going round the bend

Adjusting edging for working on the round.

If you’re only edging one side of your fabric, you should now know enough to do that. However, if you’re edging around corners, you’ll need to do some extra planning and calculations. Most edging patterns are written for working in rows so you may also need to adjust it for working in the round.

To get you around a 90- degree corner and make sure the fabric lies flat, you will need to work some extra corner stitches. If you’re using double crochet for the base round, you’ll only need one extra dc stitch to form the corner (see Diagram 1), but with longer crochet stitches you’ll need more, such as 3 trebles.

On the base round in dc, you can work the extra corner stitch at the END of each side (into the last stitch or row end, or blanket stitch loop), or at the START of the each side (see Diagram 2) – either method should be fine, just be consistent on every edge. It will help to use stitch markers to mark each corner stitch as you make it and on the subsequent rounds.

On any subsequent rounds of dc, you need to treat the corner stitch as the last stitch you work into at the end of one side (1 st), the place where you work the new corner stitch (2 sts, mark this), and the first stitch to work into at the start of the next side (3 sts). So in dc, you need to work a total of 3dc into each corner stitch (see Diagram 3). With longer stitches, use the same process, but work more stitches into the corner to create the new corner, such as 3tr (mark the central of these three as the new corner stitch).