CMC - Advanced Tips

This follows on from the Clean Mosaic Crochet (CMC) Tutorial. These advanced tips for CMC should, hopefully, help you enjoy the CMC technique more.

Clean Mosaic Crochet: Advanced Tips

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Once you have mastered the basics of CMC, you might want to consider these tips below.

Tip 1: For a Neater Back (WS)

Updated: 21 Sept, 2020

We know that it is normal to have alternating stripes on the WS of a Mosaic Crochet piece of work. There are times when these stripes can look a little floppy. For example, when there is extended stretches of ddc (which means that the back loops are left unused on the WS).

Take for example this “Cats” mosaic crochet I have been working on. You can see the extended range of ddcs on the RS which gives it the solid background. Then have a look at the WS where my finger is indicating one of the many “floppy” sections of unused back loops.

FRONT

BACK

It is inevitable that you will these floppy stretches with some MC designs (which feature extended sections of plain background). You may not mind this and that is ok as they really are not a problem. But if you are a bit pedantic like I am, then this here is a tip to how to catch some of the long length of untouched back loops so that the WS is less “floppy”.

How to Minimize those "floppy" Stretches on the WS

Work ddc with WS facing us…

Updated & Improved, 21 Sept, 2020

The section just above was worked with WS facing you. And while it helped with having the “floppy” stripes on the wrong side of the work, … we still had some floppy bits. This next section will help us eliminate those floppy stripes altogether.

Work ddc with the RS facing us….

Sorry I have to show you using another piece of work. I just figured this out and the work I used above has already been completed (yes, that had some floppy stripes on the WS 😏)

This may seem fiddly, but I can attest that it is actually easier to do! Yes, easier. And what takes me hours to photograph, edit, comment, explain … will only take you seconds to do once you try it out. And the bonus of course is, this tip is good for getting a smoother, firmer WS for those MC designs that have extended sections of solid background.

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Tip 2: Slanted Lines in Mosaic Crochet

Let’s look at my Cats mosaic crochet again.

Credit: I found a royalty-free “alphabet cat” image on Pinterest that I modified quite extensively to create a MC graph.

You can see that this MC work is not typical of a repeating kind of MC pattern. And it involves, amongst other things, lots of slanted lines to create the outlines for the cats. So how do we create slanted lines in Mosaic Crochet?

I am not going into huge details here but will just lay out the core logic so you can adapt it to any situation. Things to keep in mind:

• slanted lines are created by dropping dc stitches (or tr, double treble, triple treble, etc. etc.) at a diagonal
• whether you are working on the RS or on the WS (and therefore using the trick I showed above of “peeking over” and working a ddc into the RS) – should not make a difference

Have a look at this small section from my MC “cats” graph. There are many slanted lines of varying lengths in the full charted pattern. However this below will illustrate the basics. In the second image, you can see the crochet symbols (in green) of the stitches I used to create the slanted crochet lines. (Here it is working a (1sc1dc tog).) I hope that this explanation, while brief, will still prove illustrative of how to crochet slanted lines in any MC work.

Note that for longer diagonal lines, you might want to use longer stitches (e.g. trebles, double trebles, etc). I have no hard and fast rule as to how to crochet the diagonal lines. But briefly, here are some of the ways I do it.

I work a dc if the diagonal line is over 3 rows (as per graph), a treble of more if it is more than 3 rows.
Sometimes, I work 2 dc over 5 rows (rather than a treble).

Tip 2 (extended as at Jul 20201):

If you need more assist, I have created a mini tutorial on how to create diagonal lines when you are working on the WS.

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I will be publishing the MC “cats” chart soon(ish). Not quite finished yet at the moment …. 😀 ♥ (Update Oct 2020: Finished and available – free pattern for Cats Pocket Scarf .)

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