Craft Smarter in the New Year 2019: Color Blending 4 – Spike Stitch

Craft Smarter in the New Year

Welcome to the next post in our Craft Smarter in the New Year series on Color Blending!

How Color Blending is Different in Crochet

Crochet is perfect for color blending because of its natural ability to crochet in the row below. Doing this makes transitioning from one color to the next even that much more comfortable to the eye because the colors blend together even more. We do try to approximate it with knitting (our post on Slipping Stitches for Color Blending is a great example).

YARN AND HOOK

I’m using Valley Yarns Northampton (a worsted weight yarn) and a G hook. The image below shows knitting, but the colors are the same!

From light to dark (bottom to top), I’m using:

CC1: Raspberry Heather (26)

CC2: Dahlia (21)

CC3: Merlot Heather (27)

CC4: Amethyst (19)

How to Work the Spike Stitch

You can work a spike stitch using any stitch desired (single crochet, half-double crochet, double crochet, even treble crochet). We’ve worked this sample using both single crochet (sc) and double crochet (dc).

Also, we’ve worked a spike every other stitch. You can choose to do this at any interval though – including every stitch.

Keep in mind that for each spike stitch, when pulling the initial yarn over through, you need to pull the yarn up so it matches the height of the rest of the stitches before it. The spike stitch should NOT compress the height in any way. This is VERY important.

Working the spike stitch is easy. You just insert the hook in the stitch indicated (typically 1-3 rows below) and work the stitch normally.

How Many Rows?

We did the swatch working 2 rows each. You can work any number of rows per color, so this is up to you, the yarn and the hook size.

We worked the spike stitch with both SC’s and DC’s so you can see how each looks.

As always, when in doubt, swatch.

The back side

The back of the spike stitch looks just as nice as the front – as long as you weave in the ends in a way so they don’t show on that side either.

Craft Smarter in the New Year

This post is part of our Craft Smarter in the New Year Series. We’re covering both knitting and crochet, and here are the posts we have in mind:

1. Purl Stitch (knitting)
2. Linen Stitch (crochet)
3. Slipped Stitches (knitting)
4. Spike Stitch (crochet)
5. Garter Stitch (knitting)
6. Shell Stitch (crochet)
7. Color Introduction (knitting)
8. Lemon Peel Stitch (crochet)
9. Holding 2 Colors Together (both knitting and crochet)

We also kicked off this series with a post on color choices and included a bunch of different resources for you to get the juices flowing!

Our Sponsor

And of course, a special thanks to our yarn sponsor, Webs, for donating the yarn for this series. We couldn’t have done it without you – plus their Valley Yarns Line is FABULOUS. I highly recommend them.