The Difference Between Knitting and Crocheting & Master Your Tension

Knitting and crocheting have made a comeback in recent years and are gaining in both popularity and creativity.  These crafts are not just for grandmas anymore, but for younger adults, mothers and their children and yes, even men!

The Difference Between Knitting and Crocheting

Do you want to become a hooker too?  Hooking is fun and you can earn a little extra cash in the process.  😛 I learned how to crochet from my siblings. One knits and crochets and the other crochets.  We’re a bunch of yarn lovin’ fools!

While knitting requires two pointed needles, crocheting requires just one “hooked” needle, or crochet hook.  Knitting offers more versatility, and I’m pretty proud of my first attempt at a pot holder.  If you consider a pot holder to be an octagonal, funkily shaped and somewhat holey object used to remove hot dishes from the oven. LOL!

I’ve found that crocheting is more relaxing for me than knitting, and it is almost better than therapy!  I throw in my earbuds with a good audiobook and I could get lost for hours.

The most important thing to remember: you are using one piece of yarn, and it is almost impossible to screw it up so badly that you can’t rip it out and start over.  This is called “frogging” because you are “ripping it out” which sounds like ribbit.

“I don’t know why, I don’t make the rules.”  ~Weezer from Steel Magnolias

In order to crochet even stitches (all uniform in size etc) you’ll need to master your yarn tension.  This is essentially the amount of resistance or pull you have when manipulating your yarn, similar to the bobbin tension on a sewing machine.  I hold my yarn wrapped around my ring finger, then around my index finger, like this:

This allows me to control how quickly or slowly I pull the yarn.  It will become natural to you before long.

To practice tension, and to get comfortable with wielding a hook, grab some yarn and start crocheting a chain.   Crochet (and knitting) is just a series of loops, that you connect together in a variety of ways which make up different kinds of stitches.

There is a single crochet stitch, a double crochet stitch (this one is twice as tall as the single), a triple crochet stitch (this is three times as tall as the single), a half-double (this is a combination of the single and the double) and dozens of other stitches.

The good news?  Most patterns require the knowledge of just these few basic stitches, and by the time you’re ready to branch out and get really fancy with your projects, you’ll have a solid understanding of what exactly you’re supposed to be doing with all that yarn and metal.