When Selma was a baby, I took a class at the Yarn Gallery in Seattle–my then neighborhood yarn store–from Morgan Hicks and I learned to make a crocheted scarf that was double-sided. It’s made with two colors of yarn, one worked only on one side of the work and one only on the other. While it sounds like double knitting, it more resembles thermal fabric. I found the scarf recently and I wanted to reproduce the technique and play around with it, but I could remember neither the name nor the method. A quick e-mail to a designer list I participated in revealed the mystery. The technique is known by a few names: waffle weave crochet, honeycomb stitch, thermal crochet, reversible crochet. Basically it’s worked, most often in two colors, in alternating loops to create a double-sided fabric. There was recently a ravelry discussion about it on the Crochet Liberation Front board that Dee pointed me to. She made cute two-color scarf with the technique that you can see on Ravelry.
Vashti Braha–one of crochet’s truely brilliant minds has made a few projects using a variation of the technique she developed, including a coffee cup cozy that converted the technique into the round:
Vashti says, “Sometimes crochet just isn’t thick enough.” Vashti’s pattern is from the book Kooky Crochet. It uses sock yarn and it’s a great project for using up scraps.
Here’s a scanned instruction on how to create one variation on the stitch, called Reversible Afghan Stitch. Here’s a web archive which includes photos of what the author calls Helena’s Potholder Stitch.
I’m hoping to play with it soon, and I’ll share the results. I like the idea of a double-thick hat to keep warm in Alaskan winters. Have you tried this technique? I’d love to see what you made.