Crochet in the Front & Back Loop

Hi everyone, I'm Jen Lucas, and in this video, I wanna talk a little bit about crocheting through the front loop only or back loop only. There's lots of different reasons that you might want to crochet only through the front loop or back loop, and it's really actually pretty easy to do either one of them. I particularly like to use back loop only when I'm crocheting an amigurumi or a small toy. I really like the look of the fabric of crocheting through the back loop when I'm working in the round, I like the lines that it creates in the fabric. And it's a really great technique to know. I'd love to show you how to crochet through the front loop or back loop only so let's get started. Let's talk about crocheting in the front loop and crocheting in the back loop. This is something that can come up in some different stitch patterns and projects and it's very easy to do, you just need to know which particular loop that you need to work into, whether it's the front loop or the back loop. So here I have two swatches, the one here on the right is just regular single crochet. I just worked a traditional single crochet stitch, working under both loops of each stitch every single row, and that makes a single crochet, and like what you think of when you think of single crochet. Here on the left, this swatch, I alternated rows by crocheting through the back loop when I was on the right side of my fabric and crocheting through the front loop when I was on the wrong side of my fabric. Again, your pattern will tell you when you need to be crocheting in the front loop or back loop but that's just what I chose to do for this particular swatch. So by crocheting through the back loop on the right side and crocheting through the front loop on the wrong side, you can see I'm getting these sort of lines that form because I'm not working under both of those bars of the stitches like I normally do. So it's a really fun way to still basically do your same stitches that you always do, but it adds a little more texture, sometimes it can add a little more interest to your project. So let's go ahead and take a look at how to do these working through the front loop or working through the back loop. So I have just a little swatch here where I have been crocheting through the back loop on the right side and then through the front loop on the wrong side. So let's start with how to crochet through the back loop. So we'll start by just reviewing how to do a regular single crochet stitch. So if you were doing a regular single crochet stitch, you're going to insert your hook under both bars here. Let me back my hook out. So you see at the top of our stitch here, we have this sort of V and normally we're gonna take the hook and we're gonna go under both like this, yarn over, pull up a loop, yarn over, pull through two to do our single crochet. So when we do a stitch that tells you to crochet through the back loop, we're gonna take a look at that V and we're gonna work only through the back of that loop. So I'm gonna bring my hook sort of into the center of that V and just under the back loop of that stitch, yarn over, pull up a loop, yarn over, draw through two. And so that front loop is just left hanging out there. So again, for the back loop, we're looking at the V, we're inserting our hook into the center to go under only the back loop, yarn over, pull through a loop, yarn over, pull through two. And this is for single crochet. You could crochet through the back loop or front loop for any type of stitch, I'm just using single crochet here, that's where I most commonly use this as well. So again, back loop, we're gonna go in through the center of that V to grab that back loop, pull up the loop, and then finish the stitch. And so that is crocheting through the back loop. You'll see this often abbreviated in a pattern as BLO or back loop only. You may also sometimes see it abbreviated as BK space LP, which just is the shortened words back loop, BLO tends to be the most common that I've seen, but your pattern abbreviations will tell you exactly what to do. So now we finished kinda off that row, I have that one random single crochet in there but that's fine, the standard single crochet, but now we're on the other side so let's talk about the front loop only. So again, let's look at a regular single crochet. If I was gonna do a regular single crochet, I'd be going under both sort of bars of that V and working my stitch. But if I was gonna do front loop only, now I'm gonna bring my hook under only the front loop and bring it up through the middle of that V so I only caught the front loop of that stitch and the back loop's just still hanging out back here, and then we'll work our single crochet. So again, here's my V. So now I'm gonna go only under the front. So you're sort of bringing it up through the center of that stitch to grab that front loop only. Let's put the yarn there, let's do that one again. So we're bringing it up through the center to only grab that front loop, like that. And so you'll see this abbreviated in your pattern the front loop only typically has FLO, front loop only or sometimes you'll see it as FR space LP for front loop. Again, your pattern abbreviations will tell you exactly what to do, but it's really easy to work in like I said, you could do this with a half double crochet, a double crochet, it doesn't matter. It's really about all of the stitches that you're working whether it's a double crochet, treble crochet, single crochet, whatever, they all have this V at the top. And so those are the loops that we're referring to whether it's front loop or back loop. So it doesn't matter the stitch type that you're working. The other thing too that's important to remember is that when you're talking about front and back, you're talking about it as how your fabric is facing you. This has nothing to do with the right side or the wrong side of your fabric, we're gonna work through, if we say that we're working through the front loop, it doesn't matter which side, whether on the right side or wrong side of our fabric, it's front in terms of how our fabric's facing us. So front loop only, it's always gonna be working through the front loop like how our fabric's facing us, and then back loop it's the one that's to the back of us. So that's important to remember too that sometimes that can be a little bit confusing, like right side versus wrong side, and then front and back but it's front and back in terms of how the fabric is facing you as you're working these stitches. So that's it, that is crocheting in the front loop or back loop only. There you go. Once you take a close look at your stitch and you really understand where you need to put your hook in to work through the front loop or back loop only, it's actually pretty easy. And like I said, I love using this on things like toys, but there's lots of other places that you can use it and your pattern will always tell you if you need to crochet through the front loop or the back loop. Thanks so much for joining me and learning with me today, I'll see you back here again real soon.