 Hi friends, Tasha with Stardust Gold Crochet. Today I'm going to teach you how to do cables. Cables are really great. I just finished up my Australia headband. It's a free pattern. You can get it on the blog and there's also another video that goes over how to do the tails and the other side. If you want to make this headband, head over to the blog and you can get the free pattern on the blog. In today's video, I'm going to show you how to read a cables chart and then also show you how to work the first five rows of this cable chart. You'll learn how to do front post stitches, front post double crochet, front post treble crochet, and front post double treble crochet, which is a tongue twister. We're going to work through these first rows. I'm only going to do a chain of 15. When you want to do a cable pattern, you want to use odd numbers. Remember that initially you chain an odd number of stitches. However many you want to add on for your turning chain and then work back or you can just do a foundation single crochet, foundation double crochet, or foundation half double crochet row to start your project. Let's get started. All you need for this project is your crochet hook and some yarn. To start, do a chain of 15 and then add 3. Make a slip knot, chain 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15. After that, I'm going to chain 3 more. I'm going to hold on to my 15th chain so I know where I'm going back into and I'm going to do a double crochet into that chain. I'm going to work a double crochet across each of the chains until I get to the beginning again. You can pause the video and work your stitches. Alright, I worked 15 stitches. Make sure you count your stitches as always. So I've got 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, and 15. Now for the next row, we're going to chain 1, turn it. We're going to work a single crochet into our very first stitch, which is at the base of your turning chain. That's going to give us a little bit of an edge for our foundation of our cable stitches. For the next stitch, we're going to do a front post double crochet around the very next stitch. We're going to work around the post of the stitch. The way to find your post, the proper post to work on, is to flip your work a little bit to the side and look for the top of your stitch and then follow that down and you'll find the post of the stitch that you're going to work around. The one we did for the single crochet right here is right here, so we're going to do the next one. Yarn over, insert your hook from the right to the left around the stitch, and if you're a lefty, you'll be going in the opposite direction, so you're going to insert your hook around the post from left to right. Then we're going to yarn over, pull up a loop, yarn over and pull through 2 loops, yarn over and pull through 2. So we just completed our first front post double crochet. Doing front post stitches always leaves an extra stitch back here, so you want to avoid that stitch, you want to ignore it, we're going to skip it, and we're going to work a front post stitch around the next stitch from below. So we're going to front post around it, just like that, and work our double crochet. So now we've created 2 front post stitches, and these are front post double crochets, so later on we'll get into the front post treble crochet. So we have 2 stitches back here that we're going to skip, and we're going to work into the 3rd stitch right after that, and we're going to do a single crochet, and that's going to anchor these stitches to the row below. You do a single crochet. Now we're going to do 3 front post stitches, a single crochet, and then 3 more front post stitches. So we just did our single crochet over this, so we're going to skip that stitch, and we're going to work around the next front post double crochet. We're going to work around the next one, and a front post double crochet. If I'm going too fast for you, please feel free to pause the video, and maybe I'll do a little slow-mo version right after this. So far, we have a single crochet, 2 front post double crochets, another single crochet, and 3 front post double crochets. Now we need to skip the 3 stitches that are behind the ones we just created, and we're going to go into the next stitch with a single crochet. Now we're going to skip this stitch down here and work a front post double crochet around the next 3, just like we did before. Turn your work over, skip those 3 stitches that are behind the ones we just created, and work a single crochet into your next stitch. And now we're going to work a front post double crochet around the next 2, skipping the 2 stitches behind, and then we'll work a single crochet into the very last stitch of our row. And there we have our first row of raised front post double crochet stitches that are going to be the foundation starting for our cables pattern. If you're reading a chart in addition to the written pattern for your cables pattern, or you're creating one on your own, here's a little low down on how the symbols work. So the legend will tell you what the symbols in the chart mean. A little hooks at the bottom of your symbols are front post stitches. The top line of the symbol represents the very top of your stitch, the middle line represents how many yarn overs you do, and then the hook at the bottom represents that it's a front post stitch. So when you do a front post double crochet, you're yarning over once, and you're creating a double crochet around the post. For a front post treble crochet, you're going to yarn over twice. So the top line is your top of your stitch, and then there's 2 lines which represent the yarning over, and then the little hook. Front post double treble crochet, you're going to yarn over 3 times and you work around the post. Single crochets are denoted by a plus symbol. Chains are denoted by a horizontal oval, and then chain one stitches are denoted by a vertical oval. So once you learn how to read a chart, you can create any cable pattern you'd like. In a cables pattern, all of the even number of rows are going to be single crochet stitches, and then the odd numbers are going to be where you're doing your front stitches. So normally in a pattern like this, this single crochets are grayed out or muted so that you can clearly see what your cable pattern is. And this is an example from the Estrella headband that I did. So you can clearly see that those single crochet stitches are used as a background. And you can see the back is very flat. So what we're going to do next with our cables pattern here is we're going to chain one, turn it, and work a row of single crochets across. And that's creating our background. So you should have 15 single crochets at the end of this row. There we did our 15. So now we're going to chain one, we're going to turn, and we're going to start working over our stitches and creating crisscross cable patterns. And this is the fun part, but it's also a little hard. So we know that we had a first, our first stitch of the row is a base stitch. And we're going to do a single crochet into that very first stitch. We know that the next stitch we did, the next two stitches we did were front post stitches from below. So you'll notice that things are a little off center once you do your single crochet rows back. So here is the next stitch. And it kind of lines down. And it looks like it's coming over or just a little bit. But in essence, this stitch is matching up with this one. And this one's matching up with this one numerically, that is. So you want to even though it looks like it's over, you need to make sure that you're working around the right stitch. I labeled my pattern in columns and rows. So it's easier. So you can just count the numbers of stitches over. So we know we have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. So in my pattern, I say, when you're working into stitch number five, or stitch number three, stitch number three would be one, two, three. So that would be stitch number three. That's just a little tip. All right, for our first crossover, we're going to crossover skipping the first front post double crochet from below and going around the one that's next to it to the left, we're going to do a front post treble crochet this time, which is yarning over twice. And we're going to work around that second front post double from two rows down. So it's not this one, but it's the second one down. Just like we did before, you're going to insert your hook into that post in and around that post, yarn over and pull up a loop. This time you'll have four loops on your hook, yarn over, pull through two, yarn over, pull through two, yarn over and pull through two, yarn over and pull through two until you'd have just one loop left on your hook. So you see this is crossing over a little bit already. Now we're going to go back through and work around the first post, which can be a little awkward at first, but don't let it scare you. You're just going a little bit backwards. Sometimes I hold this one with my thumb and make sure that I'm going around the right post. Then you complete your stitch just like normal, your treble crochet stitch, yarning over and pulling through two loops at a time until it's complete. There is your very first crossover cable stitch. Like before, you're going to have two stitches on the back side that you're going to skip. And then we're going to work a single crochet into the next one. Here is where it gets a little more complicated and we're going to use a front post double treble. And a front post double treble is going to give us the length to go all the way across these stitches here. So we're going to skip over one, two, three, four stitches. And we're going to work around the first front post stitch from this cluster of three. To start, you want to yarn over three times. I usually push my hook up just a little bit like this. And then when I go in, I bunch them up a little bit and kind of twist it so that my stitches right up next to those stitches, then I bring my yarn over, pull it through, and I try to keep everything bunched up because these stitches can get really, really difficult and leave a very large gap at the top. It's almost impossible, but I don't know the trick to get rid of that. Let's do a front post double treble again. One, two, three times. Yarning over. Insert your hook around the next post. Yarn over and pull through. Then yarn over and pull through two loops at a time until you just have one loop left on your hook. So there we've done two front post double trebles. We're going to do one more around that last post. One, two. Okay. So we did our three. And now you can see it's a little bit twisted and these really long loops on top. Don't worry about those because they end up getting hidden when you do your work. As you keep going, they end up hiding. So that's really great. So your tension is kind of important, but not super duper important. Next, we skip the three stitches behind. One, two, three. We're going to work a single crochet into the fourth stitch behind there. And that kind of anchors those stitches where they're crossed over. So now we're going to actually work back through and we're going to go back right to the stitch where we left off before. We're going to do a front post double treble all the way over here. So get ready. One, two, three. Now bunch everything up, just pull it on over, go around that very first post, yarn over, pull through. And here I kind of turn my work and bunch it all up close together. And we're going to yarn over and pull through two at a time until we have just one left on our hook. And you can situate it back and see that you actually crocheted over and you're making crisscross cables. Let's do it on the next one. One, two, three. Go into the next front post. And I'm going to bring my yarn over, pull up a loop. I'm kind of folding my work a little bit and bringing it over. There we go. Now you can see that our stitches are crossing over. We have our one anchored stitch back there. So we're going to bring it forward, skip the next three stitches and work a single crochet in our next stitch. And similar to what we did at the beginning of the pattern is we're going to do a crossover stitch. So next, we're going to cross over to here and do a front post treble crochet. Then we're going to cross over back and do a front post treble around the one we skipped. Front post treble is yarning over twice. Then we're going to go around, pull up a loop and yarn over and pull through two until you have one loop left on your hook. Now we're going to go back and work through the one we skipped. We'll have two stitches on the back. We're going to skip and to anchor our row, we're going to do one last single crochet. And there. So you've done your first crossover cables. Now I'm going to show you how to bring them up just a little bit. So like before on our even rows, we're going to chain one, turn it and we're going to work a single crochet across all of our stitches. Sometimes doing crossover stitches can hide your loops on top. So be careful and make sure your stitch count is proper. I'll give you an example here. This stitch right here is so tiny. It's right there. And you almost wouldn't see it. You might skip over it and go into the next one. But make sure you get that stitch so that your stitch count is the same throughout. Oh, I hate it when there's a ball in my yarn, but I'm just going to keep going. Here's the last one. Alright, after that, we did our 15 single crochets across the back. We chain one, turn it. We're going to work single crochet into the first stitch. Then after that, we're going to work a front post double crochet around the next front post double from down below. Yarn over once, insert your hook around the stitch and then yarn over, pull up and do a double crochet just like normal. Then we're going to work another double crochet around the next front post stitch. We've skipped two in the back. So we're going to go back and skip those two and work a single crochet around our next stitch. And you can kind of see the pattern here. So this brings up and does a crisscross. And you can see if you repeat that on the next one, you would do a crisscross. And then the next one you would do straight up the next one a crisscross the next one straight up. And you'll create cables that look like this, like this. After that, we're going to do up and down stitches off of these next three cable stitches. So we're going to do a front post double crochet around the first cable stitch you see, front post double around the next cable stitch, and front post double around the next one, which is kind of hard to do. So you might have to open up your work a little bit and find that stitch. Because when you get to do the crossovers, they can be a little bit hard to find. We're going to skip the three stitches behind and work into the next stitch with a single crochet. And then we'll repeat that right here. And we're going to do a double crochet around this first post and then do a double crochet around the next one. We'll do a double crochet around the next one as well. There we've created our crisscross stitch, and that's our first cable. On your next row, you can repeat this one, the previous row where we crisscrossed over, or you can keep going and elongate them. So when you do straight up and down front post stitches, you're going to make a longer transition between each of your cables. So here I did two of the straight up and down front post stitches to create a longer chain. So if you want to create an even longer chain, you can do three or four in between and then do your crisscross stitches. So however many straight ones you do up and down, you're going to have a longer chain just like this one. I've added one straight up and down between the crisscrosses, and that gave me a pretty decent distance of a chain. This one here, you could just do crisscross stitches up the entire way, and you'll have it crisscross over. I added these straight ones on the side just for an accent. All right, let's get finished, and then you'll be finished, and you'll know how to do crochet cables, and I'm so excited about that. So we're going to skip the three behind our stitches we just created, work into the next stitch with a single crochet, and here we're going to work up off of those cables from below, going around, and we're doing a front post double crochet on those. Now we skip the two that are behind, and we work a single crochet into the next one. Oh, look good, we did it. Yay. So you learned how to do cables. I'm so excited about that. I hope you are too. You can do so many different things once you learn how to do cable stitches, and you can make up your own cable stitch patterns. And this is just a great stitch to learn. Once you get the hang of working these long stitches over, you're going to come up with some great projects. So if you have any questions about doing cables, let me know. The Australia headband is a free crochet pattern, and this is on my blog. There's also a video tutorial for this one that goes over. The main part of the stitches, like what we just went over, except for there's a little bit of added ones on the side. It also goes over how I used it to create the front post stitches that create this really pretty Celtic design coming down. I hope you guys enjoyed this tutorial. Please subscribe to my channel if you haven't already. Leave a little like and a little heart. Hit the bell button to be notified of future video tutorials. Thanks so much, everybody. I hope you guys have a great afternoon. And thank you so much for being patient on this video. I have tried, I have recorded, like, six videos to get this video out. So I hope that it helps you work through cables, and I hope that you've learned something new today. Happy crocheting! Bye!