Left-handed // How to hold a crochet hook and yarn

in this video i’ll show you how to hold a crochet hook and yarn left-handed so to start with there’s two ways to hold a crochet hook the first way is called a knife grip which is how you would hold a knife and the second is called the pencil grip which is how you’d hold a pencil just do whichever one is comfier for you for me that’s the knife grip because i feel like i can control things more that way next up is holding the yarn so you have your crochet piece face your right palm to you and put your crochet piece in front of your palm now look at the working yarn which is the yarn that’s connected to the rest of the yarn ball you want to wrap that once around your pinky so that your crochet piece winds up behind your hand and then drape it over the top of your hand over the index finger now you’re going to hold on to your piece with your thumb and your middle finger and this might feel a little awkward but the reason why we do this last step here where you’ve draped it over your index finger is because that is what will control what’s called the tension of the yarn and in particular the tension of this part of the yarn the tension here is what’s going to affect how easy it’s going to be for you to pull to grab onto the yarn and pull it through loops and it’s also going to affect how even your stitches look over time you want to get used to maintaining what we call an even tension of yarn so that you have a higher chance of making all of your stitches look nice and even so i’m going to show that to you again at a different angle here i have my right palm facing me and my piece in front of my palm i’m going to wrap it once around my hand bring the piece up over the back of my hand and then hold on to it with my thumb and my middle finger so now when we put the two things together i’m going to put my hook into this loop and you may wonder how do you know uh if your loop is the correct direction because i could have also put my hook in this way you want to make sure that your loop looks flat that it’s not twisted so here you can see it’s nice and flat the other way that you can tell is that you want the working yarn to be the piece of the yarn on this loop that’s in front so as you see if i pull on this working yarn this part of the yarn is moving which means my hook is in the loop the correct way so just tighten this uh so that your hook is nestled next to your piece not so tight that it’s like glued to the side of your piece you still want a little bit of a gap between your hook and the rest of the piece here and because i did that it made all the yarn on my right hand a little loose so i can either try to pull on this yarn to make it tighter but i actually usually just completely redo holding onto it so again i guess my other tip would be to try to start this movement close to your piece to maximize the chance that you’ll still have a tight enough um tension for your working yarn and now you’re in crocheting position