My Wonderful Crochet Journey Thus Far

3/3/26

Recent unemployment has been hitting me hard and I've been anxiously scrambling for something to fill the void that a 9-to-5 once did. Imagine having a void where a 9-to-5 was in the first place! Most people feel free from their shackles once these jobs end. Moving on.

Me and crochet go back a few years, when I was also bored and desperate for a non-addictive time killer. I tried knitting around the same time too. Neither stuck, but at least I’d acquired a new skill, sort of. Or, not really, but I’d given something my best shot, and if I can’t praise myself for that then I don’t know what I can. For whatever reason, I still kept the three crochet needles that I bought at the time. After only one month of action, they were doomed to collect dust in my pen holder for years.

Back to today, with my Youtube feed finally out of my life, I was forced into the depths of my watch later list, and found…

…this? A decent video for once? For the second time today, I’m shockingly proud of myself for picking something that I normally wouldn’t.

I had many thoughts arise as I watched, little things such as, ‘Woah, I already know what a schema is, I actually remembered stuff from school,’ or, ‘Maybe that’s why I bite my nails so much, and am still doing so as I type this blog out with one hand,’ or, ‘I should dye my hair blue again.’ Among them, one floated towards me like God's sacred messenger, holy light cast from behind - ‘I could give crochet another chance.’

I mean, it’s relatively straightforward. It only requires yarn, a small hook, and the space on your lap. Not only is yarn cheap, I had plenty left over from when I tried crafting ages ago. It occupies both hands. I can make a funny little guy out of yarn.

With that I, just, started. Didn’t think too hard about it.

I already had a rough idea of how single (US)/double (UK) crochet works, so it was easy enough to relearn the basics. For some time, all I set out to do was practice stitches until I ran out of yarn, unravel it, repeat. I actually think it helped, instead of diving into real projects and getting frustrated with myself. Most of my first attempts don’t exist anymore, and I didn’t think it would be worth getting pictures of them, so here’s what I could fish out from the yarn box.

That granny square was more fun than I thought it would be. I think UK treble stitches are my favourite crochet stitches to make, something I never thought I’d have a favourite of.

And an attempt at a moss stitch -

I only took interest because I wanted to know why it was named after moss. I still don’t have a solid answer. Perhaps someone thought it resembled moss? I disagree, although I admire the whimsy in such a thought.

More than anything, I wanted to hastily start practicing with dark yarn, to achieve my greatest goal: make myself a fat black cat.

With this basic amigurumi video that I picked somewhat randomly, I attempted two blob cats - one with some random cheap yarn, and the other with black chenille yarn, the latter of which I think is The Range’s own brand…? Maybe these don't serve as the best advertisements but I feel it’s polite to at least let you know what resources I used. The glaring issue was all the decreases being too holey; unfortunately I still don’t know how to fix this. I didn’t even finish either cat.

The biggest obstacle, I soon found, wasn’t my lack of skill (although that was to be a huge hurdle) or resources, but instead a lack of inspiration. See, most patterns that I could find of, well, anything, let alone animals, were sweet, round, and cuddly. This is the opposite of what I want. I have no interest in strawberry cows or floral cardigans. I want my family to walk in my room and worry for me.

There were hundreds of patterns, and absolutely nothing I wanted to learn from.

Am I being spoiled? A little spoiled brat? A brat who won’t even learn the basics of a long lived specialised craft without it catering directly to itself? Who won’t get off her ass to make its own thing and instead waits for someone else to do it for free? Yeah.

My muses, they let me down. Reddit, it was all the aforementioned, children's toys or cute cropped pyjamas; with only the occasional breakthrough of a conspicuously phallic banana, or, this thing. Pinterest, once a temple of worship for creatives, only to be burned down by AI slop and the same regurgitated Twitter trends from 4 years ago, driving me to instead spend my potential research time to look at drawings of girls from shows I’ve never watched kissing each other. Tumblr, fuck no, not anymore. Ravelry, a pattern site recommended from Reddit, requiring an account just to open the fucking site. I was at a loss.

Then, in the place I least expected it but probably should’ve anticipated at some point - my local library's new-in shelf. Perched upon the edge, almost out of sight, sat Spooky Tapestry Crochet by Emily Chavez. Looking at the date stamps, I was to be the first to check this book out, if its presence on the new-in shelf didn’t already give that away. I was almost too embarrassed to bring this to the check-out desk, it was so perfectly catered to me.

Sure, it’s corny, but so’s trying to make anything legitimately creepy out of a grandma hobby.

So, there’s a couple spiders in here, yeah? I like spiders. I could make a spider. I found a couple patterns, most felt a tad too cutesy for me, came across this one, settled on it. It’s just two balls and a couple tubes.

Well. Fucking christ.

For the body initially… y’know how the yarn recommends a 5mm needle? My only options were 5.5mm, 4mm and 2mm. I fear that the stitches will be too open when I go to stuff it. Only after multiple days of walking through my local stores (I’m not paying online prices, and I picked up the first ones in person too) did I find 6 hooks from 2-8mm for £3. And only after buying those ones did my favourite craft store stock a better value 8-pack for £3.50. I don’t want to play these little games anymore.

First mistake - I used that same black chenille yarn for my first big-ish project. I couldn’t see shit. I kept having to take breaks after each attempted row because I was straining my eyes, shining torches onto the stitches (which didn’t even work!!), frogging my work until the yarn started to fray (I’ll FUCKING get back to this) getting the hook caught on each thread it passed through, it was awful. I put off continuing for as long as possible, often days at a time, before my pride and the urge to see this out got the better of me.

Second mistake, linking into the first one - I never really practiced magic rings, so I didn’t quite know how they were structured. Each time I made eight stitches, with the occasional exception, my next row would end up with nine. I had no idea what I was stitching into in order to get that ninth stitch. Frankly, I still don’t. Maybe it was the space around the first chain just behind the first stitch? But I haven’t the slightest idea how I would’ve gotten my hook through there, because…

…Third mistake - my tension was way too high. I mean, I tightened each loop on the hook as though I were trying to strangle the fucker. Given everything else going on, I kind of wanted to most of the time. Or, that anger is misdirected, the hook gave me no problems. Not only could I not see what I was doing, the high tension of each stitch now made it difficult to feel where the next one should be. A humiliating mistake to make at this point; every time I’ve ever had trouble with crochet, it’s my high tension, one of the most typical beginner errors. This is not a relaxing hobby.

The magic rings by far took most of my time and energy. They were either too tightly stitched, occasionally too loose, got me nine stitches on my second row without me being able to see where I fucked up, or some other esoteric issue that I can’t recall. I don’t want to recall the amount of time I spent having to pull them apart. Chunks of fuzz ended up getting stuck in the stitches or pulled out with my own fingers, both of which would render the ring unable to be tightened. A few times, the yarn just snapped, right as I was about to finally make a decent ring, and the process started all over again. Gah.

Technically fourth mistake, but it’s not exactly my own mistake - the pattern was wrong. If you didn’t check out that video (I don’t blame you), it instructs you to make a set of increases somewhere on the legs. There, just, isn’t one. I mean, there’s no way that this leg is made in rounds of sixteen stitches. I did try, I honest to god tried to trust the process, but I couldn’t figure out how it would fit. So, that was one leg and an extra magic ring wasted, soon to be unravelled and put through the stress of my yarn tension once more. Or maybe three or four times more, it took a few goes to get the rings right.

I also think I kept putting in my stitch markers wrong and made them harder to read? It was a mess. I was using safety pins and kept stsbbing myself because I couldn’t be bothered to fasten them by the end.

But! I did sorta end up getting the tension right. Eventually. It’s clearer in person how the stitching is more even in right leg over the left, giving it a more uniform shape.

I then proceeded to run out of yarn just as I was to add the legs to the head. So after all that, there’s no finished result. Just a flat open sack and a bunch of smaller twists ready to snap.

In light of this, I used a near full and much larger skein to fashion a brand new spider, with plenty of yarn to spare. I got this one years ago, and there’s no label anymore. Same directions as above with a 3mm hook, a couple progress pictures this time, and she looks okay…!

Okay she’s kinda ugly. But I like that about her.

She certainly holds her shape. That’s a little better than I’d anticipated. Miraculously, this girl was done in 2 days, not including stitching the criss-cross eyes the other morning. C’mon, it took 10 minutes, that doesn’t have to count as a day. This yarn was mostly grey with red streaks, and the fact that her rear neatly fades from red to grey was pure luck.

I displayed her next to my copy of Clear Hearts Grey Flowers by Jack Off Jill (my physical copy of that specific album, that I actually got somehow) and decided to name her Vivica. When I tried to take her outside to get nicer pictures, there were too many people around, so we'll have to settle for those ones.

What did I learn from this? Apparently nothing, since I went out to get extra yarn, and when the chenille wasn’t there, I bought two more skeins of near black yarn! And they’re thinner than anything I’ve worked with before. Fun.

Just a little more practice and I’ll be ready to try my fat black cat. Upon further digging, some little jesters kinda appeal to me? Hopefully those will be fun to try out new shapes. I have a vague idea for the cat, and it keeps getting edgier the more I mull it over. So far this is my only draft, with a couple of unsourced images (sorry). You know, like those anatomy dolls in science classes.

More things going on, sorta… you know that joke that was going around about how if you don’t have enough going on you’ll start regressing to your young teen interests? I’ve been listening to Jack Stauber again lately. Apparently he got more of his work on Adult Swim about two months ago, so that’ll give me something to pass the time, as well as something to look up to in the future. God, I loved Opal. And Tea Errors. I was one of the at least hundreds of thousands of people who found his stuff inspiring, I wish I did something with that.

I so desperately want to start writing essays, but I have nothing to actually say. I don’t even write book reviews anymore! I’ve read The Handmaid’s Tale and Girls Against God (from Jenny Hval, the one who made that one novella famous for its piss content) and I came out of them both with absolutely nothing to say! I’m acutely aware of my vocabulary dwindling and hate having to confront it each time I sit down to write! Ironically, this train of thought is the only inspiration that I’ve felt to write something in months!! What! Am! I! Doing!

As of writing this, up until a few hours ago I’d gone about 5 days without leaving the house? I might’ve taken the bins out at some point but that would’ve taken 2 minutes at most. For me that’s a record. I started feeling faint at the notion of going outside for food this morning, and it hasn’t fully worn off yet. I wonder what I could get diagnosed with for that.

I’m not sure when exactly I’ll be sharing this (I imagine it’ll be before 5/3/26) but it’ll be coming up to a full year of this blog section. Fuck, that went fast. It feels like 7 months at most since I tried writing pretentious essays on internet culture or whatever I was trying to do. You can’t even imagine the bullshit that I decided not to post, it’s worse than this.