Turning Chains

When you're reading crochet patterns you'll frequently come across an instruction that will say, chain three, or chain two, to turn the row and it has to do with what kind of stitches you're gonna do in the rest of the row or the round. Hi, I'm Corrina Ferguson, and in this video we're gonna learn all about turning chains for rows and rounds. So I wanna talk about turning chains in crochet and what I have here is I have a sample of fabric. I've gone from a single crochet, to a half double, to a double, and then a triple, and different patterns will tell you different things for turning chains. I've always been taught that it is two for a single crochet, two for a half double, three for a double, and four for a triple. Other people will say that it's only one for a single, two for a half double, three for a double, and four for a triple. And basically sometimes the yarn that you're using makes a difference. Sometimes the pattern will tell you to do different things for different reasons, but you shouldn't be afraid to play around with it a little bit. Now, I wanna show you what happens when you don't do your turning chains. So here on this side of the fabric I've done my turning chains and everything lines up, and here on this side I've either done no turning chains at all, or I've done them too short. And that's where you get like wonkiness and we don't want wonkiness in our crochet unless it's like whimsical on purpose and this is not whimsical on purpose. So, the other thing that I wanna talk to you about, with the turning rows, is what does that chain at the beginning of the row count for? Does it count as a stitch, does it not count as a stitch, and show you how to work it whether it does or not? Now, patterns will often tell you chain three counts as first double crochet and then you know that that is the first double crochet of the row. Generally for doubles and triples, and sometimes even for half doubles, the chain actually counts as the first crochet stitch of the row. For singles, that single chain, at the beginning of a single, rarely, if ever, counts as the first crochet of the row just because it's basically impossible to work back into and it doesn't add a lot of bulk as you can see here on the edges. So let me show you turning rows when you're treating them as if it is a stitch that you're going to work, or if you're gonna ignore it entirely. So we've got some double crochet here and in the double crochet, the chain three that starts a row, is considered the first double crochet. So we've gotten to the end of our row and I wanna show you what it looks like when you work that chain and start working your row. So here's the last stitch that we just worked, this guy right here, so we're gonna chain three at the end of that, one, and two, and three, and then we are not going to work back into that same stitch 'cause then we would be increasing and then things go all wonky. So, we're gonna wrap our own to double crochet. We're gonna skip this first, or as some people call it the false stitch, and go into the second one and do our double crochet like normal. And then we're gonna double crochet, in each double crochet, to the end of this row until we get to the chain stitch that began the row and we're gonna work into that a little differently. So I'm almost to the end of my row. I have one regular double crochet left and then I have this chain three. So I'm gonna work into the last double crochet here and then after I've done that double crochet I actually need to double crochet into the top of this chain. So the way that we do that we wrap as if we're gonna double crochet and I like to kinda turn it on its side so you can see a little bit. So we wanna go into the top of it. We're actually only going into the two strands, so we're not going into that bottom one, we're just going into the top two and we're going to work our double crochet just like normal and then we're ready to turn and chain three to begin the next row. So what if I were gonna work a single crochet, work a row here, and we didn't wanna count this chain as a stitch? So what we would do for that is we would chain one, for the single crochet, and then we would go into the same stitch that we just chained out of. So when I called it false before, now it's true, and we're just gonna go into it and we're going to do our single crochet. And then we would single crochet all the way down the row and when you get to the end of your single crochet row, if you're not counting that chain one as a stitch, you're just going to crochet, single crochet all the way to the end of the row, ignore that chain one, when you get to the end of the row, and then you just turn and chain one again. And those chain ones at the beginning of the single crochet won't ever count as a stitch. So if we look at our sample that we looked at earlier you can kinda see, we've got like a little bit of a scallopy thing there, that's where those little chain ones are, but that's not enough bulk to worry about and that's kind of how you deal with your turning rows. Thank you so much for joining me to learn about turning rows in your crochet project. Check out our website for more great videos.