Crochet

My sister and I are very similar. We look alike, we agree about most things, and we certainly have a very similar sense of humour. I don’t know how I ended up stumbling across this crochet pattern but the second I saw it I knew it would be the perfect birthday present for her.

I had a plan, bought the yarn I needed, and now the only thing standing between me and the greatest birthday gift ever was the fact that I really didn’t know how to crochet. Okay, I had tried to learn from my grandma years ago but it never really worked out. The most complex shape I had done was circle. The pattern I had was much more intricate than that but that wasn’t important. One of my favourite strategies when learning a new skill is to get in way over my head and stumble around until I figure it out. (or realize it’s a lost cause and give up, but that’s a different story)

For those who aren’t over sixty-five years old, crochet patterns either work in rows or rounds, depending on if you make something straight or round. within those rounds, the pattern will tell you all the stitches you need to do in order to make the correct shape. This process simply repeats until you have a whole giant baby. In my mind, I thought I could just go for it and as soon as I got to something I didn’t know I could just look it up and keep going.

For the most part, this strategy worked fine. The only real mistake I made was I bought the wrong yarn. This pattern is supposed to yield a newborn-sized baby. The one I ended up with is bigger than a four year old. It turns out that they suggest yarn size for a reason. I guess I used a slightly bigger yarn and hook than I was supposed to and that’s what I ended up with. Oh well.

About halfway through, the pattern just seemed to click in my head. I guess spending hours staring at something you don’t really understand is a viable option. I realized that crochet is just math! Think about it, I’m working with shapes defined with their height in rows and their width (or circumference) in stitches. If you think of a stitch as one unit, then things really get crazy. The diameter is roughly a third of the size of the round and a single crochet (the ‘regular’ stitch) is roughly square. Different stitches give different heights but we can treat a single crochet as one unit of crochet. The smallest circle you can really make is 6 stitches around and (approximately) 2 stitches across. With this, you could make any sized cylinder you wanted, and extending that, if you know how you want the diameter to change over the height, and round shape.

That’s about as far as I got, but even with that, I began to be able to see simple shapes in my head and understand how I would make them mathematically. This is super powerful on its own, but it demonstrates something even more important. Even the hobbies and interests I’ve had that I considered the furthest I could get away from science and engineering, such as crochet, fit into the subject so intuitively that I would say my math background made me a much better crocheter than I would have.

It seems like a strange hobby for an engineer, but if you knew me, you shouldn’t be surprised. In the end, my sister loved her gift, naming her new child ‘Meathook’ and I discovered a new kind of math (sort of). That’s a successful project for me.