Crocheting

When it begins to get cold in New Hampshire, I start crocheting again. Twirling strings of heavy yarn around a hook and through my fingers only appeals to me when the leaves are in the midst of changing from green to brown, and the temperature in the morning is in the forties. In the same way that birds know when to start flying south, I know when to take a trip to Joann’s (or to the bottom of my closet) to find a new skein of yarn. Soft is always best, but sometimes, I just crave the largest amount of yarn for the cheapest price for the projects I haven’t thought of yet.

            I prefer crocheting to knitting these days. There’s something pleasing about needing only two objects to create something with surface area and actual usefulness. A small crochet hook and a ball of yarn can become something wearable or usable with a little knowledge and skill. Some YouTube tutorials and a few frustrating minutes wasted looking at patterns (only to decide to never try to follow a pattern again) are all I ever needed to become obsessed with hooking yarn together in never-ending sequences.

Making a long, thick scarf out of a ball of yarn just a half a foot in diameter is like watching someone form a tall pot out of a ball of clay. The surface area of a project, knitted or crocheted, never seems proportional to the amount of yarn it started out as – this is part of what makes the product so exciting. Sometimes, crocheting becomes more about the process than the outcome. That small skein of yarn equals hundreds of repititions of the same pattern over and over again, and in the end, I have a simple circle scarf to show for it.

Crocheting is a repetitive process, and that’s part of why I love it. In the beginning, I rewatch ten crucial seconds of a tutorial at least five times just to figure out which stitch to crochet into next. Once I’ve figured out the pattern, I can do it in my sleep. By this time, my hands move so fast that I don’t even think about what I’m doing. I push the hook through a an opening in the pattern that has somehow become distinguishable to me, wrap my yarn around it, cast off a stitch, wrap my yarn around it, cast off another stitch, wrap my yarn around it, cast off two stitches, then crochet one chain stitch – then, I do all of this five-hundred more times.