In lesson 3 on ‘How to Crochet’ I showed you how to do slip, chain and single crochet stitches. Today I am going to show you how to decrease and increase stitches.

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How to increase stitches

Increasing crochet stitches is actually really easy. All you have to do is work more than one stitch in the same position. Easy, right! Let me show you in a video

So in a nutshell,  if a pattern says to increase (or you somehow don’t have enough stitches and you need to fudge) you simply work more than one single crochet, double crochet or whatever stitch the pattern calls for in the same stitch. You can work anywhere from 2 to 20 stitches in the same position, all depends on the design.

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How to decrease stitches

Unfortunately decreasing stitches is not quite as straight forward as increasing stitches. To decrease a stitch means that you work two stitches together. It depends on which stitch you are working exactly how you do it, but in essence it comes down to this.

Work your stitch to the point just before the last yarn-over and taking off the last two loops, this means you now have 2 loops on your hook (except for a hdc, then you have 3 loops on your hook). Now start the next stitch and do exactly the same; so stop just before the last yarn-over. In general you will now have 3 loops on your hook, take them all off in one go.

In these two videos I show you how to decrease from two to one single crochet, this stitch is called a sc2tog (single crochet 2 together)

and how to decrease from two to one double crochet, this stitch is called a dc2tog (double crochet 2 together)

The same concept applied for working 3, 4 or even 10 stitches together! So if you see the method behind the madness, you are going to be just fine. 😀

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Lesson 5

You have now learned a few basic stitches and techniques, now time for a small project. Next time we will be making a small purse using single crochet stitches.

See you next time,

Esther

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