Crochet 101: How to hold your hook and yarn

Hi guys,

                Welcome back to easy crochet 101. In this post I will show you how to hold your hook and your yarn when you crochet. Let’s get started.

                First let’s get to know your hook a little better now. As the picture show many parts of a hook. The only 2 things you need to remember is the thumb rest and the handle.

                First thing to know is you need to hold your hook in your dominant hand. There are 2 popular ways to hold your hook: the knife method and the pencil method.

                First is the knife method. This method, like the name suggests, you will hold your hook the same way you hold your knife. Make sure that your thumb and middle finger are holding the thumb rest and the handle is resting against your palm.

                The second method is the one I like to use: the pencil method. Again you will hold your hook exactly the same way you hold your pen or pencil. Your thumb and index finger hold on to the thumb rest.

                The important thing here is you need to try both way to find which one you feel comfortable with so you won’t hurt yourself while crochet.

                Now I will show you how to hold the yarn. Some important notes when you hold your yarn. First the yarn will be in your less dominant hand. Remember that this hand will feed the yarn to the hook and it also control the tension of the yarn. If you close your hand, the stiches will tight and you will have a tighter project. If you open your hand you will make the stiches looser. Depend on the project that you are doing, you can adjust this fairly easy. 

                There are three popular ways to hold your yarn base on which finger you want to control the tension of the yarn. It can be you pinky, your index finger or the whole hand. As you see in the picture, if you want your pinky to do the work, make a loop around your pinky, over your hand hold the loose end between your thumb and index finger. 

                If you want your index to do the work for you, it will go under your pinky, over your hand, make a loop around your index and you hold the loose end with your thumb and middle finger.

                If you want your whole hand in this, you just make the yarn goes under your pinky, over your hand and hold the loose end with your thumb and index.

                Again it’s important to find out which way you feel comfortable with so your hand won’t hurt in the end.