Freshstitches Crochet Tutorial: Crocheting Through Back Loops & Through Both Loops

Please welcome Stacey Trock of "Freshstitches," in honor of her new book Cuddly Crochet she has graciously offered to do a crochet tutorial for us!

Hello wonderful SandraSingh.com readers! I’m so excited to be writing a guest post for Sandra, since she’s been doing a lovely job of selling my FreshStitches patterns for over a year!

In this post, I’m going to talk about the difference between crocheting through the back loops and crocheting through both loops. If you’re interested in even more detail on the issue, check out http://www.freshstitches.com/wordpress/?p=573, where you can see photos of what the back of these pieces look like. Since we’re talking about amigurumi… how the back looks isn’t so important today!

In most crochet patterns, you’re instructed to crochet through both loops, resulting in fabric that looks like the photo below.

To accomplish this look, simply insert your crochet hook underneath both of the ‘loops’ when doing your crochet stitch. This looks like the photo below.

My designs are a bit different, because I crochet through the back loop only. I suppose the real reason that I do this is because that’s what my Mom did… but now I’ve grown to like the look! Before I talk about details, let me tell you a couple advantages of crocheting through the back loop.

1. Beginning crocheters (especially those who are tight crocheters) often find it easier to crochet through the back loop only.

2.When you crochet through the back loop, your crocheted fabric has little ridges on it. I happen to love these ridges, but someone on Ravelry recently called these ridges ‘unsightly’. Ouch! Anyway, regardless of how you think these ridges look, they have advantages, as well. First, the ridges make it very easy to count how many rounds you have crocheted… since the ridge (1 per round) stands out fairly clearly. See http://www.freshstitches.com/wordpress/?p=13 for a spelled-out example of how this works. Second, the ridges make it very easy to attach limbs. Since there is a ridge on the fabric, picking up the ridge with your tapestry needle makes attaching limbs a breeze! (stay tuned later in the blog tour when there will be a tutorial on attaching limbs, with photos of how the ridges help)

3. I think that the fabric created by crocheting through the back loop makes stuffing less visible. This means that you don’t need to use a super-tiny crochet hook to make a tight fabric. You can just crochet through the back loop!

Convinced? If you want to give it a try, here’s how to crochet through the back loop. It’s pretty easy, and your fabric will look like the photo, below.

To do this, when you’re crocheting, simply insert the hook only in the back loop of the stitch, as pictured. You’ll notice this is slightly different than crocheting through both loops, because there is only one loop on the hook.

And that’s it! Hope this has been helpful to you!

Thanks so much to Sandra hosting this tour stop! Feel free to follow the whole tour (check my blog: www.freshstitches.com/wordpress for the schedule), and learn lots about crocheting amigurumi!

And Thank You Stacey for taking the time to educate us!

There is still time to enter the Cuddly Crochet autographed book Giveaway, visit the post below this one.