Hi, I’m matching with florp today. If you just started learning crochet 20 minutes ago, you just watched your first introductory article. Read this article before doing anything else, because I’m going to tell you about some common crochet beginner mistakes that I wish somebody had told me about because I had to learn them the hard way. I also think that there are things that you should and shouldn’t do as a beginner crocheter. Stay tuned to the end of this article. I’m going to tell you what those are. The first common mistake is pulling your stitches tight or honestly, pulling anything. If you come from a different craft, maybe sewing or cross stitching or even just like tying your shoes, you’re probably accustomed to pulling fiber and that is something you have to unlearn.

Always keep in mind that the stitches that you make are openings that you have to work into later. If you pull your stitches tight, your hook is not going to fit and you’re going to have frustrating tension issues. As a general rule, your loops should have a slightly larger diameter than the body of your hook. So not the neck of your hook, that’s right underneath the actual hook part, but the thicker area that’s between the hook and the handle. That’s where your loops should be resting in between stitches. Stitches. So use that as a general guide. If you find that you have to really jam your hook into the stitches that you made in the previous row. Your stitches are way too tight.

If your hook is squeaking, that’s also a good sign that you are using way too much tension and you are pulling too much. Keep your hands loose. Pulling and using too much tension is also going to hurt your hands. They’re going to be sore the next day. I promise you. The next mistake is over. Stuffing your projects. I love stuffing my projects. Like when I’m making plushies. I love when you can finally start putting polyfill in because you see the shape form and you see your project come to life. So I just kept stuffing and stuffing because you can always condense polyfill more. So I was like, why not? And I loved being able to, like get rid of my yarn scraps and my polyfill and seeing it disappear into the project.

Don’t do that because once you actually finish your project, it is going to be bursting at the seams. The stitches are going to be stretched out so much that you can see the stuffing underneath them and it’s going to look super wonky and ugly. So you should actually stuff conservatively. If anything. You should actually be taking your polyfill and like pulling it apart so that it’s decondensed. So always stuff moderately unless you want your plushie to be like literally oozing polyfill out from between its stitches. Underestimating Yarn Requirements this is a common mistake, especially when you come from knitting. Crochet demands upwards of triple the amount of yarn that knitting requires. I’m not telling you to bulk buy.

Like don’t be like those toilet paper hoarders during COVID But when you are estimating your yarn requirements for a certain project, especially when still trying to figure out your tension and your gauge, I suggest overshooting and buying maybe an extra skein or two. If you are new to crochet, some of that yarn is also going to be sacrificed to you. Making mistakes, getting tangled. Give some extra space and forgiveness for things to go wrong without super big consequences. Because the last thing you want to do is buy not enough yarn and then you run out. And then the next day when you go back to the store you see that it’s like out of stock or discontinued. That’s happened to me a couple times at the start, and it was absolutely infuriating.

Working into Just the Magic Ring so many tutorials show you how to make a magic ring, but they don’t actually tell you how to work into it. I was working into just the ring, like the singular strand of yarn that made up the ring, and I was so frustrated I couldn’t figure out why my first row was not closing when I pulled on the yarn tail. And it’s because you have to work into the magic ring and the starting yarn tail so that it can pull through all of your stitches in the first round. Nobody told me that and I was just suffering until I watched a article of somebody else doing it.

If you want a comprehensive tutorial on how to both make a magic ring and work into it, I’m going to link it somewhere up here and also in the description weaving in just anywhere. Weaving in is like the bane of a crocheter’s existence because it is so tedious and boring. By the time you’re weaving in, your project’s pretty much done and you just want to get it over with. So it’s very tempting to just like grab your yarn, just like jam it through any area in your project. But if you are not intentional with where you are weaving in, you are going to see the yarn tail. You have to follow along the chain or disguise it into the body of stitches. Make sure that you are weaving in like parallel or perpendicular to your project and not just like anywhere.

That one’s a very simple fix and it will elevate your projects. All of my early projects, you can see the yarn tails, they were not only poorly concealed, but they were just like poorly secured. So they would always just pop out and then I’d have to weave them in again and then the edge would get frayed and then it would just get more and more frustrating. So we’ve in thoroughly used the rows of stitches as a guide for your needle buying. Too many crochet related gadgets. Locking boards, yarn holders, tension rings. Crochet is simple. A lot of these apparatuses being plugged by influencers are not necessary. And they’re doing it because they have brand deals. The people manufacturing these products are trying to capitalize on the fact that you do not understand crochet very well.

And they are trying to convince you that in order to be a good crocheter, you need to have this obscure product. Like they are trying to exploit the fact that you are eager to come to grips with the craft as soon as possible. And they’re trying to put you under this impression that the more crochet apparatuses you have, the better crocheter you are. If anything, it’s the other way around in my opinion. If you want to see some of these funny gadgets, I also have a article for that I will link in the description. I also mentioned in that article. The things that you will be needing not differentiating between UK and US terminology. So crochet language has different terminologies. If you are working in English, it’s usually US and uk.

The way it works is that every US term has a corresponding UK term and some of the words overlap but do not refer to the same stitch. So when you’re using a pattern or a tutorial, it’s very important. Check whether it’s in US or UK terms. Now, just because you learned, let’s say, US terminology, that doesn’t mean to say that you cannot follow crochet patterns that are in UK terminology. It just means that you need to have some sort of conversion chart to refer to. And be extra careful that you don’t get any of the stitches mixed up using incompatible hooks and yarns. You can change yarn mid project, but if that yarn is a different material, has a different weight, your project is going to look different halfway through.

Similarly, you cannot use two different hooks with one yarn and expect that yarn to look the same, even if you are switching between two Hooks of the same size, but they are of two different brands. All of a sudden your tension will change because now you’re holding a different handle that affects your form. Selling your projects too soon. Your first projects are going to suck. Like, you’re going to have project blindness. And I say this with so much love in my heart, but your first project looks bad because you’re not going to understand yarn weight and your tension is going to be inconsistent. You’re going to have errors people are not going to buy, People are going to give you criticism, and you are going to feel sad and discouraged. Experiment with some different projects and yarns and hook sizes.

Figure out what works for you and what you like. Spend a couple of weeks loving the craft for what it is before trying to capitalize on it. And definitely don’t pick up crochet with the intention of making money out of it. Because being a fiber artist is hard. Even when I’m making things that I plan on selling or making a pattern out of later, I’m only making it because I love it. In the situation where I have designed things with the intention to sell, it’s never gone well. So as corny as it sounds, do not follow the money. This last one I struggled with a lot, and it is separating plied yarn. Plied yarn refers to yarn that’s not just one homogeneous strand of fiber, but it’s made up of multiple smaller strands.

And these strands aren’t, like, glued together so you can separate them. They’re just twisted together. At the start, I was, like, going in between the plies with my hook, and I was like, oh, it doesn’t matter. I’m just gonna craft on and then it won’t show. Like, it took me so long to do a stitch that if I accidentally worked in between the plies, I was like, I’m not bothered to unravel this. I’m just gonna work through. It’s gonna show in your project and it’s gonna look bad. So be very careful not to get the plies tangled. You’re gonna be making a lot of mistakes, and you’re gonna be having to unravel. If you’ve been working in between the plies, it’s gonna be so hard to unravel your yarn because it’s. It’s like a jumbled mess of plies and strands and fiber.

So those are a few words of advice that I didn’t really come across when I was learning crochet. And now you know them so that you don’t have to make the same mistakes as me. I also want to tell you guys about things that you should and shouldn’t do. Starting with things you shouldn’t, buying every single yarn in sight and being way too ambitious with yarn. So obviously not all yarn is made equal. And that means some yarns are going to be more difficult to craft with than others. Dark yarn, for instance, confetti yarn, faux fur yarn, the bulky plushie yarn, I don’t know what it’s called. These are difficult to work with as a beginner. This is something that seasoned crocheters struggle with as well.

It’s really tempting to see a pretty yarn when you’re new to crochet and you want to make something out of it only to find that you can’t see the stitches. It’s one thing to work with yarn where you can’t see the stitches, but it’s a whole other thing to work with that yarn while you’re still a beginner and you’re still learning what the stitches are. So save yourself the frustration and just work with some simple yarn first. Buying a pattern Way Too soon I am all for supporting pattern designers and I love buying patterns and being able to like interact with the designer when I have questions and stuff and being able to like connect with other people who also bought the pattern and like comparing projects etc and generally patterns are not expensive.

But make sure that you really understand the skill level of the pattern before buying it. In the event that you are very new to crochet and you spend money on a pattern that ultimately you do not understand and you struggle with, you are going to feel frustrated that you spent money on something that didn’t work out for you. Written patterns are hard to follow when you’re still trying to familiarize yourself with certain crochet maneuvers. Start out with watching article tutorials where you can really craft along with the person in the article. And if you want to learn patterns, there are lots of free ones on the Internet. Which brings me to things you should do, and the first thing on that list is learning to read patterns. A very small percentage of crochet exists in article format.

If you don’t learn to read patterns, you are restricting yourself to a very small corner of the Internet and you are only seeing a fraction of crochet projects and what crochet can do. I think patterns unlock probably like 80% of the crochet world. I learned patterns and then I never felt the need to move on to learning charts. To this day, I’ve still never followed a chart because being able to read patterns has been more than enough for me. It’s incredibly valuable. If you look at a pattern and you see like all these abbreviations like dc, sc, lgbt, it’s like really overwhelming. It’s really easy to learn because they’re just abbreviations. I think crochet patterns are also getting easier as time goes by because we rely more and more on them rather than like generational knowledge.

Like more and more people are learning on the Internet rather than like from their grandmothers. So crochet language is evolving to become easier and easier. Don’t be intimidated. That being said, learn as you go. I never opened like a textbook or even read like a blog on how to read crochet patterns. I learned actually inadvertently because I was looking exclusively at article tutorials, but some of these tutorials had pattern instructions written in the caption. Just by reading those captions and seeing how it corresponds to the article tutorial, I was able to pick up pattern writing. So not only is it not daunting, it’s actually really fun because it’s not like you don’t just sit down and you study, but you like pick it up as you go while you’re making projects that you like.

The last thing that I really encourage you to do is find a community. Get active on Reddit, on YouTube. See if there are clubs in your region where people come together and they can crochet and knit as a group. Get connected with people who are in the same position as you, who are also trying to learn. That way you have somebody to relate to and help each other out. Also find people who have been working with the craft for a long time who you can learn from. It’s so much more motivating and uplifting to craft with other people rather than alone sitting at home. Especially at the start when you are going to be very easily frustrated by things you don’t understand and try to really go out and meet people in person. People in this crochet community are absolutely wonderful.

Like, they’re so friendly, they’re so creative. They come from all types of different backgrounds. You’ll see that crochet is really like a lifesaver for a lot of people. It’s actually a really beautiful thing. So get connected, meet people, learn their stories, to really fall in love with the craft. Let me know if I missed any beginner friendly tips. I know there’s the typical things that you get confused with, like don’t drop stitches or like chaining at the end of every round, but I think those are things that are commonly addressed on the Internet. If you guys have any more unorthodox tips that nobody really talks about, please leave them in the comments. I’m really curious. Thank you guys for watching and I will see you next week.