 Hey guys, Tasha here from start of school crochet. Today's stitch explorer tutorial is the alternating spike stitch Which is a really great stitch to learn. It creates a really nice fabric There's lots of different variations you can do by changing colors from row to row which I've shown here in a sample and The backside looks a lot different from the front side or whichever one you decide to be the front But it has a really great alterations to it So I'm using Bernat yarn today, and that's the home deck in the cream color with a 5 millimeter H hook You can use any yarn or hook you'd like It's a very easy stitch pattern and it works in multiples of Even numbers or so I should say multiples of two or even numbers so grab your hook in your yarn and we're going to start off with a Slipknot and chaining an even number of chains Get a little bit closer, so I'm not going to go through all the chains here But just chain as many as you need. I chained about 16 here So you're going to work your first stitch into the second chain from the hook and You're going to do a single crochet stitch and single crochet across the entire chain One single crochet in each chain I'm not going to do the whole thing here, but we're going to come back and once you get your single crochets Come back and we'll do the next row and this will be row two So here I have I counted an even number to start but when you count your stitches you're going to have one short So it's going to be actually 15 stitches instead of 16 So chain one turn then we're going to skip the first stitch and Do one single crochet into the next stitch and Then we're going to do the spike stitch which works below Your main stitch so you follow your single crochet down And you can see there's a little hole underneath it. You're going to go straight into that hole and Do your spike stitch which is basically a long single crochet Then you're going to pull up and complete your stitch Then the next stitch is to single crochet in the next and that pattern repeats throughout the entire pattern So just go down From the top of your stitch when you find your single crochet Follow it down insert your hook Yarn over pull up a loop Stretch it a little bit and then yarn over and pull through to complete your single crochet And that's a very simple stitch. That's what you were you keep repeating that until you reach the very end and spike stitches Can be a little confusing sometimes for people But you just kind of have to follow the main stitch down and go straight underneath it And once you do a few you'll get the hang of it It goes pretty quick So keep repeating until you reach the end of the row So we're here at the end of the row We had we just did a single crochet and now we're going to do our last spike stitch into the very last Single crochet, which is a little bit odd, but that's what the pattern calls for and Then we're going to do a single crochet into the chain one Which kind of be maybe a little bit hard I just went through one loop and then row two repeats Over and over and over again until you reach the size you want so skip one and then single crochet in the next and you'll be single crocheting in the top of The spike stitch from the previous row and then doing your new spike stitch underneath The single crochet from the previous row and you just go down find the little hole there And do your single crochet or spike stitch into there the little hole So keep repeating that until you complete your row three You can see the pattern starting to emerge a little bit there So now we're at the end again. We did our last spike stitch and we're going to go through the chain. I Tried to get through two loops here, but didn't really have success. So I'm just doing one loop So we're going to change colors. I'm going to show you how it looks changing colors So you can frog out your last and just complete your last stitch by adding your new yarn Over your hook and then completing the last single crochet with your new color and then nothing changes for the pattern here We just keep working One single crochet and one spike stitch across the row So at the end of the row, you're going to chain one and then turn skip the first stitch and Then work your first single crochet into the spike stitch and then work your spike stitch below the next single crochet and Then repeat that around until you come to the end Okay, so I'm going to speed it up a little bit here to get through this row and Then when we get to the other side You can kind of see what we do you can kind of pull apart your little V's that your spike stitches created So there you can see the pattern coming out and Here you can kind of follow with those if you'd like. I kind of like to separate them. Sometimes they get a little bit twisted All right, so you did it and This is what the finished piece looks like and you can see the different alternating rows One side actually looks a little bit different than the other side too so For this side, I used two rows of white and then I started doing Alternating rows of white and gray and white and gray and you can kind of see the pattern that emerges when you do that So you can create a lot of cool different kind of patterns with this stitch. It's a great stitch I really love it and I can't wait to use it more All right So also I wanted to show you guys that what it looks like when you change your tension a little bit and use a different yarn So this yarn is Red Heart Amore and I used kind of a tight tension on the spikes instead of pulling them up And you can see it creates these neat little holes So when you when you pull up your spike stitch To the level of your working stitch you can see that it creates Different V's when you do it tight makes it really tight Thanks for watching guys. Happy crocheting. Please subscribe the links to the pattern are below