Hey Julie! Those initial 3 chains count as one sc and 1 chain space! If you look at the Granite Cape blog post, you can see a swatch I did with 15 stitches where it shows how starting with 15 chains results in 8 single crochets with 7 spaces! So the initial chains equals to the number of single crochets plus spaces! Granite Cape swatch example: http://www.allaboutami.com/thegranitecape/