How to crochet in rows

in this video I’m gonna show you how to crochet a flat piece starting from when you’ve got nothing but just plain yarn and a hook so it’s begin with you’re going to make a foundation chain and to do that you need to first make a slip stitch which means you will take your yarn and then create the number-four with it by essentially picking a spot on that yarn and then bending the yarn tail to the right see how there’s this number 4 like this now put your index finger and thumb through the loop of the floor and then just bring it over to pick up the yarn that’s attached to your yarn ball and then pull the yarn tail so that uh not forms here and don’t worry if your a loop is huge because when you pull on the yarn that’s attached to the yarn ball it will make this loop smaller so now you want to put your hook through that loop tighten this loop until it’s about the same width on the hook you don’t want to pull it so tight that you have trouble maneuvering the hook later on just enough so that it is literally the same circumference as the hook at this point and you want to position it so that the Slipknot that you just made is to the left of your hook so now hold on to your yarn as you normally would and as a reminder that’s looping it over your pinky and then bringing it up on top of your index finger and then holding the piece so that your thumb and middle finger thumb in index finger whatever is more comfortable for you so now we’re gonna do what’s called a foundation chain and let’s make eleven of them and you’ll see why I am saying an odd number even though in the end what I want to do is create a flat crochet piece that’s actually and single crochet stitches wide so to make a foundation chain you’re gonna do is yarn over and then pull the yarn through the loop so that was one chain here’s the second chain third fourth so notice how as I’m making every chain I’m moving my hand to always be right my left hand to always be right next to the hook because it gives me more control when I’m in the ability to the yarn versus if I held it all the way back here it just seems it just feels a lot weaker my control over this yarn so I lost it of Cowan’s let’s count here how many stitches I’ve made one two three four five six alright then eight nine ten eleven alright eleven chains in the foundation chain and in terms of how tight you want this foundation chain to be ideally your chains are all exactly the same size as you can see they were not exactly the same size over here for me usually that’s what happens to me when I take a break in making the chain so I would recommend trying to do this all in one go while your hand is used to the same amount of tension so you’ll see when you are doing this that these loops when you crochet the next row on tend to get a bit bigger so I would err on the side of making these chains a little bit tighter but again you need to balance it with being able to easily put your hook in it later so we have made the foundation chain and now what we want to do is make the first row and a lot of patterns you’ll see will say make the chain and then save a single crochet in the second chain from the hook and the reason for that is because you are about to create another row and for the Roda actually be the right height you want to let one of these chain be the stitch that gives it that height so in case it’s hard for you to tell which one of these chains is the second chain from the hook remember you can always count from beginning so we made eleven chains one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven and so I need to put my hook in between the loops of the second chain of the hook so I’m gonna basically split so this chain in half with my hook now I’m gonna just do a single crochet like I normally would which is a yarn over pull it through so you have two loops on the hook yarn over pull it through again that was one single crochet and see what I mean by how when you do this first row because you’re splitting this foundation chain it makes this pretty big gap over here and that’s why I was recommending that you want to try to make the foundation chain actually a little bit tight so that you sacrifice one of those chain stitches to be the height of this row there’s actually only only gonna be ten single crochet stitches in this row so I’m gonna go ahead and do that real quick all right I’ve made nine single crochet stitches so far I’m gonna make the tenth one over here and I wanted to pause and show you because a lot of times people get confused about whether or not this Slipknot is one of the chain stitches since especially when you’re working with smaller yarn it might look like a really tight chain stitch so just remember to keep count of how many stitches you’ve done that’ll really help and also you can tug on it and see that when you tie on this this slip knot just gets even tighter versus when you tug and it’s a chain stitch it just moves that chain stitch alright so here’s the tenth single crochet and now to do the next row you’re gonna execute something called a chain one and turn and depending on the pattern they have you chain one at this moment or they have you turn the piece and then chain one so I’m going to show you a chain one which is yarning over and pulling it through this loop and I turn literally means that you’re just going to rotate the flat piece so that as you create the next row you can continue going in the direction as you normally would which is right to left if you’re writing and remember that chain one is something we need to do because we’re giving some height to the row and it’s only chain one in this case because we’re doing a bunch of single crochet stitches but if you had a pattern that wanted you to do things with like double crochet or triple crochet you’d have to do chain two to accommodate for the height of a double crochet stitch the other thing that’s different from how you treat this row and all the other rows beyond this very first one we just did is that now you’re gonna put your hook not through the middle of the V’s the top loops here of the stitch you’re actually going to put it as you normally would under the top loops of a stitch and remember you always want to skip the first chain from the hook you’re gonna put a hook into what actually counts as the first stitch of this row which is the second stitch melodic and as a reminder we’re gonna do more single crochets so yarn over pull it through yarn over pull through both loops on the hook and again as you can see if you rotate the piece a little bit to you there’s all these these that indicate each stitch in this row you need to put the hook under the top loops up the next stitch yarn over pull it through and continue on I’m gonna show you a complete row so you can see how this is slowly building into a flat crochet piece so I’m actually gonna pause here again because this is another point on which people often get confused about if this counts as a stitch in the row my best advice would be again to count how many stitches you have so that you can keep track of it and ideally you’re actually keeping count of the stitches as you’re crocheting them so you don’t have to keep going back and double-checking and the danger of getting a stitch is that you’re slowly gonna wind up with a flat piece that looks a bit angled instead of straight you might wind up with a triangle instead of a rectangle so remember we needed a crochet piece that’s 10 single crochet stitches wise so that’s one two three four five six seven eight nine that means yes indeedy this is a stitch that we need to crochet a single crochet stitch in and again we’re going to chain one and then turn the piece around so that we can keep on making another row and that’s how you crochet a flat piece