Where the Hook Actually Goes
Okay. You've got a chain, you've counted it (more or less — I said more or less), and now we're going to turn that chain into an actual row of stitches. This is single crochet. It's the first real stitch and it's the one everything else is built on, so we're taking our time with it.
Here's the thing that trips up almost everybody: knowing where, exactly, to stick the hook.
Skip a stitch, then start
Lay your chain out flat in front of you. Look at the top of it — you'll see it looks like a row of little V's or hearts, whatever you want to call them. That's your target.
Now here's the part people get wrong constantly. You do not put your first stitch into the very last chain you made, the one right next to your hook. You skip that one and go into the second chain from the hook. That skipped chain is basically the "turning chain" — it's standing in for the height of the stitch you're about to make. If you crochet into the first chain instead, your row comes out one stitch short and you spend ten minutes trying to figure out why.
(You will get this wrong at least once. Everybody does. Count your chain, skip one, go into the second one. Say it out loud if you have to. I did, for a while.)
The actual motion
Once you know where you're going, here's what your hands do:
- Push the hook through the center of that V, front to back. Not under one loop, not splitting the strand — through the whole V.
- Yarn over. That means wrap your working yarn around the hook, back to front, the same way you did to make your chain.
- Pull that new loop back through the chain stitch. Now you've got two loops sitting on your hook.
- Yarn over again.
- Pull that new yarn through both loops at once. One loop left on the hook. That's a single crochet.
Move to the next chain over, and do it again. Straight down the row.
That's it. That's the whole stitch. It looks like a lot of steps written out, but your hands catch on faster than you'd think, usually somewhere around stitch six or seven, when it stops being five separate motions and starts being one motion with some counting attached.
Watch your tension, not your speed
New crocheters want to go fast right away and I understand the impulse, but slow down for a minute and watch what your yarn is doing. If you're pulling too tight, that first loop-through motion gets hard to force the hook through, and your hands will start to ache. If you're too loose, your stitches look sloppy and gappy and the fabric won't hold its shape.
I like a tension that lets the hook slide through without a fight but doesn't leave the loops flopping around. Your mileage may vary, and it will tighten up naturally after a few rows anyway, so don't panic over it now.
A story about a beanie
I made Ronald a beanie one year. Simple project, I'd made plenty before, and I still managed to make it too small. It sat on top of his head like a yarmulke instead of covering his ears the way a beanie is supposed to. He knew exactly what he had and wore it out to shovel the driveway anyway, just to make sure I saw it and felt bad about it the whole time he was out there. It's still in our coat closet. Never got worn again, never got thrown out either.
The point of that story, if there is one, is that even after decades of doing this you can still put a stitch in the wrong place, misjudge a count, and end up with something shaped wrong. It happens at every skill level. The difference between a beginner and someone who's been at it forty years isn't that we stop messing up. We just shrug and either fix it or wear it to shovel snow.
Don't worry about gauge yet
If you look up single crochet anywhere else, you'll probably run into a lecture about gauge — matching your stitch size exactly to a pattern's measurements. Ignore that for now. Gauge matters for things like garments that have to fit a body. It does not matter one bit for the washcloth we're building toward. If your stitches come out a little bigger or smaller than mine, congratulations, you're going to have a slightly bigger or smaller washcloth. Nobody's going to measure it.
Before next time
Practice going into that second chain from the hook until you don't have to think about it — that's the one habit worth drilling before we start building rows. A short practice chain, ten or twelve stitches, single crocheted straight across, is plenty.