Crochet – Few Fundamental Lessons

Crocheting is not just stitches and yarns. It is a wonderful art that everyone craves for and crocheting is practiced mainly for the pleasure that it can inculcate on one’s mind. It is a known fact that many people started crocheting got stuck to it for the lifetime, consciously.

Learning crochet is not at all difficult and all you need is a good crochet hook, yarns, a measuring tape, yarn needle, few pins and a positive attitude.

The Yarn

After procuring the necessary materials, the first lesson will be on how to hold the yarn and the hook. If you are a beginner, try to learn the finer aspects of holding yarn the right way.

Here is how you can do that:

• You can hold the yarn in such a way that you can let the yarn pass through your fingers. The holding would be: little finger - beneath the ring finger - above the forefingers and the middle fingers.

• The other way of holding the yarn is making it a loop in your little finger region and allowing it to cross the forefinger.

• You can hold the hook the same way you would hold the pencil or a spoon. In this way, it will be easy for you to handle the tossing part of yarn from your fingers down to your “loop in the hook.”

Starting with the practice of holding the yarn is one of the basics and once you master the act of holding the yarn the way you prefer, then you can move on to other basics.

Choosing the Hook size and Yarn

The success of any crochet project lies in your proper selection of right yarn and correct size of hook. The dimension of the crochet fabric depends mainly on the size of the hook or yarn used.

Letters or symbols represent the dimension or the size of the hooks. There can be even numbers in certain cases and you need to know them before hand.

The rule that you can apply to your advantage is that the thickness of the hook increases with increase in number or with higher letter and you can decide on the appropriate hook. On the other hand, the yarn weight is also decided by the thickness and the yarn size is represented by a name.

Decreasing and Increasing

It is also important for you to learn in crochet how to increase or decrease the breadth and depth of the project or pattern.

You can decrease the width by skipping few stitches in a row and doing the next stitches. If you want to increase the thickness, then you can add or insert more stitches in a row. The increasing part of thickness can also be achieved by joining two stitches of the same row together in order to get a solitary stitch on the next row prior to it.

Reading and Understanding Patterns

As an avid crocheter, you must learn how to read the abbreviations in the pattern and understand them correctly. Though there is no compulsion on your part to memorise them, any effort to getting them memorised would make your work faster without the need for looking for the meaning and wasting time.