#crochet tips

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

Plus a couple example diagrams I've made with their patterns written out for reference:

1st diagram:

Ch 12

DC into 4th stitch from hook, 1 DC, 3 HDC, 2 sc, 1 sl st, sl st inc into last st

Rotate work and sl st into next stitch, 2 sc, 3 HDC, 1 DC, DC inc

2nd diagram:

8 st into MR (8)

in the current stitch: (Ch 5, DC into 3rd loop from hook, DC, 1 sc, sl st), in the next stitch: (sl st, Ch 5, DC into 3rd loop from hook, DC, 1 sc, sl st), repeat instructions in last parentheses 6 more times

I find crocheting with Tunisian simple stitches easier to comprehend when designing smaller, flat detail pieces compared to crocheting in the round or in rows. With TSS you don't have to worry as much about calculations and stitch multiplications per round. However, it does have a little learning curve and width limitations for what you can make without needing to break out an extra long crochet hook. For a regular crochet hook, you can get away with rows about nine stitches across, but more than that and it'll become increasingly inconvenient to work with.

Catztail Design has a great set of videos for different methods of increasing and decreasing with Tunisian simple stitches, so check those out if you are interested! He has a lot of insightful videos on different crochet techniques in general and I'd recommend checking out more of his channel!

Ovals are really helpful for things that you don't want to be perfectly round (like the top of a character's shoulders). You work the crochet in the round too, but you start with a chain and increase by 3 or 4 stitches at both ends of the oval. Here's a tutorial from Supergurumi that goes into more depth!

Surface slip stitches / chain stitch embroidery on top of another piece of crochet are also a big help! They can be used decoratively by themselves or as a foundation piece for more crocheting. Here's an example of the latter with Tenna's lapels: