Stacked Standing Double Crochet

Have you ever been working up a swatch of double crochet? And then you take a look at it and you are bothered by the holes along the edges. So this is a common question I get from people how to avoid these holes in your stitches. OK. So you can see them here here and here up until recently, I have been avoiding those holes by using the turning chain and that, but not counting the turning chain as a stitch. OK? So that would look like this. You just do um in, in my case, I do two chains for my turning chain, just a slightly shorter turning chain than I used to do because I feel like that blends into the side of my piece really well. And then when I turn my work, I begin by making my double crochet here instead of here. OK? Because I don't count this as a, as a stitch. And then I work my double crochet right there. OK. So that in that way, you're filling up that little space that can happen this little hole here here here. It's at the beginning of all of our double crochet roll rose. And I mean, this actually also applies to taller stitches like treble crochet and other stitches as well. Sometimes you get those holes because those turning chains are just not quite as thick as the stitches. So that's why you kind of have that hole there. Plus it's a little bit offset. So another way around that and this is what I wanted to share with you is you can start off with something called a stacked double crochet. Um A stacked standing double crochet stitch. OK? So a standing stitch is a stitch where you are not, you're not using a full turning chain to get up to that height. All right, I'm gonna show you how this works. So here we have worked double crochets all the way across and we are going to chain and turn our work. But because we're using this different kind of a turning chain, we're not gonna do a regular chain three or even a chain two. We are just chaining one right here. And I like to chain that pretty tightly. Just do one chain right there. And then we're gonna turn our work. Now we're gonna place a single crochet into that very first stitch. OK. This, this is not counting as anything that's just getting us over to the other side. And now we're gonna do a single crochet right here. So we insert our yarn yarn over, pull up the loop yarn over and we pull through two stitches and that creates our single crochet right there. Now, in order to make this tall enough to be a double crochet, we're gonna make another single crochet right into that stitch. OK? And we just do that by placing our hook right through the center of the stitch. So here's the front of our single crochet stitch. We're gonna place it between here and we will also want to make sure that it's your hook is going to come out to this side of that little strand there as we look at the back of our stitch. OK? We wanna make sure we're not just sliding it under that one loop there. That, that one loop is not enough. We're gonna be sliding it underneath here. So if we look at the side of our work, we've got that loop and we also have this loop, OK, on the side of our stitch. All right. So we're gonna insert our hook, make making sure that it is behind both of those loops. OK? So there's one loop and there's the other loop. Let me spread them up part. So you can see them, there's two loops there and we're gonna yarn over, we're gonna pull up a loop and then we're gonna yarn over and then we're gonna pull through two, completing that single crochet and making this a much taller stitch. OK? So that's twice as tall as it was before. It's about the same height as a double crochet and it's nice and thick. So it's going to fill in that space. Now, we can continue with our next stitch in double, in the double crochet stitch pattern here. OK. There's our last double crochet. Now we chain one and I like to make that chain just a little bit tight. So it's a little bit less noticeable. I turn my work. Now I'm gonna make a single crochet just like that. And then I'm gonna place my hook into the center of that single crochet, making sure there's two strands here gonna yarn over, grab that loop, pull up the loop and yarn over and pull through two, completing that sort of second single crochet stacked into the top of that first single crochet. And then we work across the row and now we just have to know that we are going to be working into that stacked stitch when we get to the end, that will be the last stitch of our row. And I'll show you that when I get across. All right. So here is our, the top of our stacked stitch. We're making our last double crochet right in the top of that stitch. It's very easy to recognize. It just looks like a regular stitch on top. It's not as tricky as working into a turning chain or anything like that. So it makes it a little bit simpler. So the one thing I have noticed about this is sometimes you know, it will make this little bit of a bump there sticking out. But if you pull on these loops just a little, it'll tighten that bump up. You can see that bump just got a little bit smaller. Also blocking, helps smooth out the edges of your piece. OK. So this here is a piece that was done with the standing uh stack, standing double crochet here along both sides. And you can see there are no large windows next to it like there were here in this original piece where we can see those holes just shining through here. I'll pick it up so you can see them a little better. So you can see those windows very clearly on this piece, on my left and on my right there aren't large windows there next to those beginning stitches. So this is a very fun one to learn. It was kind of surprising to me the first time I did it that it actually works so well. Um And it's something that I'm gonna be using a lot and I hope that you guys do too. Thanks for joining me.