The slip knot and your first chain

The Slip Knot and Your First Chain

Okay. Hook's in your hand, you've picked your grip, and now we're finally going to make some yarn do something.

Everybody wants to skip to the interesting stitches. I get it. But the slip knot and the chain are the floor everything else stands on, so we're doing them properly and we're doing them until your hands stop thinking about it.

The slip knot

This is just how you get the yarn onto the hook to begin with. It's not a fancy knot. You've probably tied something like it before without knowing it had a name.

1. Pull about six inches of yarn off your ball and make a loop with it, like a pretzel shape, with the tail end crossing over the top of the working yarn (the part still connected to the ball).
2. Reach through that loop with your hook and grab the working yarn.
3. Pull it through the loop.
4. Snug it up on the hook so it sits there comfortably, not choking the hook, not so loose it falls off.

That loop on your hook is your first stitch. Congratulations, you're crocheting. Sort of.

(You will make this too tight the first few tries. Everybody does. If you can't slide the loop around on the hook at all, pull it apart and try again looser.)

The chain

Now we chain, which is just repeating one motion over and over: yarn over the hook, pull it through the loop that's already there.

Here's the whole move, broken down:

1. Hook is in your hand, slip knot loop is on it.
2. Wrap the working yarn over the hook from back to front. We call this a "yarn over."
3. Pull the hook (with that new wrap on it) through the loop that was already sitting on the hook.
4. Now you've got one new loop on your hook, and that's one chain stitch done.

Do it again. And again. That's it. That's the whole stitch. A chain is just that same motion, over and over, forty or fifty times if you're making a chain for a washcloth.

A few things that trip people up right away:

• Don't count the loop on your hook as a stitch. The loop that's currently on the hook isn't finished yet. You count the little V-shaped bumps hanging below it.
• Keep an even tension. Not tight, not loose, just even. This takes practice and nobody gets it right away. If your chain looks like a strand of lumpy pearls, that's completely normal for week one.
• Don't twist the chain as you go. It should lie flat, like a little braid. If it's spiraling around itself, you're probably twisting your wrist without realizing it. I'll come around and look at hands, not just finished chains.

Practice this until you can make a chain of about thirty stitches without stopping to think about each individual motion. I'm not kidding about the number. Thirty. Some of you will get there in ten minutes. Some of you will still be working on stitch six when we're done today, and that is completely fine. This is the only lesson where the whole point is repetition, so lean into it.

Now frog it

Once you've got a chain you're reasonably happy with, I want you to pull it all out. All of it, back to the slip knot.

I know. You just made that. Do it anyway.

Pulling out your work is called frogging, and it is not a punishment, it's a skill, maybe the most useful one in this whole class. If you never learn to comfortably rip back, you'll spend your whole crochet life being afraid of your own hands, and you'll baby along mistakes instead of just fixing them. Frog it, chain it again, frog it again if you want. Get used to the feeling of undoing your own work without any drama attached to it.

I have frogged an entire afghan before. Not a chain, not a few rows — the whole thing, weeks of work, because there was a mistake six inches down in one row and it bugged me every single time I looked at it. Ronald thought I'd lost my mind. I did not care. I pulled the whole thing out and started over and it came out right the second time. That's just what you do sometimes.

So don't get precious about a practice chain. It's yarn. It's not going anywhere.

A word about your hands

Some of you will get a sore spot on your index finger or a tired feeling in your wrist after ten minutes of chaining. That's your body telling you it's doing something new, not a sign you're doing it wrong. Take breaks. Shake your hands out. If it's actually painful rather than just tired, stop for the day. We've got weeks of this ahead of us and nobody needs a repetitive strain injury over a practice chain.

Before next time

Practice your slip knot and chain at home this week, even five minutes a night while you're waiting for something to boil or sitting through something on TV you're only half watching. You don't need to bring anything finished. Just come back with hands that remember what to do.