Crochet's versatility comes from the fact that the tool you have in your hand – your hook – only needs to make one stitch at a time.

This gives a crocheter the freedom to make their fabric any shape or size they wish. By building one stitch on top of another any size of garment or item can be made.

If you have enough yarn, you could make an elephant a sweater with the same hook you made a beanie for a mouse!

This course will teach you the most common stitches using simple projects, but these same stitches can also produce exciting textures and delicate objects.

Some of the types of crochet you might like to try:

Cotton Handbags: Using a strong yarn like cotton or linen - that won't stretch under pressure - beautiful textured bags can be made using simple stitches like the treble crochet stitch we will be covering in the Granny Square lessons.

Stitches used in this bag include: Crocodile Stitch (top) and a Cockleshell cluster (bottom).

The handles are made with The Double Crochet stitch which we will be covering in the Fingerless Glove and Flower lessons.

Crochet Cabling/Relief Work: The Trivit is made using bailing string for strength. The stitch used to make this faux-woven fabric is called “Basketweave” which uses the Treble Crochet stitch along with a variation of The Double Crochet stitch called a “double crochet, back loop only”.

The second bag is made using Crochet Cabling techniques. Giving the effect of “Aran knitting”, these cabled textures are made possible again by using a Treble Crochet stitch. The key to this technique is learning what part of your fabric to push your hook through before you make the stitch.

Traditional Crochet Lace: There are a million vintage crochet doily patterns available both on line and in printed form. Doilies were one of the first thing I learnt to make. This kind of crochet is worked “on the round”, a method we will be learning in both the Flower and the Granny Square. It is worked from the inside out in layers of crochet.

Pro Tip:

Early on, I was given an excellent piece of advice; when starting out, use a much bigger hook and yarn than recommended and make a giant doily first. My go-to was a 4 mm hook and some nice Double-knit (DK) weight yarn.

This will ensure that your eyes will be able to see what you're doing and you can learn what to look out for without struggling to focus on teeny tiny stitches.

Once you are comfortable and familiar, then break out the tiny steel hooks and crochet thread!

Irish Crochet Lace:

This is a type of modular lace; the fabric is made up of lots of little individual pieces that are then either crocheted together or sewn together to create the shapes and textures you see here.

Irish Crochet Lace (or ICL for short) is a beautiful art form which takes much of its imagery and inspiration from the natural world, featuring vines, leaves, flowers of all types, seed pods, insects, butterflies and ferns all crocheted and then combined into works of mastery.

Tunisian Crochet:

A form of crochet that evolved alongside more traditional forms of crochet.

Tunisian uses many of the rules of knitting to create unique and beautiful fabrics. You will recognise someone making Tunisian crochet if they are using a crochet hook (oftentimes a very long hook) but with scores of loops on their hook at once instead of the few we will have at any one time on this course.

Toys:

Toys like the ones featured are made almost entirely out of the Double Crochet Stitch which we will be learning to create both our Fingerless Gloves and our Flower. Most toys are worked “on the round” so that individual body parts can be made without the need for a seam.

This method is particularly popular in Japan where they have taken this idea and created an entire new branch on the crochet tree. The Japanese word for cute, crocheted toys and objects is “Amigurumi”. These pieces can be very simple, or extremely complex, but one thing they all have in common is that they are cute, cheerful and utterly irresistible.