Left-handed // How to crochet a turning chain

in this video i’ll teach you how to chain one and turn which is the technique used when you’re crocheting flat pieces so here we have a flat piece that has two rows already crocheted and i’m gonna show you what it means to chain one and turn so that you can keep on crocheting more rows to this so get into position stick your hook in the loop hold on to your yarn as you normally would and normally you’re crocheting from right to left and as you can see you run out of crochet piece to crochet into the left side so what we need to do is chain one so that’s a yarn over and pulling it through this one loop and we do that because this chain one is going to be the stitch that helps give this next row the height see how i’m already pulling it so that it’s a bit vertical this is what the chain one’s gonna be doing since we are crocheting a bunch of single crochet stitches if instead you are going to do a double crochet rows or triple crochet the number of chains you need to do to start that row would be different it would have to be two chains for example for a double crochet stitch so going back to what we have here we’ve chained one because we’re doing a single crochet stitch for this row now we’re going to execute what’s called the turn and what that means is we’re going to literally turn the crochet piece so that now we’ve got a bunch of crochet piece to our left and we can continue crocheting as we normally would one thing to watch out for as i said that chain one that you just did is the the stitch that gives this row the height so that’s why you’ll see a lot of patterns saying that you need to insert the hook into the second stitch from the hook which is this one so let me show you this again this is the chain one that you just did this is the second chain from the hook i mean second stitch from the hook so you’re gonna insert the hook under the top loops of this stitch and then do a single crochet as you normally would i’m just going to quickly single crochet through the entire row because i want to show this to you again okay i’m gonna pause at this point because a lot of times people get confused about what counts as the last stitch of the row and then that’s why they’re flat pieces look like triangles or don’t have like really straight vertical edges and they wind up being kind of wonky one way or another the easiest way to tell whether or not this stitch or any subsequent stitch needs to be crocheted into honestly is to count the number of stitches that you’ve done because a pattern will tell you how many stitches they’re supposed to be in a row and as i mentioned this one is ten single crochet stitches wide so we can start from here and count one two three four five six seven eight nine so we’re missing one single crochet stitch and you can tell that this is a remaining stitch here because you can see the top loops that make this a b so we’re gonna stick the hook under these top loops single crochet and i guess this is what i mean by usually people get a little confused at this point for example are they supposed to be putting the hook into here and making that another single crochet stitch because the other way you can tell is by actually looking at the stitches if you look at this stitch over here it does not have that nice clean v from the top loops that’s the other way you can tell you shouldn’t be putting your hook in there so i’m going to repeat the chain one and turn another thing to take note of is you can do the chain one and turn or you can do a turn chain one you just wanna be consistent so that your whole piece looks consistent throughout so remember chain one which is a yarn over and pulling it through this loop then you just rotate your piece and then carry on