Hey there!
So nice to see you here!
This is (as you can see, hihi) my very first blog post on this blog, but also my very first blog post ever. It feels both super exciting and really scary at the same time for me to write out in public (I’m a quite private person in general), but I have been dreaming of starting a blog since I know blogging exists. I’m now 38 in 2025, so that was maaaaany years ago, probably somewhere in my teens… I’ve always liked writing, I’ve always journaled (-a lot, I might add!), I never found myself being a good writer, so I never got as far as to think of publishing anything. But nonetheless, here we are. And I’m so happy to be here together with someone else, like you (even though I haven’t opened a comment section yet, hihi – feel free to PM me though)!
The reason to my sudden burst of courage was superior motivation, which was, as the title of my blog and of this post suggests: my new found love for crochet – and its delights and struggles. What does this mean? Well… you’ll get the whole story later (because I looove to talk, and I looove to write, so I can’t do it in one go), but in essence, one of the days for some weeks ago my 8 year old daughter -whom I here will call Cecilia-, came up to me and suddenly said: Mamma! I want to learn to crochet! I got so surprised, and also to my surprise I got very delighted, and I immediately remembered back at when I used to crochet when I was around 10 years old, when my late mom taught me.
Cecilia wanted to go to a crafts shop a friend of hers had recommended to get some plushy yarn, and there we also saw some crochet hooks, even though we ended up going on the internet to get a complete set. Cecilia was super-duper excited, as she naturally always is when she has a new project going on, she counted the minutes for the new hooks to arrive, but I have to recognise, in secret I could sense I was bubbling inside too….
So we’ve been crocheting together for a few weeks now, and we are having so much fun learning this new skill!
First, let me tell you a bit about my first crochet experience…The thing is though that those times, in the mid-late 90’s the crafting world was so, so different. You can imagine why: no mentionable internet resources (no tutorials, no reels, shorts, videos, blogs, no nothing of the modern world….), no teaching except from the very basic steps my mom taught me, I could perhaps try and go and buy some patterns in the kiosk, but we had just moved to Spain, crochet wasn’t popular there, so hardly any magazines (also I hadn’t learned Spanish there yet), no patterns easy for kids or beginners for sure, nor would I have known at all how to read a pattern.. SO: veeeeeery different times. I crocheted small squares and rectangles for the Barbies and tried out making a scarf, but the edges were so, so wobbly, the tension so stiff it came out as cardboard, hands hurting from pulling the crochet hook through the very, very small stitches, only my mom’s leftover yarns from her knitting, only one size hook, you can see the conditions were quite adverse for good results. Also, I am quite impatient by nature, so even though I loved the repetitive act and movement of crocheting, the end result not being satisfying in any ways (this cardboard stiff, crooked, ugly scarf which took me weeks to complete with a hurting hand, and with no easy solutions in sight), I dropped the hobby after some time. Over the years and when I grew older, I did always long for getting back to crochet, and learn properly, but never before did I get as far as to actually do it.
So now, when we’ve picked it up again (Cecilia as a new beginner and I for the second time in my life), I feel on one side so delighted to do it together with my daughter, remembering how my mom taught me the basics (even if she was an expert and I am now still a newbie myself). I also find that journalling together with other people about the situations I encounter on my learning journey, helps me so much to process the information and learn better. But that, I could do in private… right?
Why blog about this topic in public, you might ask…. You see, the other thing that happened to me when starting to learn, is that I very soon found this huge gap in the learning information available on the internet and in the communities, and here is where this blog comes in.
So, again, veeeeery long introduction to get to a very short conclusion: I got to think that I’ve always wanted to blog, though I never knew about what before, and I found that there is so much information about the beginnings of crochet that is NOT out there, at least easily accessible, and I would love that, while I process and learn better by journalling about our learning journey, I also get to share with some other fellow crochet beginners my discoveries of these what I’ll be calling the Crochet Experts’ “State Secrets” (don’t worry, I’ll develop those thoughts more in future posts). I found that they show how to get from level 0 to 2, and then how to get from level 8 to 10, but the part between levels 3 and 7 is almost completely missing.
On top of this, at least sharing with someone the “pulling out my hair and scratching my face and biting my nails off”-part of it feels comforting. Perhaps we together could feel there are other people growing into the adventure too, and you’re not alone!!
To finish off this very first post of mine, ever, I want to thank you, whoever you are, for reading it, for maybe joining me on this -for sure winding, exciting, exasperating and fun- journey.
Stay tuned for the next post: There I will be telling a little more about myself, what actually happened to get me encouraged enough to take on the “crazy” idea to start a crochet blog, and a sneak peek into what our very first, veeeeery awkward crochet project would be.
Have a lovely day and see you next time!
Love, <3
Petite Parisienne