Techniques

This page exists to route you, not to teach a technique itself — the actual step-by-step guides live one level down, split by craft. If you already know whether you're knitting or crocheting, jump straight to the knitting techniques section or the crochet techniques section. If you're not sure, the next section should settle it in a sentence or two.

Telling the two crafts apart from the tools alone

A pattern's materials list gives it away before you read a single instruction. Knitting calls for a pair of needles (straight, circular, or double-pointed) and holds every stitch in the current row live and open on them at once. Crochet calls for a single hook, and only ever has one loop open at a time — everything already worked is closed and finished. If the supply list names two needles by size, it's knitting; one hook, it's crochet.

Why the fabric itself comes out structurally different

Knitted fabric is built from columns of interlocking V-shaped loops, each one pulled through the loop below it and left open until the next row closes over it — that open-row structure is exactly what lets a dropped stitch unravel downward and what makes steeking (cutting knit fabric) possible at all once it's reinforced. Crocheted fabric is built one stitch at a time, each one pulled fully closed before the hook moves to the next, which is why crochet doesn't ladder the way knitting does but also can't be picked back apart mid-row the same way. Neither structure is "more advanced" than the other; they're just mechanically incompatible, which is the real reason this site keeps separate libraries instead of one shared list with a craft filter.

What's actually in each section

The knitting library covers cast-ons and bind-offs, short-row shaping, grafting and picking up stitches, and the major colorwork methods (stranded, intarsia, double knitting, brioche) — 24 guides in total, each covering the mechanics and the specific spot that technique tends to go wrong. The crochet library covers starting a piece (foundation chain, magic ring, working in the round), shaping and invisible decreases, the raised-stitch families (popcorn, bobble, cluster, post stitches), color changes and join-as-you-go, and amigurumi-specific construction — 20 guides in total, at the same depth.

Reading a pattern that just says "increase" or "decrease"

Both crafts use those two words, but the actual mechanics a pattern means by them are craft-specific and covered on their own technique pages rather than here — increasing evenly in crochet and the shaping techniques inside the knitting library aren't interchangeable instructions even when a pattern's wording looks similar.

If you already know a stitch name but not the "technique"

Not every question belongs in this section. A specific stitch's repeat and how to work it — single crochet, a cable, seed stitch — lives in the stitch pattern library instead. This section is for the surrounding mechanics (how to start, join, shape, or fix a piece), not the stitches themselves. Shorthand you don't recognize in a pattern, in either craft, is covered in the abbreviation glossary.

FAQ

I've only ever knit — is crochet worth learning as a second craft? Plenty of knitters pick up crochet specifically for finishing work it's genuinely better at, like a crochet-slip-stitch seam or an edging, without ever crocheting a whole garment; the two skill sets are additive rather than competing.

My pattern uses a hook to pick up dropped knit stitches — does that make it a crochet technique? No — using a crochet hook as a tool inside a knitting project (for picking up a dropped stitch or working certain cast-ons) doesn't make the technique crochet; fixing a dropped stitch is filed under knitting because the fabric itself is knit.

Do amigurumi and lace both belong in one of these two sections, or somewhere else? Amigurumi is covered inside the crochet section specifically because its construction (tight gauge, spiral rounds, invisible decreases) is a crochet technique cluster; lace patterns themselves — the actual stitch repeats — live in the stitch pattern library rather than here, since lace is a stitch category that both crafts can produce.