Hi! I just learnt how to knit a couple months ago, when I started to attend a meetup group with my mom. I learned to crochet in school, but I always failed to learn knitting, maybe because I'm left handed?. But something clicked now that I'm an adult and I'm hooked. I'm mostly taking on smaller projects like hats and mittens, these are the first I made to give away to a friend for her little girl (3yo) but they ended up being too small lol.
Used free patterns found online, the mittens were done with crochet. I don't know what else to put in here 😅 So feel free to ask if I'm missing some important info here, please.
Edit: Thank you everyone for your kind words, I look forward to keep sharing my projects in such an encouraging and lovely community 💕
Oh, for sure, I was in tears my first crochet project because I had no idea what a stitch even looked like in order to tell where the needle was supposed to go, and the guy in the tutorial kept covering it with his hands as he worked. It was awful.
With knitting, it's just..always on the needle. With crochet, you have to be able to tell different things apart from two different angles and for a beginner, the whole thing's bull.
There are multiple ways to move onto the next round, with different favorites for ease of use or a prettier look, but the most-used imo seems to be the one where everything is made in an upwards spiraling fashion, making physical stitch counts worthless until you've finished a row you may not remember the beginning of.
For these reasons, markers are god. Far more so than my experience with knitting. Losing my place on this row or not being able to see some important point on the previous just leaves me frogging back til the count matches some definite point, and that could be an hour of lost work.
Fortunately, I wanted to make a little buddy triceratops more than I wanted to admit anything beat me ever. (Really, there are just very few good knitting patterns for toys, so I had no other option)
I recently stumbled across a crochet tutorial that really hyped the stitch markers and I definitely think it would help make things more concrete for me. I will try this method when I pick it up again, maybe in the winter. I mostly wanted to learn because of the granny square projects and how much faster it is then knitting for some things. We will see if I can figure it out, I guess 😅
(Edit: lemmy shit the bed and said my comment couldn't be posted so I tried again and apparently it posted both. Whoops)
I agree, stitch markers are the way to go with crochet.
I saw some bizarre question/comment elsewhere recently along the lines of “Why is it so much easier to learn crochet than knitting?”
I goggled actually.
My very English nana was determined that I I learn both as young child.
The knitting stuck. Even her wide range of cats-cradle cast-ons seemed deeply imprinted so I could figure them out from books later.
Crochet? Anything beyond the foundation chain seemed unfathomable. At least it was until I was sick enough that I didn’t want to risk my knitting projects and just hacked away at crochet until it finally made sense.
By the way, Sirdar had decent animal knitting patterns for its Countrytime DK yarn at one point. There was a nativity scene to knit with the obligatory farm animal patterns, but I also vaguely recall a Noah’s ark pattern set as well. The nativity one is still in print and available at some Sirdar vendors. I have this one and have had good results with the patterns.
Alan Dart is offering a slightly different Noah’s Ark set also for DK. It covers many of the popular animals, but I haven’t ever tried it myself.
I'm gonna get downvoted and possibly driven out as moderator for this but...I also think crochet is way easier to learn than knitting. And I say that as someone who learned knitting first!
With knitting, you've got to learn casting on, knit stitch and casting off to make even the most basic of thing. And then you introduce purling, and now increases are easy enough except there's a bajillion ways to do them and decreases are completely different depending on direction, and omg what is going on.
With crochet you learn how to make a chain, and you have all the skills you're gonna need. Every stitch is a variation on the same few movements, most of them only differ in terms of where you insert your hook and how many yarnovers you do.
Probably a controversial take but I stand by it! 😄
I understand the perspective, but as someone who learned both as a child at her nana’s elbow, getting started with knitting and making my first scarf worked, my first granny square was an exercise in frustration.
But as an adult with good book resources (and now videos one can repeat endlessly), I can see how much easier it is to shape and form interesting 3D garments and objects in crochet as well as make complex patterns and textures.
Seconding. Learned to knit poorly with my grandmother, and crochet was very hard to figure out. All the videos I watched did not work out because the tutorial maker’s hands kept blocking what I needed to see. Maybe I should look back into crochet again.
Once I figured it out, I found crochet to be great, but I spent a good while on Afghan crochet as a bridge.
Finding a really good instruction book with LOTS of intermediate diagrams for each of the major stitched seemed essential. Then of course there were zillions of samples to be made before anything in a project was possible.
Ooooh, thank you so much for the site. I'm going to be browsing this for a while, these are adorable!
You’re very welcome.
I haven’t tried these myself, as I’m doing more crochet for that kind of thing at this point, but they look promising.
I actually was meandering through some crochet tutorials recently and saw the tips about stitch markers and I definitely think that would make a huge difference! When I pick it up again I will try that.
I mostly wanted to crochet granny squares and make blankets like my gramma did...and be able to make certain other things WAY faster than knitting allows. We will see if I can catch on eventually, haha.