Left-handed // How to crochet in rows

in this video i’m going to show you how to crochet in rows starting from when you have nothing but a piece of yarn so to begin with you’re going to create a foundation chain and the first step to creating a foundation chain is to create a slip knot so to create a slip knot you’re gonna take your yarn have your yarn tail on the left and your working yarn on the right and you want it in this sort of horseshoe shape now you’re going to take your yarn tail and put it on top of your working yarn in what looks like the number four if you were to apply some more tension here hold on to the intersection of the yarn tail on the working yarn with your right hand and then put your thumb and index finger under the loop of the floor with your left hand and now simply flip your yarn your hand over so that you can pick up the working yarn and bring it through the loop a little bit now you’re gonna pull on the yarn tail with your right hand to create a knot and this loop right now is really big but don’t worry we can easily adjust that first let’s put the loop on the hook and the way you know which way to put the loop on the hook is that you want the part of the yarn that’s connected to the working yarn to be the yarn that’s closer to you also you want to put the slip knot to the right of the hook so now we’re just going to pull on the working yarn until this loop becomes much smaller and you may wonder how far do you go you want to pull this slip knot so that the loop that’s on your hook is only a little bit bigger than the circumference of your hook let’s see if the camera can focus this way so there is still a bit of a gap and that’s because i want the loop on my hook to be big enough so that i can easily bring the whole crochet hook through it later on as i’m crocheting but i still don’t want it to be too big because then my stitches are going to be really big 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 whether your thumb and middle finger or thumb and index finger whatever is more comfortable for you so now we’re going to do what’s called a foundation chain and let’s make 11 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 10 single crochet stitches wide so to make foundation chain you’re going to 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 next to the hook because it gives me more control when i’m manipulating 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 a bit of count let’s count here how many stitches i’ve made one two three four five six all right seven eight nine ten eleven all right 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 single 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 row to actually be the right height you want to let one of these chains 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 the beginning so we made 11 chains one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven and so i need to put my hook in between uh the loops of the second chain on the hook so i’m gonna basically split 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 since you sacrificed one of those chain stitches to be the height of this row there’s actually only going to be 10 single crochet stitches in this row so i’m going to go ahead and do that real quick all right i’ve made nine single crochet stitches so far i’m going to make the 10th one over here and i wanted to pause and show you because a lot of times people get confused about whether or not this slip knot 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 tug on this this slipknot just gets even tighter versus when you tug and it’s a chain stitch it just moves the chain stitch all right so here’s the 10th 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 a 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 a righty 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 the middle of the v’s the top loops here uh 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 going to put the hook into what actually counts as the first stitch of this row which is the second stitch for the hook and as a reminder we’re going to 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 v’s that indicate each stitch in this row you need to put the hook under the top loops of the next stitch yarn over pull it through and continue on i’m gonna show you uh a complete row so you can see how this is slowly building into a flat crochet piece so i’m actually going to pause here again because this is another point at 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 going to 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 ten single crochet stitches wide 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