Crocheting is a lot like programming. It requires locked-in focus when you’re first learning a pattern. Sometimes the pattern repeats, sometimes they don’t. It’s stressful when you’re first trying to decipher and replicate a pattern, but then once you get into the groove of it, it becomes like flow.
Crocheting is also precise. Every round should have a certain number of stitches, no more or less. I often found myself counting and recounting again to make sure the number is exact so it doesn’t affect the outer rounds later. Sometimes if something doesn’t seemed right when you finish a round, you have to go back to check your stitches to see where the mistake happened, which is a form of debugging in itself. Then you either untangle all the stitches up to that point and redo them, or you try to see if there’s a way you can still build on top of the mistake without it being too noticeable. But like programming, if a mistake remains unattended, it usually will end up making later steps harder to implement, though there are still workarounds. But unlike programming, everything is manual and there are no AI-assisted anything to help you speed up the process or get unstuck. Everything is analog, which is such a good breather from screen time.
Like code reviews in programming, it is a good skill to know how to read other people’s crochet patterns so you can try them yourselves or help them discover what went wrong. To para-quote what the store owner said at the workshop the other day, “once you become literate in reading crochet patterns, it becomes a whole lot easier”. Like how empowering it was to learn to code, learning to read / create crochet patterns itself was also really encouraging. It’s like gaining access to another sphere that you previously had no access to before.
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