The Complete Beginner's Guide to Crochet

Choose smooth, light-coloured yarn, a hook compatible with its label and comfortable for you, scissors, a blunt yarn needle and a couple of stitch markers. Worsted-weight yarn with a 5–5.5 mm hook can be a useful starting sample; adjust if the fabric is too tight or loose. Light yarn makes it easier to see individual stitches.

Two common grips are the knife grip, where you hold the handle overhand like cutting bread, and the pencil grip, where you cradle the hook between your thumb and index finger. Choose a comfortable grip; neither is a requirement. What matters is your non-dominant hand. That hand regulates how fast the yarn slides off the skein. If you wrap the yarn three times around your pinky, you will choke the strand and pull your loops tight. Let the strand glide lightly over your index finger and pinch your project with your thumb and middle finger right beneath the active loop.

In US terms, single crochet uses no initial yarn over; half double and double crochet begin with one. Each has a different pull-through sequence. Practise the individual lessons, count the stitches and follow their turning-chain convention. Stitch placement and tension also affect the finished fabric, and more advanced stitches introduce other movements.

A missed edge stitch can make a swatch shrink as it grows. You start with 20 stitches, and ten rows later you have 15. This happens because the turning chain at the start of each row behaves differently depending on the stitch height. In single crochet, the chain 1 does not count as a stitch, so you must work into the very first stitch right under the chain. When a double crochet pattern counts chain 3 as the first stitch, skip the stitch at its base and work into the top of the turning chain at the end of the next row. Other patterns use a different turning method, so follow their specific instructions. Place a locking stitch marker in your first and last stitch of every row until your eyes spot the edges naturally.

Crochet shorthand is concise because spelling out every yarn over would make a blanket pattern twenty pages long. A line like 'Ch 21, sc in 2nd ch from hk and across (20)' simply means: make 21 chains, put one single crochet in the second chain from your hook, and work one single crochet into each remaining chain until you have twenty stitches. Before you pick up your hook, verify whether the designer is writing in US or UK terminology. A US single crochet is called a double crochet in the UK. If you work a British pattern with American double crochets, the stitch structure and finished measurements will change.