the very first stitch. Our chains don't count as stitches. And then in this hole here, our chain one space, we're going to go around it and chain one, single crochet into the next single crochet, go into that hole, which is kind of tiny, but it's there. And then we're going to do a single crochet in the very last. So you have five single crochets on that row there. For row five, we're going to chain one, turn it and work a row of single crochet across. I didn't get in both loops. That happens sometimes with the end stitches. Okay, so there is where we are so far, and you can see the little holes right here where we're going to weave in our chains when we're finished doing it. So this pattern is so simple, you guys. It's basically a three row repeat. The three rows you're going to repeat are numbers three, four and five. So for this, we just did row five. I'm going to do row six, which is our single crochet in the first stitch, chain one, skip one stitch, single crochet in the next stitch, chain one, skip one, single crochet in the next stitch. After we do that, this is row four, repeat, chain one, turn, single crochet in each stitch and chain space across for five single crochets total, three, four and five. Then we chain one, this is our row five, repeat, turn, single crochet in each single crochet across and you have five total. That is this pattern. The written pattern is on my blog, and I'm going to go ahead and do an assembly with you guys here too. But here is the bookmark and you can count the holes. I crocheted and this is all in the pattern. I crocheted about nine repeats. What we'll do next is you work your pattern until you have nine repeats up and then the top part here I do a decrease and then we work a long chain. So let's pretend we just finished out our very last row and we're at the top of our bookmark, however long you want to make it. These are one, two, two rows of decreases. We're going to chain one, turn, we're going to do a single crochet two together. So you insert your hook into the very first stitch, yarn over, pull up, insert your hook into the next stitch and yarn over and pull up. You should have three on your hook, yarn over and pull through all three. We're going to single crochet into the next and then do another single crochet two together, decrease stitch. So that brings it from two stitches down to one. And so there we have three single crochet on the top. The next one and final row is we're going to yarn over, I'm sorry, chain one, turn it and then we're going to single crochet three together. So one, two, three. Then you yarn over and pull through all of the loops on your hook. We're going to close it out with a chain. Here is where you start to make your tail, your long, long tail. This part I chained about 100. Yeah, it was about 100 stitches. So just start chaining and then when you count to 100 or however long you want your tail to be, I mean it's up to you really. But if you want to follow the pattern completely, you chain about 100 and just keep going. We're going to weave in the long chains that you created. I started this off here. So you start here at the bottom and then we're going to work diagonally across in and out from the front to the back. And it's probably easiest to go ahead and use a darning needle for this. I weaved in a few already. So just you're going to go in through the front, find your next hole and come up through the back. Then you're going to go up to the next one and up the front again like that. And then when you get to the very top, just make your last diagonal there. The trick here is we want to make this part the same length as our tail. I'm going to go ahead and pull it through until I feel like it's almost there. I think I went a little bit too far that one. So I'm going to pull it back down. It doesn't have to be perfect, but you want these all to match up. All three tails at the end. So I'm just going to pinch that right there and then pull this back down. Then I'm going to stretch it out just a little bit because you don't want it to be too tight and bunch up. I'm going to weave in this side and it looks like I need more chains. So I'm going to chain those and then we'll weave in the rest of it. I chained about 24 more and since I think it's going to be just about right, I might just chain a few more. Chain like five, maybe six more and if I need to I can just pull it out at the end. Then I'm going to put this on my hook as carefully as possible. I'm going to pull it through a lot. Then I'm going to weave back through the front, the front here, up through diagonal again and then you're going to go opposite over here and weave back up. Repeat that all the way up your bookmark. Tug on it every now and then to make sure that it's not bunched up too much. This is our last one. Let's see how good we did on the length of our chain. That's it. Go ahead and tug on it a little bit. Before you block them, they tend to curl a little bit so you can see how it's kind of curling. That's why you want to make sure that these chains are loose, twisted around the opposite direction a little bit. I actually blocked these before I weaved in these chains as well. Looks like I'm still a little bit short on this one and it looks like I'm probably short like about five chains. Let's see if that helped. No, I still need just a few more. I'm going to do four just to be on the safe side. They're all pretty much the same length. Now we're going to braid and you want to braid with when this side's up, you're going to flip it over and you're going to braid this side. I put something like a water bottle, heavy water bottle on the top of it so that I could have a little bit of leverage when I was braiding. If you don't know how to braid, usually take the right one over the center. Take the left one, put it over the right one. Take the center one, wrap it around, then take the left one, put it over the center, take the right one. Basically, whichever one you put into the center, you're going to take the left one and wrap it around it and then take the right one and wrap it around it. So the left one's going over the center one, so now the center one became the left one. Left one became the center and the right one's over here. So take that right one, throw it over the center. Looks like my tails are not exactly even and I want them to be even. The pink ones actually just a little bit longer than both of those by about one, two, three, four, maybe three chains. So what I did was I actually unraveled my last stitch of the chain and then took out one, two, three, four and you can do that with any of them and then you can go ahead and tie it off like normal. We're going to finish out the braid and when you get to a point where you can't really fold them over anymore, I bunch them up and you sew them together. I'm using a sharper darning needle for this to show these ends together, so you want to make sure you're going in the top stitch of each. Make sure you have all the stitches in there and then just pull your yarn through and go back and forth, but go back through these three or four times just to make sure they're secure and then when you feel like they're secure you're going to take this one piece and just wrap it around over and over again. You're just going to kind of wrap it around, pull it tight and then go through sideways to wrap the final piece and then come up this way then go back through to the top again. The sharp darning needle makes it really easy to work. Now you're going to go back down and that'll be the final time you go back down through. Try to make sure you get through a lot of the fibers. Your needle out. So I left my tails about an inch long I guess. You can leave them as long as you want or as short as you want. Just cut your tails and then go ahead and wet those and block them out because they look much better when they're wet and blocked. Now we're going to work the picket stitch for the top part that I did on this one. You can see and you don't have to do this part. I just liked it because it added just a little bit of a I don't know what looks like a prettier edging than just the flat but the flat looks pretty as well. So that's why I left both into the in the picture. So you're going to use the front. The front is where this little horizontal bar is because as you can see when you follow down the back part. So just flip it on over and then we're going to turn it upside down so the bottom is on the top. Go through the very first stitch the two. Attach your yarn pull it through and then chain one. And if you're not familiar with a picket they're fairly simple. All I did was just do a few across the top. So you have your first chain do two more chains then work into the very first chain. Yarn over and pull through and then slip stitch it straight through and then I anchor it to the next stitch pull up with a slip stitch. And then you work three more chains two three work back through that first chain slip stitch and slip stitch again then anchor it to the next stitch slip stitch to anchor it. Slip stitching is always kind of cumbersome to me. Chain three. That's why I don't really like doing pickets but I thought a picket would be a nice edging for this. Then anchor it to the next with a slip stitch. Chain three. Go back through the very first chain and slip stitch through and then we're going to do one last anchor here and call it a day and slip stitch through. So it leaves you four little pickets on top one two three four. Then of course you're going to cut a tail pull it through and weave in all your tails. That's it. Alright we did it everyone. Thanks for being here. Thanks for watching. Please subscribe to my channel. Also this bookmark X marks the spot would be a perfect gift for friends or family for the holidays this year because our supply chain is messed up right now and you can just whip this up real quick. Give it to a loved one, a family member, co-worker, best friend, boyfriend, whomever. Thanks guys and check out Marley Bird's 24 Days of Quickies starting December 1st. I'll leave all the links for all of those blog hops below this pattern and if you have any questions please feel free to leave a comment below or head on over to my blog and message me. Thanks guys. Happy crocheting!