Crocheting Tall Stitches - how to do Treble Crochet
Making tall stitches helps to add height to your stitches, and in this particular example, I had to use tall stitches to make Belle’s dress. For her, I actually used quadruple treble crochet (qtc) or yarn over 5 times! This might sound complex but once you nail down a basic tall stitch, the rest is just about how many times you yarn over at the start.
So in this tutorial, I will be taking about how to make a treble crochet stitch, which is taller than that of double crochet. If you want to try out a simple double crochet first, you can check out my ‘Back to Basics’ series and specifically the tutorial on how to do double crochet.
If you got the hang of that already, then let’s try some even taller crochet stitches!
How to do Treble Crochet (tc)
Similar to starting a double crochet, do a yarn over even before you insert the hook into the desired stitch. In this case, yarn over 2 times instead of just once for dc. Then proceed onto step 2.
Having more yarn over before inserting the hook means more loops on the hook subsequently like in step 3. (As you will see later, more yarn overs means taller stitches.) Steps 4-6 is basically slowly working your way down to the last loop on hook.
Keep drawing yarn only through 2 loops on hook progressively (only twice in this case in step 4 and 5) until you reach 1 loop left on hook. Then you will get the final tc!
As you can see in step 6, doing a tc without a starting chain will result in a slanted appearance as you are going from a low stitch to a sudden much higher stitch. We can circumvent this with the following step:
Adding a chain before the treble crochet
So this time, let’s talk about a variation of the above. Before embarking on doing the treble crochet, add on a chain first. For this illustration, I chose a chain of 3 because its length approximates the height of a treble crochet. As you can see in the 2nd picture on the right, I added the usual yarn over 2x.
I subsequently added 2 more treble crochet, so you can see in the last picture on the right, there are 3 treble crochet stitches (tc3) with a ch3 at start.
The final appearance is pretty vertical, as opposed to the step 6 above where the stitch is so slanted! I generally prefer to use this latter method to utilise for my amigurumi.
Taller and taller stitches!
This is just to show a double treble crochet (dtc) stitch (what they keep getting longer? :)). Like I mentioned previously, doing the dtc from the preceding sc creates a slanted/ curved effect with a gap in the 1st picture. Whereas adding a chain of 4 before starting the dtc creates a column-like effect in the right picture.
When I decided to make Belle’s dress, I wanted to create that high column effect all around the base of the gown, so I went with doing a quadruple treble crochet (qtc)! Essentially before I inserted the hook, I had to yarn over 5 times! This is how it turned out:
However, one caveat I must mention is using these tall stitch techniques often creates a gap in between each column, as you can see in the final picture above. Some might not like the obvious gap, which becomes more apparent the taller the stitches go.
Which is why for another princess Tiana, I decided to try tunisian crochet! It’s my first time attempting that so do look out for it soon in another post! Look out for the Belle pattern and rest of girls coming soon!
Also for more special crochet techniques (in addition to some very basic ones as well), check out the Freebie Vault below.
Happy testing and if you try out treble crochet in your amis, let me see them!
P.S. If you want to know where to get gold yarn, do check it out here. *Full disclosure, it is an affiliate link but I only link to items I actually use and believe in!
