Cat Mad Crochet

Estimated read time: 10 minutes

So you want to get better at crochet, but you are self-taught and flying along on your own without the benefit of a group. How do you do that? The easiest way is to develop a critical eye so that you can see where your work needs to improve and work toward that goal. You need to be able to look at your work and decide what needs to be improved and how you will do it without throwing your entire project out, which, when you aren’t happy with your work, can be tricky. 

This process requires a lot of thought about all parts of a project. You need to intelligently consider if you used the right yarn with the right hook with the right stitch pattern; if you need to work on adjusting your tension; where your project falls short of your vision and whether that is your fault or something else entirely. There are many roles for the constructively critical eye, and it can be a great benefit. In this post, I hope to help you train your friendly, helpful, constructively critical eye, so you can become the crafter you dream of being while keeping the destructively critical eye at bay.

As crocheters, if we want to improve, we need to stop looking at our work like hobbyists, happy to have completed a project and loving it as we do children’s art, flaws and all, and start looking at our work as craftspeople, in which each project is a learning experience. Some projects we are proud of because they come out awesomely; some we learn a lot from and are happy to complete even if we are not happy with the finished object; some are a mess that end up either frogged or in the permanent UFO pile because they are all wrong and we don’t even want to think about fixing them. This last category is actually the most important to look into and dissect, so we can learn to see when a project is going awry and learn how to fix it despite the difficulty of doing so. If you can look at a failed project and see your way to a successful one, your constructively critical eye is at its peak.

So how do we develop a constructively critical eye? First, we challenge ourselves by working with new stitch patterns and new yarns. It’s fine to have a favorite yarn and a stitch pattern. I have known people who knew but one stitch pattern and made everything out of that with the same yarn for their entire crafting life. They were happy and never wanted more from their chosen craft. This is not wrong! Your crafting time should bring you joy. If you are happy making whatever you are making and just want to go on doing that, by all means do. We are tool using animals. If you have found a tool that brings you joy and comfort and creativity, this is a wonderful find and should not be dismissed. I, however, would find myself quite quickly disenchanted with crochet if I did that. I may be weird.

There is safety in the same stitch pattern, but there is little challenge, and I want to be challenged. So I am always trying out new stitch patterns and new yarns and new styles and shapes of garments to keep myself thinking and engaged with my work. As you learn new patterns, you become more aware of how you work and make stitches, thus your skills increase. If, for example, your double crochets look great in a granny stitch, but loose and loopy when you try to work into them instead of between them, trying new stitch patterns is going to make that obvious and you can address it. If you only ever do granny stitch, though, you will never know.

New yarns are going to have different tension needs and hook needs. They will look best in different stitch patterns. Fuzzy yarns eat up complex laces so you cannot see all of your hard work and show off your premier counting skills. Tightly spun, crisp linen yarns will create sharp lace that really pops, but they will not create a soft, smoochy, warm fabric you want to curl up in. Linen is also going to do better with a wooden hook than a metal or plastic hook. If you try all of these different yarns and hooks and patterns together, you will learn not only which look best together, but also how each yarn and stitch pattern needs to be handled to look its best.

How do you learn all of this without having to make millions of projects? One could, I suppose, spend the rest of one’s crafting life studying the possibilities of one stitch pattern with 1,000s of yarn and hook combinations on every sort of possible crochet project from washcloths to sweaters. That would be quite the project. Or, in case this sort of decades long deep dive is not your thing, you can take your remnant yarns and make swatches with them. Get that little last nub of yarn from Aunt Sally’s sweater that she never thanked you for and pick a new stitch pattern, a couple of different hook sizes, and test them out. If you don’t like your work, frog it and try again. This is a low stress game because it’s just a practice swatch with yarn remnants. Play with your yarn!!! 

To be clear, the same rules apply if you are using only acrylic yarn. You need to play with different yarn weights, different yarn preparations, different stitch patterns, and different sizes and materials of hooks to see the various differences in the fabric created with each change you make. Experimentation is in no way the soul domain of natural fibers and high end hand dyed yarns. Play with any yarn you have.   

Now that you have a new stitch, project, and/or yarn, you can start working. Every day stop at some point and really look at your work. Are the stitches neatly formed? Is your tension even? Do the stitches show nicely with the yarn you picked? Are the stitches sharp when they should be soft? Soft where they should be sharp? If anything seems off about your work, stop right then and retry. Maybe you need to take more time learning the stitch pattern. Maybe your single crochets are just gorgeous but your double crochets gape a bit at the top. (Hi! I see you. Haven’t quite fixed that yet but I’m working on it.) Maybe you need to change something like your yarn choice or stitch pattern completely because the beautiful fuzzy yarn is obliterating the complex lace pattern. This is not a failure. This is learning. Let constructive criticism of your work show you where things can improve and then improve them.

When I started, I hated most of what I made. I kept looking at each project noting all of the things I did wrong and how the finished object never measured up to my vision. Over time, I started making myself look at the specific aspects that didn’t work and address at least one of those before I started the next project. I spent months working on loosening my gauge. To this day, I practice double crochets because I am never happy with their tension at the top. I know why there is a gap at the top now, but I am still working to fix it. Cabling is still beyond me because I have not yet been able to make a swatch I am happy with. 

Sometimes it helps to consciously watch how you make each stitch. It’s actually very calming to focus so intently on something that doesn’t have a glowing screen or messages of doom. As you focus, ask yourself the following questions: 

How are you holding the yarn? 

What is happening with your yarn hand?

How are your two hands working together?

How do you hold the project? 

How do you hold the hook?

How do you turn the hook? 

How do you yarn over? 

How do you pull the yarn through? 

Do you lift your hook anywhere? 

Are you loosening the tension anywhere as you make a stitch? 

Is there a difference in how you hold the project when you start and it is 

small and light versus when it is big and heavy? 

How does your yarn hand move or fail to move? 

How are you pulling more yarn? 

Is your tension changing because sometimes you have loose yarn to work in 

and sometimes the yarn gets a bit tight before you pull out more?

Make crocheting a conscious effort and you will notice little idiosyncrasies in

your working style that you never knew you had. Sometimes these idiosyncrasies are what makes your work uniquely your own. Sometimes they need to be addressed so you can improve your skills.

This is how I learned that I am a lifter (I hold the tip of the hook up as I work the loops creating slightly elongated stitches) and a yanker (I pull the yarn back a little with each stitch so my work is a little narrower than you would expect). This impacts how my work turns out. I get a little bit better drape from the same stitch than a rider (hook is held close to the work and the stitches are a little more squat), but my narrowness means meeting gauge on other people’s patterns is a nightmare for me. 

A couple of long, surprisingly narrow, rectangular wraps later, I worked this out, but not, unfortunately, before I made a sweater for a newborn suited only for Slenderman’s baby. I have accepted these aspects of my crochet because, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t fix them and still enjoy crochet as a hobby and a craft. So lifting and yanking are how I work. I like my fabric, and I write my own patterns, so I can go forward with this without problems.

If I just kept charging ahead and not looking consciously at both how I work and what my work looked like, I do not think I would be able to see now how my work could improve and where I need to invest time in learning and changing. It would be wonderful if we all had a group of creative friends to call on who could look at our work as craftspeople and diagnose where we need to improve. Barring that, we need to be our own teachers and guides. It is a wonderful feeling when your close attention to detail and quality lead you to tangible improvements in your work. 

I do have one word of caution. Your constructively critical eye is your friend and can help you make leaps forward in your work. The problem comes when you accidentally look with your plain old critical eye, which is mean as hell and really doesn’t like anything you do, ever. If you are tearing apart everything you make as no good and cannot point to one way you can improve it, you are looking with the wrong eye. If you are working on your first project, the only thing you might like is that you picked up the hook. Awesome. Go with that. Now pick one thing you don’t like, think about how to improve that (maybe watch some videos or read a crochet book for advice), and start again with a new project. Eventually, your critical eye will get bored and go think about something else to be mean about. When it does, you and your constructive criticism eye can happily build your skills.