WHAT ELSE CAN I LEARN?
Here’s the lowdown on what we’ll show you in this workshop…
Tunisian crochet is a fab combination of knitting and crochet. We want to show you how to extend your skills with Tunisian knit and purl stitches. You can find our tutorial on the basics of Tunisian crochet at www.bit.ly/ HowToTunisianCrochet
In this workshop, we’ll explain how to make Tunisian knit and purl stitches. You can practise your new skills by making our cowl on page 30.
The neat fabric created with Tunisian knit stitches looks a lot like knitted stocking stitch, but it’s much thicker. Tunisian knit stitch is simple to work using a Tunisian crochet hook.
Tunisian purl stitches will also create a fabric that looks like its knitted equivalent. These stitches are often used in combination with other Tunisian stitches to create texture, rather than on their own.
After working the foundation row (forward and return pass), you can choose which Tunisian stitches to work next. Here, we’ll show you how to work Tunisian knit stitch (abbreviated to Tss).
If you examine the strands of yarn in the foundation row you’ve just worked, you will see that it is made up of vertical strands of yarn (created when you pick up stitches in the forward pass) and horizontal strands (formed when you work the return pass). You work different Tunisian stitches by varying the way that you insert the hook into the fabric on the forward pass.
Step 1 With the right side of the work facing you, identify the vertical strands of yarn that were created in the forward pass of the foundation row. Skip the strand on the outside edge of the work and *insert the hook through the work from front to back, placing your hook between the front and the back of the vertical strand and underneath the horizontal strands of yarn.
Step 2 Yrh, draw yarn through to front of the work and leave on the hook. You will now have 2 loops on the hook.
Step 3 Repeat from * by inserting the hook into the next vertical strand, yrh and draw up a loop onto the hook as before. Keep going until you have worked in all strands across the row. With the forward pass complete, you can work the standard return pass (as explained above), without turning the work. You will have completed one row of Tunisian knit stitch.
Tip When working the forward pass, keep the tension fairly loose to make working the return pass easier.
You can achieve many different stitches and effects with Tunisian crochet, and even combine it with regular crochet. To make room for all those stitches, it’s best to work Tunisian crochet with a special, long hook or a small hook on a cable. If you’d like to try out the technique with just a few stitches and see if you like it, you can use a standard crochet hook with a straight shaft.
The key difference with Tunisian crochet is that one row is made up of two parts: the ‘forward pass’ (where you pick up the stitches onto the hook) and the ‘return pass’ (where you work them off the hook again). This means there’s usually no need to turn your work so make sure you keep the right side facing you. Patterns usually write the two passes as one row, but they can be written in different ways, so always check this before you start.
We’ve shown you how to work three basic Tunisian crochet stitches – Tunisian knit stitch and Tunisian purl stitch in this workshop, and Tunisian simple stitch in our online tutorial at www.bit.ly/ HowToTunisianCrochet
Once you’ve mastered these three, there are plenty of other stitches and techniques to get your teeth (or your hook) into.
You can work different Tunisian stitches across one row, working into the loops in various ways during the forward pass, to create a different effect when you work the loops off the hook in the return pass. Lacy fabric is made by including chains in the return pass. Plus, there are stitch variations to extend the basic stitches and make them taller, just as there are with regular crochet stitches.
Working Tunisian crochet in the round is also possible – one of the ways to do this is to work with a double-ended crochet hook and two balls of yarn. Using a doubleended hook is sometimes called CroKnit, CroHook or even Crochetnit, and is derived from Tunisian crochet but produces a slightly different and reversible fabric. Of course, any of these Tunisian techniques will work beautifully with regular crochet, so it’s a wonderful way to extend your crochet repertoire and create different fabrics.