Amy O'Neill Houck: Hello, I am Amy O'Neill Houck from AOH Designs and 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 crocheting in the round working in the increases. Once you have got your crochet in the round started the next thing that you are going to do is increase. So to get a flat circle, one that stays nice in flat and doesn't ruffle or bend upward, what you need to do is have your increases worked evenly. Basically adding the same number of stitches in every row. So if you started your first round with eight stitches then every row are going to be adding eight stitches to make a nice flat circle. So in the first round you put two stitches in every stitch of the round and then after that you would also be adding eight stitches and to do that evenly, you would just increase the number of plain stitches between every increase stitch as you go, so the next round you might have an increase and then a plain stitch and then an increase around and that would be eight more and the following round two plain stitches between each increase and what I like to do is just mark the beginning of my round with a stitch marker so that I know when to change the pattern. Some people also mark every increase, but I find if you are looking at the crocheted fabric it's pretty easy to see where you have got your increase stitch right there that's where you have put two stitches in one stitch and then that's the same place where you increase on the way around. So I am going to just single crochet up to the next increase. You can see there is two stitches right there, I am going to single crochet in the first one and then I am going to put two single crochets in the one that looks like it's stacked right on top of the increase.

There is one and two. So that serves as my next increase and you can look on this hat here that I have been working in a spiral and you can see that the increases make this nice pattern if they are stacked one on top of the other. Now you don't have to stack them. You can actually scatter them across the row as long as you have made an even number, the same consistent number in every round. This hat which is a store sample here at A Tangled Skein, the increases are not stacked. They are sort of scattered and instead of this nice hexagon or polygon shape, you get a more round circle and even if you were stacking your increases, if you then just stopped and went straight down afterwards you create a hat, you would get a pretty round thing. You just have more distinctive increase pattern in the crown of the hat. So you would just keep going until your circle is the size that you wanted and that's how you make a nice, flat circle, working in the round. So thank you for joining me for 'Crochet beyond the basics' and I hope these new techniques inspire your crocheting.