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.

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.

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.