Hi guys! I was wondering is anyone had any tips to keep your rows starting positions from moving. What I mean by that is whenever I am working in the rounds and I place a Stich marker I follow the pattern perfectly. But after a few rows my starting place begins to shift to the left. Does anyone know what I mean? If so please leave tips!! Thanks so much! I love this community!!
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usually when rows shift it’s because of tension!! otherwise, its because of the increases/decreases made! are your rows shifting when its just sc or when its an inc/dec round??
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one way to prevent that is to use the yarn under teqnequie!(sorry spelled that wrong)
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I know that to avoid this some people to a ch 1 at the start of each round and then sl st to the ch at the end of each round. I don’t do it myself and just let my rows shift, so I don’t know if this actually works. It’s not a huge deal to me since most patterns can be done either way, but some patterns are made specifically for one of those techniques
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It’s even just with sc
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i would say that is from tension then! <33
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There’s videos out there to explain this. Partially it’s because when you finish your stitch, you’re probably pulling to the side. For right handers, the rows shift to the right. Lefties it goes left since you’re pulling your stitch that direction. You can fix that by pulling your hook more up straight instead of to the side but even that only helps a bit.
Yarn under helps reduce it. But it’s also in the nature of crochet to shift. A well written pattern gives you info on when and where to adjust your end of the row so the stitches are positioned correctly.
So in short, it’s not a bad thing if it shifts. It’s normal. You can try to reduce it but it’s difficult and not always worth it since a lot of patterns will help with adjusting for the shift.
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If you really want perfectly straight rounds, here’s a video on doing ‘joined’ rounds instead of continuous. You slst and ch 1 at the end of each round to keep it straight and using the method in this video, she goes in from behind to do the slst and it makes it even more straight than normal joined rounds. Warning that doing this when a pattern is meant for continuous rounds will have different results. You also get a ‘seam’ doing joined rounds that you don’t see with continuous
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Here’s another helpful one that explains why the shift happens and how to ‘pull’ your loop differently to get it more straight
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My way to troubleshoot is to start with a stitch marker at the beginning and place one every 10 stitches. If my project shifts anyway I can be assured it’s not my count … I know it’s my tension.
If it starts being funky like that from the base, I will up my hook size by .5mm (ex. It says 5mm, I use 5.5mm) for the starting Ch or Foundation row. I find my chain stitches and slip stitches are always tighter than any of my other stitches.
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Thank you so much my stitches are much straiter!
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