Crochet

Crochet builds fabric by pulling loops of yarn through other loops with a hook. Only one loop is ever live, which is the fundamental difference from knitting and the source of most of its practical advantages: you can put it down mid-stitch, it cannot unravel by accident, and undoing a mistake is a matter of pulling the yarn rather than rescuing dropped stitches.

The resulting fabric is denser, firmer and less stretchy than knitted fabric. That makes crochet excellent for bags, blankets, baskets, toys and anything that should hold a shape, and less naturally suited to close-fitting garments — which is why the two crafts have divided the territory the way they have.

It is worth knowing early that crochet has an unusually deep amateur culture and an unusually shallow professional one. There is no crochet machine: every crocheted item in existence was made by hand. That is not sentiment, it is a mechanical fact about the stitch, and it is why crocheted goods are expensive and why the craft has stayed a hand craft.

1. 1

   Step 1: Buy smooth, light-coloured, medium-weight yarn

   DK or aran weight, in a plain pale colour, in plain acrylic. This matters more than anything else on this page: you must be able to *see* the stitches to learn them, and black, fluffy, variegated or novelty yarns hide the stitch structure completely. Almost everyone who says "I tried crochet and could not do it" started with the wrong yarn.

   You will know it worked when: You can see where the hook goes.

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   Step 2: Buy one hook, sized for the yarn

   A 4mm hook for DK, or 5–6mm for aran, is the usual British starting point — note that American patterns following the Craft Yarn Council standard will suggest a size larger, which is a real difference in tradition rather than an error in either. The ball band is the tie-breaker. A single good hook beats a set of forty.

   You will know it worked when: Fabric that is neither rigid nor holey.

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   Step 3: Learn four things, in this order

   Slip knot, chain, single crochet, double crochet. That is enough to make a blanket, a scarf, a bag or a dishcloth. Everything else in the craft is a variation or a combination of these.

   You will know it worked when: You can make an actual object within a week.

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   Step 4: Make a swatch and count the stitches

   Chain 21, work 20 stitches per row for 20 rows. This teaches consistent tension, teaches you to count, and produces the swatch you will need to understand gauge.

   You will know it worked when: Even edges, and a sense of what your natural tension is.

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   Step 5: Make one small finished thing

   A dishcloth, a granny square, a simple bag. Finishing something is what makes the craft stick, and a half-finished blanket is where most beginners stall.

   You will know it worked when: A completed object, and a reason to make the next one.

Almost every crochet problem a beginner has — a piece that grows or shrinks, a row that ends in the wrong place, a pattern that stops making sense at row four — is the same problem: not being able to look at the fabric and see what is there. Counting stitches is not the skill. Recognising them is.

This is a section rather than a video for a specific reason. The stitch is not moving. It is in your hand, you can turn it over, and you can look at it for as long as you like — which is exactly the situation where a labelled reference beats a demonstration that goes past at somebody else’s pace. Everything below is checkable against the thing you are holding right now.

The parts of a stitch, and what each one is for:

• The top V — Two loops lying across the top of every finished stitch, forming a V when viewed from above. This is what you normally work into, and counting Vs along a row is how you count stitches.
• The front loop and the back loop — The two halves of that V. Patterns saying "front loop only" or "back loop only" mean working under one of them instead of both, which produces a ridge — the whole basis of ribbing in crochet.
• The post — The vertical body of the stitch below the V. Post stitches wrap around it from the front or the back instead of going through the top, which is how cables and basketweave textures are made.
• The space between stitches — The gap either side of a post. Working into the space rather than the V is a different instruction and gives a different fabric, and confusing the two is why a granny square and a solid block behave so differently.
• The turning chain — The chain worked at the start of a row to bring the yarn up to the height of the stitches that follow. Whether it counts as a stitch varies by pattern and is stated at the top — and the disagreement about it is the single commonest reason a row ends up one stitch out.

How to actually read a row, with the work in front of you:

1. 1

   Step 1: Find the Vs along the top edge

   Lay the work flat and look along the last row you made. Each stitch presents one V. If the edge looks like a wavy line rather than a row of Vs, the work is twisted — untwist it before counting anything.

   You will know it worked when: You can see individual stitches rather than a texture.

2. 2

   Step 2: Count in fives and mark them

   Stitch markers every five or ten stitches, especially on a first project. Recounting a row of sixty is how a mistake gets missed twice.

   You will know it worked when: A miscount is found within five stitches rather than at the end.

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   Step 3: Identify the first and last stitch of the row

   These are where errors concentrate. The last stitch of a row often hides against the turning chain and is the one most often skipped; the first is the one most often worked into twice.

   You will know it worked when: The two positions responsible for most edge drift are under attention.

4. 4

   Step 4: Check the count against the pattern before turning

   Every row, at first. It is thirty seconds, and it is the difference between unpicking one row and unpicking nine.

   You will know it worked when: Errors are caught while they are cheap.

Gauge — called tension in British patterns — is the number of stitches and rows in a 10cm square of fabric. It is the single most misunderstood thing in crochet, and it is the reason a jumper made exactly to a pattern comes out three sizes too big.

A pattern is written to a gauge, not to a hook size. The hook size quoted is only the designer’s starting point: your hands are not their hands, and two people using the same hook and yarn routinely produce fabric that differs by 15% in width. If your gauge is looser than the pattern, every measurement scales up.

The fix is mechanical. Work a swatch at least 15cm square in the pattern stitch, measure the middle 10cm rather than the edges, and count. Too many stitches per 10cm means your fabric is tight — go up a hook size. Too few means it is loose — go down. Change the hook, not your hand tension, which is not reliably adjustable.

Gauge matters enormously for anything fitted and barely at all for a blanket or a scarf. Knowing which project you are making tells you how much to care.

The two right-hand columns disagree, and that is the point. The Craft Yarn Council standard is American and its recommended hooks run a size or so larger than British workshop convention — a UK pattern will routinely call for a 4mm hook with DK where the CYC standard suggests 4.5–5.5mm. Neither is wrong. They produce different fabrics: the CYC sizing gives a looser, drapier result, and the British convention a firmer one.

This matters because British and American patterns are freely mixed online and neither states which convention it is following. If a pattern feels stiff and slow at the hook size given, and it came from a UK source, that is the tradition rather than your tension. Your own swatch settles it either way, and the ball band is the tie-breaker.

HobbyHQ published a single blended table here until August 2026, attributed to the Craft Yarn Council. It did not match the CYC standard, and reading the standard is what caught it.

1. 1

   Step 1: A square that stays square

   Chain, double crochet, treble, and counting stitches at the end of every row without thinking about it.

   You will know it worked when: Your edges stop drifting and the count comes out right three rows running.

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   Step 2: Working in the round

   Amigurumi, hats, anything circular. Increases and decreases stop being a rule to follow and start being a shape you can predict.

   You will know it worked when: You can make a flat circle that lies flat and a sphere that closes.

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   Step 3: Reading patterns and gauge

   Following a written pattern in a yarn the designer did not use, and swatching first. This is the step that turns crochet from a craft into a repeatable one.

   You will know it worked when: A garment comes out the size it was meant to be.

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   Step 4: The plateau

   Almost everybody stalls at garments — flat pieces are easy and shaped, fitted things are not. The fix is one simple garment made properly with a swatch rather than five more blankets.

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   Step 5: Where it branches

   Fine thread and lace, Tunisian crochet, freeform, or designing your own patterns. Designing is the one that changes how you see everything else.

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   Step 6: When a class helps

   Rarely at the start — crochet is unusually well served by video. It helps most for garment fitting, which is where written instruction is weakest.

• A pattern is somebody’s copyrighted work, and the community treats it that way — The strongest norm in the craft, and the one most likely to get a newcomer told off. Sharing a bought PDF, photocopying a pattern for a group, or reposting one you liked is regarded as theft rather than as sharing, because independent designers are individuals and a pattern is often their income. Making and selling items *from* a pattern is a separate question, and the answer is whatever that designer’s licence says — many explicitly permit small-scale selling and ask for a credit, which is why people check.
• Yarn shops sell help, and the price of the yarn includes it — The reason a local yarn shop charges more than an online warehouse is that somebody in it will fix your tension, find where you dropped a stitch, and tell you honestly that the yarn you have chosen will not do what you want. Buying yarn online and then bringing the problem into the shop is the one thing that genuinely irritates owners.
• Nobody asks how long it took, and everybody wishes you would not — The standing joke and the standing grievance. "How long did that take?" is usually followed by an offer to buy one at a price that works out below minimum wage. Experienced makers deflect it, and there is a whole genre of gentle community writing about why.
• Gifting has an etiquette, and a curse — Handmade gifts are given without strings and without expectation that they will be treasured, because they frequently are not. The community’s standing warning — half joke, wholly meant — is against making a large, time-expensive garment for a partner early in a relationship. Make hats.
• Groups meet, and they are not skill-graded — Crochet groups in libraries, cafés and pubs are one of the most reliable ways into the craft, and they run on the assumption that somebody at the table can do the thing you are stuck on. Bring the project you have ruined. That is what it is for.
• Terminology is a genuine transatlantic trap, and people are kind about it — US and UK stitch names are offset by one — a US single crochet is a UK double — and every pattern states which it uses. Getting this wrong once is a rite of passage rather than an embarrassment, and the standard response in any group is to laugh and hand you the other conversion chart.

Underneath the etiquette is a culture that gives an enormous amount away for free. Vast numbers of good patterns are published at no charge, technique videos are made by people with nothing to sell, and stitch dictionaries are maintained collaboratively. That generosity is exactly why the community is so firm about the paid patterns: the free layer only survives if the designers who choose to charge are not undercut by people passing their work around.