Want a better texture for your flat pieces?
If you crochet flat pieces for amigurumi the usual way, by going back and forth in rows, chaining and turning at each end, you may have noticed that the piece ends up with a very noticeable stripy texture, as seen on the left example here. It's quite different in appearance from the texture of single-crocheting a 3D piece in the round (the texture on the right in this example). There's times when you might want a piece to have that stripy texture, but most of the time, you probably don't - you'd probably prefer it to look more similar in texture to the rest of the 3D pieces in your amigurumi, right?
Well, there's ways to do that while still making a flat piece! I'll be going through a couple of methods here.
1: The Standard Way
First, as a baseline, here's your standard method that gets you the stripy texture. Single crochet along the row, chain and turn, single crochet along again, repeat. Simple to do, but because the single crochet rows are happening on opposite sides of the piece - the front, then the back - each alternate row looks different and gives you that stripy appearance.
In order to fix this, we need to make it so that the single crochet isn't happening on opposite sides each row? What if we could always crochet from the front - the "right side" of the piece?
2: Purlwise Crochet (or back-to-front crochet)
If you do knitting as well, you might already realise what I mean by calling this "purlwise". Purling is such a basic technique in knitting that perhaps you've even wondered why standard crochet doesn't have an equivalent type of stitch!
If you don't knit and have no idea what "purl" means, don't worry. It's a simple idea, and "back-to-front" about sums it up. You hold your yarn at the front of the work, and then insert your hook from the back, to the front. Pull up a loop like that - it'll end up on the back - and then pull another loop through those two to finish the single crochet. Here's a video to illustrate it better:
It's tricky to get the hang of at first, but with practice you can build up the muscle memory to do it a lot more smoothly!
When crocheting a flat piece using this technique, you'll want to alternate rows of regular single crochet and back-to-front/purlwise crochet. This way, while you are turning the work, you're always working the stitch from the "right side" of the piece, and the texture is much smoother!
(Alternatively, if you can crochet ambidextrously, you can flex on all of us non-ambidextrous people by not even needing to turn the piece and work purlwise at all. Just crochet from right to left with the hook in your right hand, chain, then move the hook to your left hand and crochet the next row from left to right. Simple!)
(As a non-ambidextrous person, though, I do find getting the hang of purlwise crochet easier than trying to teach my non-dominant hand to use the hook.)
With all that said, although this method looks a lot more similar, it's still not exactly the same as the texture of a 3D in-the-round piece. The stitches, while worked from the same side, are still pointing in opposite directions every row, and that makes it look a little different.
3: Moving the Starting Point
If we want things to look exactly the same as a piece made in the round, we can't work our rows back and forth. We have to work each row in the same direction - and since this is a flat piece, it means we have to move the starting point. After working one row of single crochet, we need to make it so that our active loop ends up back on the side we started on (the right if right-handed, or the left if left-handed). There's a couple of ways to do this:
Tying off The most straightforward way is to tie off your yarn every row, and reattach with a slipknot and standing single crochet at the new starting point. You could do this by cutting the yarn, but it's also possible to tie off your yarn without cutting it. If you pull the loop large enough to fit the entire piece through it, you can tie it off that way (shown below).
I prefer to do this because it means that if I need to frog and redo, I don't have multiple separate pieces of yarn to work with. Tying off like this does still make frogging more annoying, however, as you need to manually untie each knot, every row.
Chaining across If you want frogging to be less annoying, there's another way to move the starting point. Rather than tying the yarn off, you can simply make a chain long enough to reach back to the starting point without bending the piece.
Of course, this means that there will be a bulky chain hanging out at the back of your work, which will be more annoying to undo and weave in when you're done. But depending on where and how you want to use this flat piece in your amigurumi, there could be times when the chains will just end up inside of a 3D space that will get filled with stuffing anyway, and you won't need to worry about the extra bulk they add at all. That's what this method is best used for.
Whichever way we go about moving the starting point, the resulting piece will have a texture exactly the same as a 3D piece made in the round. The downsides are that, because we're crocheting in the same direction every row, the piece will be susceptible to drift just like when working in the round. The edges are also less neat and may stretch out a bit, because they don't have the chains holding each row together like you get when you chain and turn.
And of course, the back is a mess and will need to be cleaned up or hidden one way or another. Here's the back of my example piece, showing the results of both tying off (top) and chaining across (bottom).
So, to summarise each method and their pros and cons:
1: The standard way
Pros - Simple to crochet - No drift - No loose ends
Cons - Very noticeable stripy texture
2: Purlwise crochet
Pros - Much more similar texture to scs in the round - No drift - No loose ends
Cons - Tricky to crochet purlwise; will take time to get the hang of - Still not exactly the same texture as scs in the round
3: Moving the starting point
Pros - Simple enough to crochet - Exactly the same texture as scs in the round
Cons - Susceptible to drift - Sides less neat - Chaining across adds bulk; need to hide the chains inside a 3D shape - Tying off makes it annoying to frog, and many ends to weave in when finished
Hopefully this taught you a few things to consider trying in your amigurumi designs. Happy crocheting!
