Knitting vs Crochet for Beginners: Which to Start With

The gods tried twice to bind Fenrir with the strongest thing they could make. Læðingr was a great iron chain, and the wolf broke it without effort. Drómi was twice as strong again, and he broke that too.

Then the dwarves sent up something that looked like a silk ribbon, and it held forever.

Twice they reached for the heavier tool. It was the simpler one that worked. Anyone deciding between two needles and one hook should sit with that for a moment.

The chart answers the question by accident

Amazon has a category called Knitting and Crochet Supplies. Both crafts, one chart. Read this morning, the top fifteen contains:

• Eleven yarns.
• A set of crochet hooks at number ten, with twenty-eight thousand ratings.
• A beginner crochet kit at number fourteen.
• Two finished crocheted objects — see the warning at the end.
• Zero knitting needles.

Not “knitting needles ranked low.” None in the top fifteen of the chart named after knitting.

What that does and does not tell you

It would be easy and wrong to read that as crochet is better. It is not what the data says. Here is what it plausibly does say:

Crochet is one purchase. A hook, a ball of yarn, and a video. Knitting is a pair of needles in a specific size, and then a second pair when the next pattern wants a different gauge, and fairly soon circular needles and double-pointed ones. The first purchase is simple in one craft and branching in the other, and a best-seller chart measures first purchases better than anything else.

Knitters buy somewhere else. Needles are a durable good bought once and kept for decades, often from a local yarn shop where the staff will tell you which to get. Chart rank rewards repeat purchase and punishes things people buy once — which is why yarn takes eleven of fifteen places and no tool of any kind cracks the top nine.

And crochet has had a genuine beginner wave, driven by kits that arrive with everything in the box. One of them sits at number fourteen on this chart.

So the honest reading is not that crochet is superior. It is that crochet has the lower barrier to the first finished object, and the chart is a picture of people getting over that barrier.

Which to start with, plainly

Start with crochet if you want to make something three-dimensional — a toy, a bag, a basket — or if you want to see a finished thing quickly, or if the idea of dropping a stitch and unravelling a row makes you want to put it down. Crochet lives on one active loop. Nothing unravels because you set it down.

Start with knitting if what you actually want is fabric to wear. Knitted fabric drapes, stretches and sits flat in a way crochet fabric does not, and no amount of skill closes that gap because it is the structure, not the technique. A crocheted jumper and a knitted one are different objects.

The trap is picking the craft rather than the object. Decide what you want to hold at the end. The craft follows from that, and the chart above is no help at all with the question that actually matters.

Where these picks came from, honestly

All three read off Amazon’s own Knitting and Crochet Supplies chart this morning — node 12897221 — rank, rating and review count together, best-sellers first. All three are research picks. The reasoning about first purchases versus durable goods is our reading of the chart’s shape, offered as reasoning and not as a finding; the absence of knitting needles from the top fifteen is a fact, and the explanation for it is not.

The one honest warning

Two of the top fifteen products on a chart called Supplies are not supplies. Number eight is a crocheted flower pot sold as a birthday gift for women, and number eleven is a crocheted birthday item in the same vein — finished objects, made by someone else, sitting in the middle of a chart of materials.

They are not scams and there is nothing wrong with buying one. But it is a genuine hazard on this particular chart: you can be shopping for the things you need to make something, working down the best-seller list, and put a finished handmade object in your basket by mistake. The listings do not shout about it, and the category does not separate them.

On a craft supplies chart, check that what you are buying is an ingredient. It is the one place we have seen where the best-seller list quietly mixes the two.