Crochet didn’t relax me (until I stopped counting stitches)
There’s a line that shows up in every article about yarn: “crochet is like meditation”. Right. My first chain looked like a piece of wire. So tight the hook wouldn’t go in even when I pushed, while I sat there with my shoulders up by my ears, tongue out, neck wrecked.
Relaxing it was not.
The notebook full of tally marks
My first proper project was a granny square. A square, in theory. Mine came out trapezoid-shaped — and not subtly. It looked like someone had ironed it diagonally. Counting was the problem. I kept tally marks in a notebook like a prisoner counting days, and I still lost track every other round. Undo, recount, undo again. In crochet, undoing is called “frogging”, by the way. I did a lot of croaking that winter.
One day my mother, who has been knitting since before I was born, looked at me over her glasses and said: “stop counting and look at what’s in your hand”. It sounded like advice off a breakfast mug. I tried it anyway.
What changed (it wasn’t magic)
Turns out a single crochet has a shape. And a double crochet has another. Once you learn to read them — to see where each one starts and ends — you don’t need the notebook anymore, because the fabric itself tells you where you are. It’s like going from spelling out words to actually reading. It took me a few weeks. Nobody had explained it to me that way, and it’s now the first thing I tell anyone starting out.
Second thing: I loosened my grip. Literally. The yarn tension was my tension; once I stopped holding the hook like it might escape, the chain opened up and my neck stopped creaking.
And third — this sounds like a joke but isn’t: I set the tutorial to 0.75 speed. The hands in the video moved at an impossible pace and I was pausing every three seconds. In slow motion, suddenly, everything made sense.
Now it does relax me (most days)
These days I crochet while listening to podcasts, and some evenings I look up and two hours have gone by. That state does exist — it’s not a myth. But it comes after the climb, not before. Mine cost me one trapezoid granny, half a notebook of tally marks and a cushion that was supposed to be a blanket.
If you’re starting out and yours doesn’t feel like meditation either, you’re not doing it wrong. You’re just in the spelling-out phase. It passes.
And if you’d rather skip the climb and go straight to the finished piece, that’s what those of us who did our croaking years ago are here for. Tell me what you have in mind and I’ll crochet it for you — my neck is trained by now.
The cushion that was supposed to be a blanket is still on the sofa, by the way. Nobody knows it was meant to be a blanket. Now you do.