How a Lifelong Knitter Picked up a Crochet Hook
A devoted knitter of three decades, I surprised myself in early 2020 when I started dabbling in crochet and found myself more drawn to it than I expected to be. At the time, I thought I wanted only to crochet a round rug from old bed sheets torn into strips. I’d spotted a few at a friend’s home and I was intrigued.
I’d learned to crochet a chain and work single crochet as a child. Making a rug only required that I figure out how to join my chain into a ring and increase at the right pace, and for that, I was lucky. To begin the year, I was attending a weeklong residency with a group of fellow makers in my area, including the crochet designer and teacher Cal Patch. With Cal by my side in the studio during the day, my rug grew quickly. The process — working in a spiral from the centre out on a hefty-sized hook — was easy and comforting. In the evenings, after dinner, we gathered in the living room, where Cal camped out on the couch and crocheted granny squares in a gorgeous array of colours. I brought my knitting, but I began to wonder: could I crochet granny squares, too?
In the back of my mind, I’d always dreamt of learning, but I felt intimidated. Yes, I could manage single crochet, but beyond that, crochet seemed complicated. Into which loop do I put the hook? And in what direction? How many times do I wrap the yarn? What Cal was doing looked like a blur of quick movements — a dance between yarn and hook that I could not follow.
Being a beginner again felt risky. Adulthood trains us to protect our competence: we choose the familiar, the practised, the things we do well. To begin crocheting meant loosening that grip and accepting the vulnerability of starting over.
Learning to granny square
Over the next few years — in a series of focused bursts inspired largely by Cal’s work, Kristin Nicholas’ Scrappy Hexagon Afghan and Kathy Merrick’s Babette Blanket — I learned to crochet granny squares. Despite their name, granny “squares” can take many forms: hexagons, circles, triangles and more. What they share is a common stitch language (variations of US double crochet and chain stitches) and a construction method: working from the centre outward, in the round, with increases at the corners.
As I got the hang of my “squares”, learned to read my stitches and even spot and fix mistakes, I found myself falling in love with crochet. I like the rhythm (a bit quicker and jazzier than knitting), and I especially enjoy how shapes grow in a spiral, a formation echoed in nature and in us, in shell and flowers, in our DNA, and in our instinct to make the ordinary extraordinary through ornament.
And, more than anything, I revel in the chance to improvise and experiment with colour, which is less fussy in crochet (where there is only one live stitch to manage at a time) than in knitting (where there is always a whole row or round’s worth to wrangle). It’s collage, it’s play, it’s freedom. And it’s a great way for me to put to good use the single skeins of yarn I collected during the many years I spent as the author and editor of books about craft and creativity and as the editor of a knitting magazine.
Process and reward
Looking back, I recognize that my original inspiration was the finished object (a rug, then a blanket), but what ended up seducing me was how the process itself made me feel — happy, confident, competent. Although I was never bored with knitting, crochet opened me up to new possibilities, psychologically and creatively. Being a beginner again was challenging, sometimes frustrating, then rewarding.
The designer Eun Mi Ahn, who started to crochet in 2022 when a blanket crochet-along on YouTube caught her interest, expresses similar sentiments about being an adult beginner. “There’s something uniquely satisfying about watching yourself master an entirely new skill set with adult awareness and intention, as each completed project feels like an achievement. That’s a very different emotional experience from the quiet and almost invisible accumulation of knitting knowledge I’ve had my whole life.”
And, in the process of learning to crochet, Eun Mi discovered a more spontaneous side to her personality. “I'm a very methodical person who loves spending time alone and planning everything carefully,” she explains. “But when I'm choosing yarns for crochet or looking at the finished pieces, I’m often surprised by how bold and playful my choices are: colours I wouldn't normally gravitate toward, cute details I wouldn't usually add. It makes me wonder: have I always had this side to me?”
A cache of wellbeing
In her 2024 book Craft Psychology: How Crafting Promotes Health, Dr Anne Kirketerp, a psychologist, describes five ways handwork can enhance our wellbeing: flow, capacity, calmness (and presence), achievement and positive emotions.
Flow is that wonderful state of full engagement — when time seems to disappear or fly by. It arises when a task offers just enough challenge to hold our attention without tipping into frustration. That’s exactly how making granny squares feels to me. In flow, we’re more open to new ideas and perspectives — and we simply feel good.
Capacity is our ability to learn and grow. Skills such as crochet require that we sustain attention, follow sequences and track pattern changes, all of which strengthen neural pathways tied to working and short-term memory. In addition, the repetitive motions of crochet signal safety and calm to the parasympathetic nervous system. They can also enhance our ability to listen, absorb and learn.
Finally, doing something we enjoy and achieving the result we’re seeking offer tangible proof of our capabilities. These satisfying moments of making trigger the release of dopamine, the brain’s reward chemical. Small, repeated successes (of which there are so many when I make granny squares) lay the groundwork for lasting self-confidence. And, over time, building a reserve of positive feelings strengthens our ability to weather difficult moments. Now I think of my latest stack of grannies as a cache of wellbeing, built in gentle spirals I can return to again and again.
A crochet renaissance
As it turns out (but unbeknownst to me at the time), I wasn’t the only one drawn to crochet in early 2020. “Crochet gained popularity with young people on TikTok during the pandemic,” remembers the designer Samantha Brunson. Teens and twenty-somethings were making granny squares like mine, plus, hats, bags, garments, including the viral JW Anderson patchwork cardigan made famous by Harry Styles, and amigurumi, those small whimsical yarn creatures and objects that are so quick and easy to complete in crochet. In addition to posting their finished projects, Gen Z were sharing their process as well as tutorials and crochet-alongs for other users to be inspired by and learn from.
Fortunately, the crochet boom outlasted the pandemic. Just like I witnessed knitting take off in the USA and then spread internationally after the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, crochet is experiencing a renaissance following the Covid lockdowns.
The designer Claire Montgomerie recalls that when she became editor of Inside Crochet magazine in 2010, crochet was often dismissed as the “little sister” of knitting, rarely seen as cool or sophisticated. Similarly, when Cal Patch and her business partner Erin von Holdt founded a crochet pattern company in 2019, they named it The C Word, a tongue-in-cheek reference to crochet’s stigmatised status. Today, Cal and Erin report healthy sales growth, and Claire’s Granny Square Card Decks, first published in 2024, have been translated into more than a dozen languages and have sold more than 250,000 copies — a testament to crochet’s reach and relevance.
Expanding the possibilities
When I worked as a publishing director overseeing a book imprint from 2003 to 2015, I was often asked to predict the next DIY trend. I watched knitting, quilting, sewing, natural dyeing and embroidery each cycle into prominence, not as passing fads but as exhilarating and healing creative practices. What they shared was staying power rooted in something deeper than fashion. We make, I’ve come to understand over many years of experience, not simply to produce objects, but to care for ourselves — to connect to our humanity, to one another and to the long lineage of makers who came before us. Handwork grounds us in a world that moves faster than we can comfortably process, offering rhythm, resistance and meaning.
Learning something new, such as a language or a craft, rewires the brain and broadens our sense of what we’re capable of. “Knitting and crochet require different ways of thinking,” the designer Susan Chin says. “They can also serve different purposes in the same project.”
That plurality feels essential to me now. My turn toward crochet is not a departure from knitting, but an expansion — another way of thinking, another way of breathing.
TEXT: MELANIE FALICK
ILLUSTRATIONS: SUVI SUITIALA
This feature was first published in Laine Let’s Crochet! Issue 2.