Crochet Cat's Eye Stitch
Following on from learning the star stitch, I'm pressing on with learning some new stitches. This week I've been playing around with the "Cat's eye" stitch. Like some of the other stitches I've tried, this one is not a single stitch but rather a combination of several stitches to form a pattern that looks a little like a cat's eye. My swatch width is almost too small for doing the stitch pattern. The basic repeat is as follows: “Dc in the first st, sk 2, tr in the next st, working behind your sts, dc in the 2 sk sts, dc in the next st, sk next st, dc in the next 2 sts, working in front of your sts, tr in the sk st, dc in the next st.”
From memory, the tutorial that I was looking at suggested having a row of sc between rows of the cat’s eye stitch. I suspect that is because otherwise, your next set of cat’s eyes will be on the wrong side of your work. You can get around it by doing your second row as follows: “Dc in the first st, sk 2, tr in the next st, working in front of your sts, dc in the 2 sk sts, dc in the next st, sk next st, dc in the next 2 sts, working behind your sts, tr in the sk st, dc in the next st.”
I had a go at doing my little sample with alternating rows of when to work into the skipped stitches in front or behind and then I worked a sample where I alternated between a row of single crochet and a row of cat’s eye. In both cases, there was an extra stitch to what was required so I began every cat’s eye row with a chain 3 to count as the first stitch and then started the pattern in the next stitch. This meant that my cat’s eye rows were slightly off-set in the first version of this square. I decided that I liked the alternating single crochet with cat’s eyes rows best so this was the version that I kept for my bigger project. You can see both versions (prior to frogging the first one and added the round of single crochet to the other) in the photos below. The first photo shows the version where I tried to do the cat's eye stitch in every single row. The second photo shows the version where I alternated between a row of single crochet and a row with the cat's eye stitch.
Because there are so many stitches required across to do this stitch, I think that at this stage I may have to give up on trying to do my stitch challenge with this stitch pattern unless I can figure out a way to keep the essence of the stitch pattern but using fewer stitches per row/round to do it. If I don't post a stitch challenge next week, you will know that I failed at figuring it out, at least for now.