Crocheting 101: The 3 Basic Stitches

Hello everyone, I know I said I wasn’t going to touch yarn and hook till the end of the month but it’s been hard so I figured why not use this time to share some basic things in crocheting like the stitches. I call it crochet magic because it’s fascinating how you could make a whole outfit from the repetition of tiny stitches.

Anyway, I get so many questions about how exactly I make things by just using some hook and yarn so that’s what I’m coming to share now. There are so many crochet stitches, about 30 plus and they keep on discovering and making new ones but I’ll share the basics in case anyone needs it.
The very basic crochet stitches are the chain stitch, double crochet and half double crochet. Others might bring in the single crochet and slip stitch which is fine but I believe that the first three are simplest to work with especially for beginners. I’ll try as much as possible to use basic words for everyone to understand.

You just need a hook and yarn to practice this.

**Chain Stitch**This is the basic of all crochet works. In all my crochet life, I’m yet to meet a crochet piece that doesn’t start with chains (apart from those that start with the magic rings). To make a chain, you need to make a little “o” with the yarn and then yarn over around the hook and pull the yarn, yarn over around the yarn and pull the yarn. You repeat this till you get your desired length of chain. This is what we call chain stitch.

**Half double Crochet**Now that we know how to make a chain stitch, we’re going to build on it and this is how to actually crochet things. Only chain stitches can’t really do much. To make half double crochet, you need to decide if you want your stitches to be big or small, long or short. If you want them to be long as I always want , you chain two more at the end of the chain you have already made and then yarn over and put it into the next stitch, pull the yarn , yarn over and then pull through all three loops. You repeat this and you’re making a row of half double crochet.

**Double Crochet**As we know how to make chain and half double crochet stitches, this will be easy. For this stitch too, you chain two at the end of the chain you have made, yarn over around the hook, put it into the next stitch, pull the yarn and this time you’ll yarn over and pull through the first two loops. After this, you’ll see that there’s a remaining two loops so you yarn over and pull through that two.

So basically, the difference between half double crochet and double crochet is the number of loops you pull the yarn through. For the half double crochet, you pull through all the three at once but for the double crochet, you pull through two at first and yarn over to pull through the rest of the loops.

Another important thing you need to know is that half double crochet gives relatively tighter stitches as compared to double crochet so you would need to plan well which stitch would be suitable for what particular project before you even start crocheting you.

It was fun explaining things and I hope it ignites someone’s passion for crochet and helps someone out there. Thank you for your time.

Crocheting 101: The 3 Basic Stitches

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