There are some beautiful affordable paper and cotton doilies out there that have tremendous detail to their design. However, I don’t really use little doilies all that much so I wanted to find a way to add to the existing doily to create something a little bit more interesting. I put my hook and yarn to work and created a crochet placemat using the doily as the center starting piece. It was so much fun!
The Materials
I was inspired to create this project because I’m part of a campaign for the David Tutera Casual Elegance collection, which is available exclusively at Jo-Ann Fabric and Craft Stores. For my efforts I received a huge box of amazing supplies, including the doily that I used in this project. There were actually a lot of other great products in the box, too, though including burlap and lace ribbon, candy tins, LED lights, votive wraps, napkin wraps and more.
The David Tutera Casual Elegance Collection is a collection of bridal crafts in neutral colors and materials. They are designed to be used to add personalize touches and rustic charm and a vintage spirit to the modern wedding. You can use the item to add personal touches to a wedding. Plus they can easily be personalized. Since the items are in neutral colors you can use personalization to work in your own wedding color scheme as you craft.
What I think is fun about this collection, though, is that even though it’s designed for crafty weddings the materials can be used for many different events and projects as well. The placemat that I’ve made here could definitely be used on the tables at a wedding but they could also be used in any home for everyday decor or holidays and special occasions.
How to Crochet an Affordable Doily into a Stunning Placemat
Of all of the materials in the box I was especially drawn to the David Tutera doily. The doily has a great detailed design to it that I really liked. I can see how a set of these would be used at any wedding, but I wanted to do something more with it. I thought that if I added my own simple crochet rounds to the doily then it would create a great large placemat. It’s a pretty easy project and you could add these handcrafted placemats to all of the tables at your wedding reception to give a great personalized feeling to the space. You could even keep going and make the doily-placemat larger and have full tablecloths for your reception!
I’ll show you now how I made this placemat but I’d encourage you to use this tutorial as just a guide and turst your own creativity to create the crochet placemats that are right for your wedding, event or home.
Step One
Join your yarn to your doily. The great thing about the David Tutera Doily is that the last round of it is a series of very open loops so you can easily just knot your yarn directly to any loop to get started.
Step Two
Single crochet in each loop around. When you get to the end of the row slipknot the last stitch to the first stitch to finish the round.
Step Three
Begin to crochet your second round. This is where you have a lot of room for creative freedom. You’ll see that I chose to use very tall stitches in this tutorial. My first round is a set of treble crochets and then the following rounds are going to be double trebles and then triple trebles. However, you don’t have to choose tall stitches. You can choose any stitch you want at all. In fact, you could do this placemat without knowing any crochet stitch other than the single crochet stitch. Note that at the beginning of the round you’ll need to do a chain stitch as the first stitch; so in my example I did a chain of four to serve as the first treble crochet of the round.
Note, you will need to increase in each round. If you just crochet one stitch in each stitch around and do that for many rounds then you’ll end up creating a bag instead of a placemat that opens up widely. I didn’t increase dramatically on my placemat because I knew that I would only be making a few rounds so my increase choices wouldn’t have a huge effect. As you can see in the photos here I just did two stitches in every tenth stitch around in the first round. In the following rounds I did an increase of two stitches in every fifth stitch. However, if you are going be making a lot of rounds in the project then you’ll want to be more methodical about your increases so that you maintain a perfect circle. The most traditional method of increasing for a single is to start by crocheting two stitches in every stitch then in the next round do one, two, one, two (so for example I’d do my double crochet in the first stitch of the round and then two doubles in the second stitch, one double in the third, etc.) and then in the next round you do one, one, two and then the next round one, one, one, two and continue increasing in this manner.
Step Four
Continue making your rounds with your chosen stitches and stitch increases. At the end of each round use a slipknot to join the round together. Do this until the placemat is the size that you want. Since I was using tall stitches and making a placemat (not a big tablecloth) I only needed to do three rounds.
Step Five
Create a finishing edge. A crochet project looks a lot better when you finish it with an interesting edge. For my edge I chose to do a shell-shaped ruffle. I did this by doing a single crochet, double crochet, single crochet in each of the stitches around. The shell is created by the single, double, single shape and the ruffle is created because I’m crocheting three stitches in each stitch around. However, you could choose many different edgings from a very simple reverse single crochet stitch around to a detailed edging from one of your favorite edging pattern books. The choice is yours!
I had a lot of fun crocheting this project. I think that it offers a great way to use some simple, basic crochet skills to create a placemat that’s still very detailed thatnks to the design of the David Tutera doily in the center. You could easily work this in any yarn and in any color scheme; I obviously just worked with a single color of yarn but you could change colors in each round to make a more colorful piece. This is a practical and affordable way to create placemats or tablecloths for your wedding or even just for your home.
See What Others Are Making
There are a lot of other amazing bloggers participating in this campaign with posts going live for the next ten days. Check out what they are making:
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Learn more about Darice Crafts and David Tutera and see other great DIY wedding inspiration on:
