What is Crocheting?

Based on the title of this post, you can probably guess that I have very little knowledge about crocheting. All I know is that it involves yarn, a stick/hook or two, and that the yarn is looped around them in some way. I have only been exposed to the end products of crocheting through the things that my Aunt Sandy has created and given me as gifts, the one plushie that I bought myself, and videos I have seen online. I always thought it was cool that my aunt was able to create all of the scarfs, toques, beanies, and blankets that she did.

The bottom two rows of toques and scarves are from my aunt, and the plushie at the top came labeled as “Mushroom Dude”.

Originally, my learning project was going to be centered around learning sign language. I did want to do crocheting for my project initially, but I did not want to purchase anything. I also figured that it would get delivered to me too late. However, I mentioned this to my mom one night, and she remembered that she maybe still had crocheting hooks. We took a quick journey downstairs, waking my brother up in the process, and started digging things out of the middle section of the dresser-turned-TV stand. Lo and behold, Mom still had yarn, crochet hooks, and knitting needles that she had purchased before my brother or I even existed. She said that she had tried to get into crocheting and knitting but found that she liked making rugs more. This means that I will get to keep all of the stuff if I enjoy doing it, which I think is pretty cool.

My Plan for the Learning Project:

1) Learn the Basics. As I said, I know nothing. I need to have a basic understanding of crocheting terminology if I ever want to progress to the point where I can fully create something. (I have taken a look at some crochet patterns online and they are like gibberish to me right now.)

– I found this great playlist of videos by Bella Coco on YouTube and will use some of them to kickstart my learning journey. I have watched part of the first one, and it is slow going and easy enough for me to follow.

– It might be a good idea for me to create a vocabulary list to reference when I am first starting out. At the very least it should be a list of the words and their abbreviations as most of the patterns I have found use only abbreviations in the steps.

2) Learn the Specifics. I really would like to create a plushie and there seems to be a lot of stitches and loops that I need to learn specifically for that.

– The Woobles website has a lot of great tutorial videos for each specific skill/technique needed to crochet plushies, and I can access them for free. I will likely use those to learn more advanced aspects of crocheting.

3) Create a Final Product. My main goal for this learning project is to create a plushie. I might be overestimating my learning abilities in the timeline that we have for this class, but creating my own plushie is something that I eventually want to do someday.

-If I find that this beyond my reach, I might switch my goal to creating a blanket or something of similar difficulty that is smaller.

-For this final product, I will likely be using patterns uploaded by various people from the LoveCrafts site, which seems to have plenty of free patterns that I can follow.

These are some of the flat duct tape flowers that I kept for myself.

I have always wanted to be crafty and create something with my hands that wasn’t typed out on a computer screen and handed in for marks. Something that could be used to create both fun and useful things. My younger self created wallets and flowers out of colourful and patterned duct tape (and created a mini-business for a year or two by selling them to my classmates), although I have pretty much grown out of that. Learning how to crochet can maybe help adult me to fulfill that need again. Regardless, I am ready to learn something new and hopefully create something I can be proud of. Also, I hope I don’t get too overwhelmed or frustrated along the way.