During this holiday weekend I braved the crowds by trekking to Michael’s craft store to acquire the supplies that are necessary to begin crocheting: yarn and hooks.

I had a pretty easy time finding what I needed. I attribute the ease of this process to the background research I had done and deciding what I wanted to do before going to get supplies. Too often we are excited to start something but fail to adequately prepare. Proper research and preparation can make just about any task easier.\

 


I set off looking for 3 things:  a hook for category 4 yarn and 2 colors of category 4 medium yarn, 35 yards of the first and 1 yard of the second.  After finding the yarn section I immediately started looking at the labels to determine what category 4 yarn looked like. As a result of the research I knew where on the label to look for that information.

 

As seen above the “4” on the left side indicates that the product is category 4 yarn.  After the painstaking process of choosing which colors to get I needed to figure out what size of hook was required to work with that category of yarn. Luckily enough, the label on the yarn indicated that a 5.5mm hook was ideal. I found a set of 3 hooks for a good price, and bought a set of 4.5, 5, and 5.5mm hooks. I decided that it was OK to get a few extra hooks in case I choose to take on other projects with finer yarn.  Although there is not much of a visible difference in the hooks, I have decided to include a photo so you can see what a hook looks like close-up.

 

 

Now that I am well-equipped with crochet gear, it is time to start practicing the beginner techniques!

Wish me luck and check back next week for an update on my progress!