Hobby Talk – Learning to Crochet

This was quite the ironic thing, to be honest. Over the holiday, I started to consider learning how to knit. I’m not sure where the idea came about, or why, but I was poking around Amazon looking at knitting kits (and I never mentioned it to anyone).

Then, out of the blue, one of the gifts my sister sends me for Christmas was a Woobles crochet kit! Of course, this sent me out looking for the difference between knitting and chrochet, but all things said and done, I think I’m glad I tried to learn crochet first. This is more than enough to tackle!

The Woobles kit is made for beginners, but being an absolute beginner who had never held a crochet hook in my life, when I started to dive into their very good video tutorials, I quickly got the idea that I was in over my head. Since then, I’ve confirmed that working in circle patterns is a bit more challenging than working in rectangles.

I wasn’t going to let that stop me though! Instead, I purchased a new ball of yarn so that I could experiment and learn on the side.

I ran across a lot of really good YouTube channels for learning to crochet. This is the series I ended up following, learning how to single crochet a chain and then a square.

The outcome of this experimentation was heartening. Not perfect by any means, but I started to get the hang of it!

Once I got a bit of practice under my belt, I came back to my Wooble. Working in circles was still a challenge, but having figured out basic stitching, it wasn’t as daunting as my first attempt at it.

I made a lot of mistakes along the way and had to undo rows several times. But working on it over the span of a few days, the project slowly began to take shape!

The body of the project, which is pictured above, had already been started for me when I got the kit. So I didn’t have to struggle with things like learning a magic circle until I got to the other pieces of the project.

In hindsight, the eyes are a bit too far apart. But it’s okay to have a first-time derp bird.

The magic circle bit was undoubtably the hardest and most time consuming section of this project. Especially the smaller parts that only had 4 stitches into the loop! I had to scrap the wings, especially so many times, and even had to discard a wing all together and remake it.

I still feel like the wings are a little too low on the body ultimately, and that it looks more like a random blue bird than a penguin. However, it’s my first finished crochet project and I’m going to give myself some slack on it.

First ever project done! Not perfect, but still cute?

I absolutely enjoyed this first crochet project, and looking online, I can see there’s tons of resources and patterns you can pick up for other cute projects. I certainly want to continue to practice and develop my skills and not forget what I’ve just learned over the past few weeks.

I’m going into practice mode yet – I picked up some cotton yarn, and have decided to work on crocheting some usable dish cloths for the kitchen. This is something that I actually do need, so it will be fun to craft something helpful for around the house.

I have the perfect color yarn for it, too!

I also picked up a crochet hook set that I’m excited to get into using soon.

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