Guide
Starting crochet: what to buy, what to learn first
Crochet needs less equipment than almost any other craft — a hook, a ball of yarn and a blunt needle will take you a long way. This is what is worth buying at the start, the order the first skills are easiest to learn in, and the handful of problems that stop most beginners in the first week.
What you actually need
Three things: a hook, yarn, and a pair of scissors. A blunt tapestry needle for sewing ends in is a fourth that you will want within an hour. Stitch markers are useful but a scrap of contrasting yarn does the same job.
You do not need a hook set, a yarn winder, blocking mats or a project bag to begin. Buy a single hook in a size that matches a yarn you like, and add tools when a project asks for them — that way you learn what each one is for rather than owning a drawer of unexplained equipment.
Choosing your first yarn and hook
The easiest yarn to learn on is a smooth, light-coloured, medium-weight yarn — and the reason is purely practical: you have to be able to see your stitches.
Dark yarn hides the loops you are trying to count. Fluffy or textured yarn hides them too, and splitting yarn punishes a beginner who has not yet worked out where the hook should enter. A smooth worsted-weight acrylic or cotton in a mid tone is unglamorous and genuinely easier.
Pair it with a 5.0 mm or 5.5 mm hook to start. That is slightly larger than some labels suggest, which keeps your stitches loose enough to get the hook back into them — beginners almost always work too tightly at first, and a bigger hook removes one source of frustration while you learn the movement.
The full conversions are in the hook size guide, and the thicknesses and what they suit are in the yarn weight guide.
The first four skills, in order
Each one depends on the one before it, and each is worth practising until it stops needing your full attention.
- Holding the hook and tensioning the yarn. There are two common hook grips — like a pencil, and like a knife — and neither is more correct. Tension comes from the yarn running over the fingers of your other hand; it is the part that feels impossible for about two days and then becomes invisible.
- The slip knot and the chain. A chain is the foundation most projects start from. Practise until your chains are even in size, because uneven chains make every row above them uneven too.
- Single crochet. The shortest common stitch and the one most beginner projects use. Work rows of it until you can tell, by looking, where each stitch begins and ends.
- Counting and fastening off. Count your stitches at the end of every row. Finishing means cutting the yarn, pulling the tail through the last loop and sewing the end back into the fabric so it cannot unravel.
Written instructions can tell you the sequence, but a hand movement is genuinely easier to copy than to read. It is worth watching someone make a single crochet once, then coming back to the written steps to practise — the two together work better than either alone.
Your first project
Make something flat, small and forgiving: a dishcloth, a coaster, a small square. Flat work in rows lets you see every stitch, and a piece you can finish in an evening teaches you more than an ambitious project you abandon.
Resist starting with a garment. Anything that has to fit depends on gauge — matching the pattern’s stitch size exactly — and gauge is much easier to care about once the stitches themselves are automatic. Amigurumi is a reasonable second project, because size matters less and it is worked in a spiral without turning.
What usually goes wrong first
- The edges creep inward or outward
- Almost always a stitch count problem: a stitch was added or missed at the end of a row. Count after every row for the first few projects — it is faster than unpicking six rows later.
- The hook will not fit back into the stitch
- Tension is too tight. Try a larger hook, and let the yarn run more loosely over your fingers. Tension loosens naturally with practice.
- The fabric curls at the corners
- Common in tight single crochet, and often fixed by a larger hook or by blocking. In a flat circle, curling usually means too few increases.
- The stitch count is right but the piece looks wrong
- Check whether you are working into the turning chain when the pattern does not intend you to. Whether the turning chain counts as a stitch changes every row.
- The pattern stops making sense
- Usually a notation problem rather than a skill one — brackets and repeats are their own small language.
Where to go next
Once single crochet in rows feels automatic, the two directions worth taking are height — half double and double crochet, which build the same fabric faster — and shape, by working in rounds instead of rows.
Before your first written pattern, read the abbreviation dictionary and the pattern notation reference. Between them they cover nearly everything that makes a pattern look impenetrable the first time you open one.