Left Hand Treble Crochet Tutorial #6: TR in the Back Loop Only

Hi everyone, it's Deja from crocheteverafter.com and right now I'm going to show you how to treble crochet in the back loop only. So I have a little mini swatch of how treble crochet in the back loop only looks. I've worked four rows so you can see these little ridges that are here and here. These are my every other row. So those are the front loops that are sticking out. When I turn it over, you can see I just have this row right here with the front loops. It creates a slight ribbing effect. You can see the peaks and valleys. Working in the back loop only gives you a ribbed effect no matter what stitch you're working. The smaller the stitch, the more ribbing. So if you want a really dense ribbing, work in single crochet in the back loop only. This creates a really wide ribbing. Almost chevron looking. But it can be used for So to work this stitch pattern, what you're going to do is first turn your work and chain 4 to get the proper height for your treble crochets. If you don't like your skinny chain 4, you can beef it up, that's just what I call it. And by beefing it up, what you're doing is just pulling out your loops a little bit before each chain. So just pull it out a little, then chain and pull it out. Chain, do that four times, and what happens is when you do your next stitch, it's going to squash your chain down and make it a little fatter, so you get kind of a thicker chain that's more in line with your other treble crochets. Now I need to find my back loop. So if you've never worked in the back loop before, what you do is you can turn your work on its side and look for your Vs. Each stitch looks like a letter V and it has two loops. The one that's facing you, that's closest to you, that's in the front, that's your front loop. The one that's further away from you, the one in the back, is your back loop. That's the loop that we need to work under. So if you're looking at the V, it's the left side of the V. Because the chain 4 counts as my very first stitch, I don't work into this first V. I skip to the second V. So I'm going to yarn over twice for my treble and then I'm going to go under that back loop. Yarn over and pull that up and finish your treble by going through the first two, the second two, and then the third two. And then I have finished my very first back loop only treble crochet. Again, to catch that back loop easily, what you do is you just stick your hook right in the center of the V and push down to the back. And that's going to catch it nice and easy so that you can work much faster than if you're trying to maybe fish around and grab it before you get there or, you know, work kind of straight at it. Just go straight in the middle and push down, diagonally back. Make sure you only grab that back loop when you do that. It's not really easy to catch any other loop, but just in case, make sure you only have that loop. Then you yarn over and pull up your loop. And I always keep my loops on my shaft to keep all of my stitches consistent. This will give me even height all the way across. As you can see, without any blocking, my stitches are all the same height. If you have stitches that are going like this, try keeping all your loops on the shaft, and it'll keep them all the same height. So yarn over and draw through the first two loops. Yarn over, draw through the second two loops. Yarn over, draw through the third two loops. So I'm going to do the next one at normal speed so you can kind of see how easy it is to grab that when I put my hook right through the center. Work all the way across so you can see what to do on your chain four at the end of the row for your back loop only. So I keep on, you can see, if I keep my hook right in that center, it's nice and easy to catch that back loop. So now I'm at my chain four and I have to work into it because I count it as a stitch. There's a back loop on the chain 4, but you don't have to worry about it. You can just go ahead and work into that chain 4 how you would normally work into any chain 4. You can grab both loops or just the back loop. It's completely up to you. The first and last stitch are not going to be back loop only stitches because the first stitch is going to be the chain 4, so it's not entering into anything. The last one is working into that chain 4. So, mostly when you use this stitch, you'll probably be seaming these edges or putting an edging on it, so those aren't going to be very visible, but you can see when you're looking at it, it's still not quite visible how different those two stitches look. That's how you're going to work into the back loop only and the effect that you get.