I Crochet Everything From Scratch ✨ Click “Visit Site”
There is something quietly radical about making things by hand in a world that has optimized itself almost entirely around speed and convenience. Every time I pull a length of yarn through a loop with a single hook, I am doing something that no algorithm can replicate, no factory can truly substitute, and no fast-fashion supply chain can cheapen — at least not in the way that matters. I crochet from scratch. Every piece, every stitch, every design starts with nothing but fiber and intention. And if you’ve landed here, I suspect you already understand why that sentence carries a kind of weight.
This blog is my space to share that process with you, honestly and completely. Not the filtered, perfectly lit version you might scroll past on social media, but the real thing: the frogging sessions, the yarn-diet failures, the moments where a pattern clicks and the world outside goes silent for a while. If you’re curious about what “from scratch” actually means in the context of crochet, or you’re just here because something about handmade things draws you in and you can’t quite explain why, then pull up a chair. We’re going to talk about all of it.
What “From Scratch” Really Means
When I say I crochet from scratch, I mean it in the most complete sense of the phrase. I don’t start from a kit. I don’t follow a printed pattern purchased from a big-box craft store and call the finished object my own design. I begin with an idea — sometimes a very vague, half-formed impression of a texture or a shape or a feeling — and I work my way toward it stitch by stitch, often unraveling and starting over multiple times before something real emerges.
This is not me putting down people who use patterns, by the way. Patterns are a form of craft in themselves, and following a complex one skillfully is absolutely an art. But my particular joy lives in the design process, in the problem-solving that happens when you’re trying to figure out how to make a fabric do something it hasn’t done before, at least not in your hands.
From scratch means I swatch. A lot. I test yarn weights against hook sizes until I find the combination that gives me the drape or the structure I’m imagining. I sketch — badly, with a mechanical pencil in a notebook that is perpetually losing its cover — and then I sit down and translate those sketches into stitch counts and row sequences. I write my own patterns as I go, marking them up with arrows and asterisks and little notes to myself like “this will probably not work, try again with a smaller hook.”
From scratch also means that when something doesn’t work, I pull it apart. Crocheters call this frogging — a name that comes from the sound you make when you rip it, rip it, rip it. It used to feel like failure. Now it feels like revision, which is something I’ve come to respect deeply.
The Yarn Comes First (Almost Always)
There are two kinds of crocheters in the world: the ones who find a pattern and then buy yarn for it, and the ones who fall in love with a skein of yarn and then figure out what to make from it. I am emphatically the second kind, and I suspect this is true of most people who design their own work.
My stash — which is the word crafters use for their collection of yarn waiting to be used, though “hoard” would also be accurate — is organized by texture and weight rather than by color family. This tells you something about how I think about design. Before I consider what something will look like, I think about what it will feel like. What will it feel like to wear, to hold, to use? What will the stitches do to this particular fiber? Will it bloom and soften with washing, like a good Merino, or will it stay crisp and structured, like a well-spun cotton?
I source yarn carefully, which means I spend a lot of time on small indie dyer websites, at fiber festivals when I can get to them, and occasionally in the back corners of local yarn shops where the interesting stuff always seems to end up. I’m drawn to single-ply yarns, to plant fibers, to anything that has a story attached to it. Not every skein needs to come with a biography, but when I know that a fiber was raised on a specific farm or dyed with plants grown in someone’s backyard, it changes the way I hold it.
This is part of what “from scratch” means to me, too. It’s not just about skipping the pattern. It’s about being present and intentional at every stage of the process, from choosing the material to casting on the first chain.
How a Design Actually Begins
People ask me this a lot, and I never have a very satisfying answer, because the truth is that it’s different every time. Sometimes a design starts with a technical problem I want to solve — how do you create a seamless, fully adjustable crochet top without any sewing or seaming? Sometimes it starts with an aesthetic impulse, like a desire to make something that feels like a Sunday morning in October, if that makes any sense at all.
What I can tell you is that there is always a swatching phase, and the swatching phase is where most of the real work happens even though nobody ever sees it. A swatch is a small sample of fabric you make before committing to a full project. It lets you test your stitch pattern, your gauge, your yarn behavior. For most people, swatching is the boring preliminary step. For me, it’s where I think. I make swatches the way other people pace or doodle. The rhythm of the hook moving through yarn quiets the part of my brain that’s always running several steps ahead, and in that quiet, the actual ideas tend to surface.
I keep my swatches. I have bags of them, labeled with the hook size and yarn details in handwriting that is frankly a public health hazard. Sometimes I pull them out months later and see something I missed the first time, a texture or a structure that would work perfectly for a project I’m only now imagining. A swatch is never wasted.
The Stitches I Keep Coming Back To
Every crocheter develops a vocabulary of stitches, a personal library of techniques that they reach for again and again because they understand them deeply. Mine is pretty specific, and it reflects the things I love about crochet as a medium.
I am somewhat obsessed with surface texture. I love stitches that create dimension — crocodile stitch, bobbles, puff stitches, popcorns, raised post stitches worked around the front and back of previous rows. I love the way these techniques make a flat fabric suddenly feel sculptural. There is something almost architectural about a well-executed cable worked in crochet, and the fact that people don’t expect crochet to look architectural makes me want to do it even more.
I also return constantly to tunisian crochet, which is a technique that uses a longer hook and creates a fabric that looks almost knitted. Tunisian allows for a density and a structure that regular crochet sometimes can’t achieve, and it opens up a completely different design vocabulary. If you’ve never tried it, it’s worth the slightly awkward learning curve. The payoff is enormous.
And then there is simple, honest single crochet — the most basic stitch, the one everyone learns first. I come back to it regularly because there is real beauty in simplicity when the yarn is extraordinary enough. Sometimes the best design decision you can make is to get out of the way of the material.
Making Things That Last
One of the reasons I design and make my own pieces is that I want them to last. Not just physically last — though I do care about durability and I choose materials with longevity in mind — but last in the deeper sense. I want to make things that are worth keeping, worth passing down, worth the time invested in them.
We live in a moment of extreme material abundance and almost comical disposability. The average piece of fast fashion is worn seven times before it’s discarded. Seven. The sweater I’m working on right now, a boxy oversized pullover in a heathered alpaca-wool blend, will take me somewhere between forty and sixty hours to complete. I expect to wear it for decades. Those two realities live in the same world, and they could not be more different.
This is not a judgment of people who buy fast fashion. Most of us do, because the economic and time costs of the alternative are genuinely significant. But making even a few things by hand, from scratch, changes the way you relate to objects. When you understand what goes into a piece of fabric — the hours, the decisions, the physical and cognitive labor — you start to see mass-produced clothing differently. You start to see everything differently, a little bit.
Crochet has made me a slower, more careful person in general. I think about what I bring into my home more deliberately. I repair things instead of replacing them when I can. I appreciate quality in a way I didn’t before I understood how hard quality is to achieve.
The Community That Builds Around Making
I want to say something about the people who crochet, because they are one of the genuinely wonderful things about this craft.
The fiber arts community is enormous, diverse, and overwhelmingly generous with knowledge. People share techniques freely. Experienced makers mentor beginners without being condescending about it. There is a culture of abundance rather than scarcity around creative knowledge, which is not universal across creative fields and which I think we should consciously protect and cultivate.
I have learned things from ten-minute YouTube videos made by crafters in other countries, from comment threads on Ravelry, from conversations at yarn swaps in church fellowship halls, from strangers on trains who noticed what I was doing and asked about it. Crochet is a connector. It gives people a reason to talk to each other, a shared language, a common ground.
And there is something else: the people who are reclaiming these crafts right now tend to be people who are thoughtfully, deliberately pushing back against the disposable and the generic. They care about sustainability. They care about where things come from and how they’re made. They are interested in the stories embedded in objects. This is a community I feel genuinely at home in.
What I’m Working On Right Now
Because I think this kind of specificity makes a blog real rather than just conceptual, I’ll tell you where I am at this particular moment in my making life.
The alpaca-wool pullover I mentioned is in progress, sitting in a basket next to my chair, about a third of the way through the body. The yarn is a dream to work with — there’s enough wool in the blend to give it memory and elasticity, but the alpaca keeps it light and soft in a way that pure wool sometimes isn’t. I’m working it in one piece from the top down, which means I’m increasing at the yoke to shape the shoulders before splitting for the sleeves. No seams. This is how I prefer to work whenever the construction allows for it.
I’m also in the early design stages of a market bag project — something I want to publish as a free pattern here on the site, eventually. I have opinions about market bags. I think they’re often either too delicate to be useful or so dense and heavy that the structural interest is lost. I want to find the middle ground: something that holds a real grocery run, that folds small enough to keep in a pocket, but that has enough visual interest to be worth making even if you already own seventeen other bags. (We all own seventeen other bags.)
And in the back of my mind, because there’s always something brewing in the back of my mind, I’m thinking about a collection of home goods. Placemats, a table runner, maybe some kind of wall piece. I keep coming back to the idea of making the ordinary beautiful — the things we use every day without looking at them closely, made just carefully enough that you do look at them.
Why I Share This Here
I started this site because I wanted a place to document the process, not just the product. Social media is wonderful for a lot of things, but it tends to reward the finished object over the journey, the polished photo over the honest in-progress shot, the aesthetic over the thinking. I wanted somewhere to write about the thinking.
I also wanted to be useful. If you’re new to crochet, or you’re an experienced crocheter who wants to start designing your own pieces, I hope what I share here helps you move in that direction. I’ll post patterns — some free, some paid — along with tutorials, material recommendations, and a lot of process documentation. I’ll write about failures as readily as I write about things that worked, because failure is genuinely more instructive and I think it’s important for people to see that even someone who has been doing this for years unravels things and starts over regularly.
Everything here is made from scratch. The designs, the words, the photographs. Come back often, because there is always something in progress, and progress is the point.
