Now that I’ve committed to teaching crochet, I’ve asked for volunteers among my friends and neighbours to come and spend an hour with me and see if I can, in fact, successfully teach the art. This week, I ran my first one-on-one lesson, and I think it was a great success!
My student, C, gave me permission to take a photo. She is middle-aged, and was taught some crochet as a child (and didn’t like it at all!) She has not done it since then.
I started off with the first slip knot. I like to begin there, and with working flat. Then I moved on to chains, singles, and doubles. This would be what I like to think of as the basis of doing crochet – enough to do a scarf, for example, or a hairband.
I taught the simplified English throwing style at first. Honestly, I know many styles and most don’t have names, so I have to develop some kind of nomenclature if only to keep them straight in my own head! But English style is very easy for dexterity, which I find to be the biggest hurdle, so it’s as good a place as any to get started and get working on stitches. C picked it up very quickly, even though she said the movements were quite strange to her.
Later, once it was clear she had the basics down, I showed her the traditional picking style, and from then it really clicked. That was the style she had been taught years ago, so clearly some memories still persisted! We frogged the piece and started over with working in the round and a basic granny square.
Overall, I got some great feedback, and I’m more confident in my ability to explain things to a beginner. Being able to switch between so many different styles is definitely a bonus, as I can figure out which one works best for the student. The next thing on my list is to review the Craft Yarn Council’s Lesson Guide for teaching crochet, and then develop some of my own teaching materials. More specifically, I would like to focus on lessons for people with mobility or ergonomic issues, because that’s something that needs work!