Single Crochet Decrease

Hi everyone, my name is Jen Lucas, and in this video, I'm gonna show you how to do a single crochet decrease. Typically when you're first learning to crochet, the single crochet stitch is one of the first stitches you're gonna learn, sort of the basis for everything, and you can make all sorts of great projects with it. Once you learn how to single crochet, though, there might be some things that you want to make that involve some sort of shaping. Maybe you want to make a hat or a small toy, and in that case, you're gonna want to know how to do a decrease, the single crochet decrease. It's really not that hard, we're just gonna take two single crochet stitches and turn them into a single stitch. I'd love to show you how to do it. Let's get started. Here I have two single crochet swatches. The one here on the right, I just did a single crochet into every single stitch, every single row. So I just worked back and forth in single crochet, I have nice straight sides, this is just when you think of single crochet, this is what you get. And then over here, I did single crochet, but I worked in some decreases. And so what I did here was I worked a few single crochets, did a decrease, worked a few more single crochets, did a decrease, few more single crochets. And I did this every other row, and you see here that my sides are coming in because I'm decreasing the number of stitches that I'm working with, and so I'm slowly coming to a point. If I would have kept going, I just would have been left with just one or two stitches at the end. And so you'll see a single crochet decrease in all sorts of applications. Basically, any time you need to shape something, you're either gonna be doing an increase or a decrease, and so this will be a very common one that you'll see. There's a few different ways that you might see it abbreviated in your pattern, and your pattern abbreviations or special stitches section will always tell you what the abbreviation is for this, but I just wanted to go over some of the more common terminology and abbreviations that you'll see. So you'll often see it as SC 2 tog, T-O-G, tog, for single crochet two stitches together. Sometimes you'll even just see it as DEC for decrease, or SC DEC for single crochet decrease. But again, your pattern instructions for whatever pattern you're working where you have this particular decrease, will have that information. So let's go ahead and take a look at how to do this single crochet decrease. So I have a little swatch here, and we are just going to work a couple single crochets and then we will do the decrease. So I'm just going to stick my hook into that loop that's already on the swatch. So I'm gonna start by just working a single crochet. So I'm just gonna go in, yarn over, pull a loop up, yarn over, pull through both loops. So that's just a regular old single crochet. I'll just do that again just to review that for you. We're gonna go under both loops, yarn over, pull up a loop, yarn over, pull through two loops. That's a regular single crochet. So now to do the single crochet decrease, we're going to insert our hook under both loops, yarn over, pull through a loop. So now we have two loops on the hook, and as you know, we would yarn over, pull through both again, but to do the decrease, we're actually going to stop here and work into the next stitch. So we're going to insert into the next stitch, yarn over, pull through a loop, so now we have three loops on the hook, and we're gonna go ahead and yarn over, pull through all three. And so if we take a really close look here, we have one crochet stitch here, one here, but they've come together here, where we have the two bars at the top to do the decrease. So I'll just work another regular single crochet, and now let's do that decrease again. We're gonna insert under both bars, yarn over, pull up a loop, go to the next stitch, insert our hook, yarn over, pull up a loop, we have three loops. Yarn over, pull through all three to complete the decrease. So now I'll just work another single crochet, and let's do another decrease. Insert our hook, yarn over, pull up a loop. We're gonna not finish that single crochet. Instead, we're gonna go and start working the next single crochet, yarn over, pull through all three. There you see where we've crocheted two together. And so your pattern, any pattern that you're working where you have to do a single crochet decrease will tell you exactly where to do that decrease. So let's just do one more. There I've pulled up a loop, gone to the next stitch, pulled up a loop, yarn over, pull through all three. And that's all there is to the single crochet decrease. There you go, that wasn't so hard now, was it? We're just taking those two single crochets, turning them into one, and we've done our decrease. Like I said, you can use this for all sorts of things. Probably the most common place I use it is when I'm making small toys. I love making small toys in single crochet, and so it's great to know how to do this decrease for that. Thank you so much for joining me and watching this video. I hope that you enjoyed learning with me, and I'll see you again real soon.