Left Hand Linked Treble Crochet Tutorial

Hey everyone, it's Deja from crocheteverafter.com and today I'm going to show you how to make a linked treble crochet stitch. So this is a swatch worked in linked treble crochet. Now if you look at a regular swatch of treble crochet, you'll notice that the space between the stitches, you can see, you can see the holes in between each and every stitch. Now, you could try using a smaller hook to try to minimize these holes, or you can use the linked treble crochet stitch, and this is going to actually link all your stitches together and close up all the gaps that are usually between your stitches. Now, these are the exact same number of stitches, so I want to show you the difference in size. The actual height of it is... Pretty equal. There is also one little row of single crochet, which I'll explain. But it's almost exactly the same height, and it's just a little bit skinnier. It's maybe like one or two stitches. It's skinnier than the regular treble crochet swatch. So this is going to work up just as fast as your treble crochet, but it's going to give you that closed feeling of like a single crochet. So that's one of the benefits of using this stitch is that it'll work up much faster than a single crochet, but it'll give you the look of kind of that closed weave that single crochet gets. So let me first show you how to make this stitch. I'm starting in the middle of the row just so you can see how to make the stitch, and then I'm going to show you a trick on how I got the end of this without the big gap that I have over here. So I'll show you that afterwards. Now what I've started with is just a foundation chain and I worked a row of single crochet, just normal single crochet stitches into my foundation chain. I'll explain more on why I did that instead of just starting right into my treble crochets when I show you how to make this edge. So first let me just show you how I made the stitch. So, in linking our treble crochet stitches, we're actually going to be working into our previous stitch. And what we do, normally with a treble crochet, you yarn over twice, you insert your hook in the next stitch, you yarn over and pull up a loop, and then you work off in twos. Yarn over and you pull through the first two loops, yarn over, pull through the second two, and then yarn over and pull through the last two. You can see it's a little bit taller than my length. Now that's normally how we would work the treble crochet. Now notice when we work off in twos it creates these little bars. Let me show you here again so you can see where those bars form. Remember twice when I work off the first two it creates kind of like a little single crochet bar that comes across. Work off the next two I get that second bar that comes across and then I work off the last two and I get the top bar. So these bars are important because these are what we're We're going to link. So, to begin our link stitch, what we do is we go to our previous stitch and we find that first top bar. So if you look closely, you can see a row, a line of bars that I've got going on, right here and right here. So what I first want to do, instead of yarning over twice, To make these two loops, I'm going to link my stitches. I'm going to go under that bar, and it's pretty easy to catch, it's not very difficult. I'm going to yarn over and I'm going to pull up a loop. So it's going to count as my first yarn over. Then I'm going to go under the next bar that's down below, yarn over and pull up a loop. Now I have the two yarn overs that I would have normally made to do my treble crochet. Now my next step is to just insert my hook in the next stitch I want to work into, and pull up my loop. Now I have my normal four loops on my hook, and I'm just going to work off in twos like a normal treble crochet. That's going to start creating my next set of bars that I'm going to work into. And now I've created my linked stitch, so you can see it's coming out of the bars from from the stitch next to it. Okay, so let's do that again so you can see how to work into those bars again. So just, I kind of hold onto my loop when I do it so I don't accidentally pull my hook out of my loop. Just head straight from top to bottom under that first loop, up your loop, straight down top to bottom, pull up the next loop, and now I have my two yarn overs that I technically would be making for a treble. And then I'm going to finish off my treble like normal. Work off two loops at a time. So once you get the hang of it, it works pretty quickly. It's not as quick as, you know, yarning over twice and just entering right into your next stitch, but it goes pretty, it's a lot quicker than working, you know, rows and rows of single crochet to try to get that dense feel that you get with the single crochets. And this is also a little bit thinner than if you were to work in just single crochet. Because you're kind of pulling your stitches apart, when they are linking up, they're kind of being pulled. horizontally and so you don't get like a super thick fabric it's not going to create this super I'm super dead. dense fabric that is very stiff you can see that it's still very loose and will easily kind of fall on itself if this was a bigger swatch you would see that it's still very pliable i guess you could So if you... If you are afraid of using this stitch because you think you're going to have some super dense fabric, it's not dense at all. So you can use this for, you know, garments. Scarves and cowls are great if you don't want the, you know, the holey effect from treble crochets. I also have a double crochet link, double crochet tutorial that you can check out if you like the double crochet as well. The last stitch on this one, it was a single crochet, so it's easy to work into. There's still two loops. But I want to show you how I made this no gap beginning over here, and explain why I didn't just start off with a row of treble crochets at the bottom. Okay, now I'm going to work my next row, but I wanted to explain why I put that row of single crochets in. So if I was beginning my next row and it was a normal treble crochet project, normally you would chain four and it would count as a stitch, and then you would treble crochet in the next stitch that you come to. Now when you do this, you get a really big... Gap between your stitches. So as you can see in this linked swatch, that's what I did here. I did a chain four and then I worked a treble crochet in my next stitch. The reason that I did this was to show that effect and I wanted to show you how I minimized that gap over here. Now if I had worked treble crochets right into my foundation chain, I would have had this problem again because my foundation chain is made The first treble of my first row would have been made out of foundation chains. So technically you could link to your foundation chain or link to your turning chain if you wanted to. You could use whatever loop you want to. You can do the bottom bump or, you know, front loops, back loops, whatever you figure out that you like best if you really wanted to do that. But it does look a little funny, to me at least. So I use my How to Eliminate Gaps tutorial that if you've never seen, I'm going to show you what it means right now. But this is kind of what it looks like if you were to join it with your turning chain. You can see it's kind of lumpy and bumpy. So instead of doing all of that, to minimize the gap that you would get if you were to work it just normally and start your linking after your turning chain, you just get rid of your turning chains. So instead of doing a turning chain, what we're going to do is we're going to pull out a loop that's about the size of a treble crochet. And that's going to take the place of the turning chains that I would normally use to get to the correct height for my treble crochets. And because this is just one almost pretty just single strand of yarn going up, I am now going to put a normal treble crochet right in that first stitch. Now, the shorter that you make this turning chain, the less noticeable it will be, so try to make it less, a little bit less than your treble crochet rather than too tall. So I'm going to do a regular treble crochet in this first stitch, and now I have eliminated the gap that I would normally get from my chain four. And then I can just start linking again, I'm going to link into my treble crochet, I just leave this little turning chain alone. So I'm going to go into that first. Um, bump or loop. Second loop in and insert my hook and now you can see that just like this other side I have gotten rid of those gaps that are very noticeable in my normal swatch. So it's not a big deal if you're gonna be seaming um certain areas. But if you were to just put like a border on this you're still going to see that really big hole. So by eliminating those foundation or those turning chains it's going to help you, oops I'm just doing double crochet here, it's going to help you you. In making a better looking project, so if you wanted to just make a cowl or a scarf out of this stitch, you could just make it as wide as you want, and then just keep going and going until it's as long as you want. And then if you wanted to put a little shell border or anything on it, this no gap is going to be really easy to work into, and it's going to give you a nice finished edge. So that is how you do your linked treble crochet. If you have any questions, leave them below, and thank you for watching.