8 Great Tips for Teaching Crochet
By Rachel – 12 Comments| Need help teaching a friend to crochet? Great! You’ve come to the right place. In this post I’ll share with you 8 tips to help you teach someone to crochet. From my own experiences, I’ve learned quite a bit, from situations that went horrible wrong to those that went right. Hopefully, these tips will give you more confidence in teaching others to crochet. There can never be enough crocheters in the world! |  |
- Demonstrate first. If someone has no clue how to crochet, it may be a good idea to just show them before he/she even picks up the hook. Do a few rows, just so your student can get a visual of what crocheting looks like. He/she will be able to see how your hands and yarn move.
- Skip the technicalities, work on the basics. Don’t get caught up with the technical aspects of crochet. The chances that a newbie would actually remember are slim. Plus, too much information can be mind boggling! Just stick to the basics stitches and once your student gets the hand of it you can move on.
- Go slow. Everyone learns at their on speed. Start off slow so that your student can see exactly what you are doing. If need be, you can even work in slow motion. Once your student starts to get the hang of crochet, you can start to work faster.
- Give step by step instructions. Remember to give all the instructions. As an avid crocheter, you may overlook even the smallest steps because you’re so used to doing it.
- Use proper terms. It will be easier for the student later, if you use proper terms now. Try to avoid describing steps by saying “that thingy”. When your student is familiar with crochet terms, it will be easier to learn more techniques and read crochet patterns in the future.
- Don’t be boring. The fastest way to make your student run away is to make crocheting seem boring! Just about anything can be crocheted, from toys, bags, clothing, and blankets. With so many options crocheting is definitely not boring. You may want to start with a small project that your student wants to crochet.
- Use tutorials. You don’t have to be an encyclopedia of crochet instructions! You can use tutorials such as the ones on Crochet Spot to assist you in teaching. Here are some great tutorials that you can use for beginners (both left and right handed): Learning to Crochet.
- Be patient. I’m sure there will be moments of frustration, especially if you are teaching someone who is brand new to crocheting. Just be patient and you and your student will have a good time!
Do you have a tip for teaching crochet you would like to share? Leave it as a comment for others to read!
I absolutely love the baby hat and newborn hat patterns. I have made them each now and my daughter stole them for her baby dolls. my friends all wanted to know where I got the patterns.
I so enjoy looking through your posts and seeing all the patterns
Thank you for this post! I know several people who are interested in learning, so I really needed it.
This is great. I’ve been meaning to continue lessons w/my fiancee. We only did one. He did a chain and I think 3 single crochets before we had to stop. Basically, all I want is for him to help me make amigurumi to stock up my Etsy shop and for the anime conventions, especially when we have a couple back-to-back. So all he really needs to learn is single and double crochets, how to work in the round and increasing and decreasing.
I have a friend who knits who wanted to learn to crochet just for a few amigurumi patterns but she’s too used to working w/2 needles to comfortably hold a hook.
I often tell people interested in crocheting that it’s really not much more than just pulling yarn through loops – it’s just how many loops and how you group them that create different patterns and textures. It’s insanely simple at its core, you just got to practice til you get the dexterity to do it smooth and seamlessly.
I’ve been doing classes for a few years now… one of the BIG problems that my beginners have was the “where do I stick the hook?” problem. Just this session (oh, why didn’t I think of this sooner?!), I started making my sample swatches out of yarns of four different colors. That way, they can easily see the difference in height between the stitches and where each row’s stitches go. I still haven’t figured out a trick for the “where do I start” and “where do I stop” challenges (whether to crochet into the top of the turning chain and how many stitches in to begin). If there are any cool ideas that anyone has for that, I’d be delighted to learn them!
This is wonderful advice for teaching any skill. I look forward to your newsletters and always get inspiration from your designs and insight. Thank you for all you do.
I have been teaching crochet for a few years and once the students learned the stitches they wanted to create their own projects. So the next obvious step was: getting patterns and reading them. Most of them got lost with trying to read the pattern. So, I told them to get a large piece of paper and take time to do the following: for each row of instructions write down everything that is before a “,” (comma) then start a new line with whatever is written to the next “,” comma. This way they will have a longer description of the pattern and as they progress with each stitch, they also understand what they are doing. I also supply documents that explain and show the different stitches before they start. Once they figure out how to read patterns – some of them take flight – and you can’t stop them. Once that happens, I know I have done my job well. Hope this idea will help those who teach crochet, or those who are intimidated with 10 lines of instruction for a pattern. Good Luck,
Gisele/Nanabear
Thanks Rachel! I really want to teach my little sister and she really wants to learn but I think she’s left handed. I’m right handed in crochet, so I don’t know how to teach her. Do you have any suggestions?
Hi Hannah, try using some of my tutorials, they have both left and right handed pics in them.
With all the people I’ve taught to crochet, I have encountered the same problem….they crochet too tightly…thus making it extra hard on themselves. I think one of the most important things to teach them is to lighten up and relax! I always tell them that crocheting should be fun, not a chore! I’ve found that if I can teach them to push the barrel of the hook through each stitch as they are making it, rather than just the hook part, that helps them loosen up….until they get the hang of making the stitches larger, anyway. I taught a lefty once, and she had better luck sitting across from me as I worked than sitting beside me.
I was trying to teach a couple of friends to crochet this weekend, so I have another tip to add. don’t try to teach more than one person at the same time. You need to be able to give the person you’re teaching one on one attention, trying to switch between 3 people just leaves them room to do something wrong. And one of them was a lefty, she just could not get it and we (me and another girl) were having trouble trying to figure out how to reverse it for her. I think if she’s going to learn, we’ll need to find her a left-handed crocheter because us righties obviously aren’t cutting it
I have experienced that crocheting the first row of whatever stitch into a row of chain stitches is most frustrating for beginners, because they need some time to “realize” how a stitch looks like (i.e. how a chain stitch looks from behind and where to place the hook best).
So if you teach an absolute beginner:
let her/him crochet the basic chain,
then take over the hook and crochet the first row in single stitches,
then give her/him back the hook and let her/him crochet whatever you wanted to show (probably single stitches).
If she/he has had some experience with the shown stitches, you can show them how to crochet them into a chain row; so they learn how to do the first row (and therefore will not come to your door everytime they start a new project
) but will have learned the stitches for this first row before (and therefore will not have the double effort to do stitches for the first time plus do a first row for the first time).
Good luck and a lot of fun with your teachings,
Kerstin
I have actually gone the route of stitching up a few rows of single crochet (we do this in session 2 after learning the chain stitch in session 1). That way, I can go right to teaching the rhythm of the single crochet stitch and THEN have the students work the stitch into a foundation chain. They still hate that part, but at least they don’t get so frustrated with learning the stitch AND keeping the darned FC under control. I generally keep a few of those swatches around for the entire class series, in case someone is having a “bad stitch day.” With the already made-up rows, there’s something to grab onto to make a row of new stitches.