Crochet Linked Stitches

Amy O'Neill Houck: Hello, I am Amy O'Neill Houck from AOH Designs. I am here at A Tangled Skein, a yarn store in Hyattsville, Maryland and I am showing you crochet beyond the basics. Today, we are going to look at Linked Stitches. Linked Stitches are regular double or treble crochet stitches that are connected while you are making the stitch and you skip one of your yarn overs and instead, go into the stitch before and connect the stitch and they create a more solid fabric than a standard double or treble crochet and they also end up creating a thinner and more drapey fabric. This here is a swatch that shows an example of linked double crochet worked back and forth and you can see that there is a row here that instead of the front row what's facing you and you are creating the linked stitches and then the second row is the row of what is the backside while you are creating the stitches. Instead, that is an interesting look that's very different from standard double crochet and it's a little bit thinner. It seems to maybe aligned into the stitches a little bit differently so it creates a thinner fabric and I used linked stitches or linked treble crochet stitch in this shawl here to create the collar in it. It has a nice round effect and then I like the way that the horizontal little lines show up on the collar. If you want to crochet linked stitches in the round then you get only the right side of the fabric showing as I did in this sweater here and you can see that you have only the right side of the linked stitches and on the inside you have the other kind of fabric which I also really like to look of. So you can play with the orientation of how you use the linked stitches to create interesting kinds of fabric. If you were working back and forth and you only wanted the right side to show, you could alternate linked stitches with say, single crochet or another stitch in between so that when you did the linked stitches only the front side would show. So now I will show you how to create them. We will start with our turning chain and since this is double crochet we are going to chain three and then instead of going directly into the stitch I am first going to put my hook into the second of those three chains that I just made and then I am going to yarn over and pull through and that substitutes with the -- for the first yarn over that you typically do in a double crochet and then I am going to go right into the stitch below the chain. Normally when working double crochet you would skip the chain, the stitch right under the chain because then you would work the turning chain as a stitch and I do the opposite with linked stitches until that chain disappears when you work into it. So I work right into the stitch directly below and then I don't work the turning chain on the return row. So now I have gone into that stitch and yarn over and pulled through and now I am going to finish like a typical double crochet. I am going to yarn over and pull through two and yarn over and pull through two again and now I have my first linked stitch and you can see it has created this little horizontal bar right here. That's where I am gong to stick the hook next. I go into that horizontal bar, yarn over and pull through and again, that substitutes with the first yarn over of the double crochet. Then I am going to go into the next stitch and work everything off like a double crochet into the horizontal bar, pull up a loop into the next stitch and finish normally and as you keep going your are going to get that nice linked stitch fabric.

Now I finished that row of linked stitches, I am going to show you how to make linked treble stitches. So instead of a chain three, I am going to chain four and we are going to work into the second stitch of that chain, take the hook in, pull up a loop and because a treble usually has two yarn overs I am going to go back in again to the next chain and pull up a loop then again go into the stitch directly below the chain and finish as you normally would do it in treble. Yarn over and pull trough two and two again and two again. You see now I have two horizontal bars and we are going to use each of these to make the link trebles, so yarn over and pull through one, yarn over and pull through the next one and then go into the next stitch and finish as you would a standard treble crochet. I will do a couple more.

That's how you make a linked treble crochet. Next we will be looking how to make Crossed Stitches when crocheting.