Amy O'Neill Houck: Hello, I am Amy O'Neill Houck from AOH Designs and am here at A Tangled Skein, a yarn store in Hyattsville, Maryland and I am showing you crochet beyond the basics. Right now we are going to look at Cross Stitches. Cross Stitches are made by crocheting backwards after you have made one stitch and there are a nice way to add texture, they create a little bit of an X in your stitch and they create a little bit of open work, so a little bit of laciness . It's just a nice way to add texture in your crochet and you can alternate them and have cross stitches alternating with plain solid crochet or you can do a few rows of cross stitches together and they begin to look sort of like a nice diagonal pattern. In this sweater that I am working on right now, I have thrown in a row of cross stitches every few rows just to add a little bit of texture. So to make the cross stitches, first we are going to chain three because we are working them in double crochet and then I am going to skip this stitch directly below the chain because the chain cancels that stitch and then I am going to skip the next stitch because that's going to be the back of our cross stitch, so I will yarn over and double crochet in to the following stitch.

Now to work to the end of the cross stitch I am going to yarn over and I am going to take the hook and move it behind the stitch I just made, bring it forward and insert it from front to back under that stitch behind, yarn over and pull up a loop and then finish the double crochet, yarn over pull through two and yarn over pull through two again and that creates a nice, clear X. You can actually work cross stitches in a number of ways inserting the hook from front to back or back to front and the way you do it just basically affects how much much of an X versus of V and how much the change in texture but this is the way that I like to work them because it has the most clear X look to the stitch. So we will do another one, we are going to skip one stitch and double crochet in the next stitch and then again I am going to yarn over, bring the hook from back to front through that hole and then under the stitch from front to back and complete the double crochet. I will do a couple more. Just skip one stitch.

You can also use cross stitches in a pattern in combination with other stitches by putting chains or plain stitches in between. There you have the cross stitches. Next we are going to show how to do crochet ribbing. 1