It Started With One Baby Blanket.
It Started With One Baby Blanket.
Some friendships are held together by shared history.
Ours has Halloween costumes, long-distance conversations, inside jokes, thrift-store discoveries, and enough life chapters to fill several books.
But in 2023, something new wound its way through our friendship.
Yarn.
Angie and Leslie have been best friends since high school. Or, as we prefer to call it, soul sisters.
We had already been through decades of life together before a baby blanket, a crochet hook, and one very confusing magazine gave us an entirely new language to share.
Leslie Here
When I found out my first grandchild was on the way, I decided I had to crochet him a baby blanket.
There was only one small problem.
I didn’t actually know how to crochet.
The last time I had held a hook, I was a kid who knew how to make one impressively long chain. Turning that chain into anything useful was apparently a lesson for another day.
Fortunately, my soul sister Angie had already been crocheting for years.
She came to visit for my birthday armed with yarn, hooks, and the essential supplies needed to turn determination into an actual blanket.
We spent several days laughing, yarn shopping, and trying to follow a Crochet for Beginners magazine.
Nothing looked right.
The instructions made no sense.
Eventually, we discovered the magazine was written using UK crochet terms rather than US terms.
Suddenly, the mystery was solved.
A few YouTube tutorials and several glorious “Aha!” moments later, the stitches finally began behaving themselves.
And I finished the blanket.
Not perfectly, not effortlessly.
But stitch by stitch, it became something real. Something made by my own hands for the grandson I had not yet met.
And somewhere between the first chain and the final row, I was hooked (pun absolutely intended)!
Crochet became more than another hobby. It became a calming rhythm, a creative outlet, and a place for my mind to settle.
Soon, Angie and I were exchanging crochet memes, comparing thrift-store finds, showing each other projects, and discussing yarn stashes that continued expanding despite our very reasonable intentions.
Angie Here
My own crochet story began much earlier.
When I was about twelve, my grandma tried to teach me during the weekends I spent with her. I managed a fairly impressive chain, but patience was not yet among my strongest skills.
I never made it much farther.
Still, I admired crochet. I looked at gorgeous afghans and wished I could create something like them myself.
Years later, my oldest daughter came home from her charter school in Alaska eager to teach me. The school offered everything from violin to woodworking, including crochet.
I told her I had already tried learning once.
She was not interested in accepting that answer.
In the evenings, she patiently showed me the stitches until something finally clicked.
Double crochet.
Magic circles.
And then my first real project: green-and-white striped leggings for my youngest daughter’s Strawberry Shortcake Halloween costume.
Once I learned, I rarely put the hook down.
From then on, I always had a hook in my hand and yarn nearby. And over the years, I’ve loved teaching friends and kids how to crochet, one loop at a time.
By the time Leslie decided to make that baby blanket, crochet was already part of my story. After the blanket, it became part of ours.
Around here, we notice how much this craft carries inside it.
Memory.
Comfort.
Patience.
Frustration.
Laughter.
Belonging.
Crochet was never only about making things.
It was about the people connected through those things.
The grandmother teaching a child.
The daughter teaching her mother.
The friend arriving with yarn and hooks when a baby blanket needed to exist.
Somewhere between tangled skeins, late-night messages, inside jokes, and countless versions of “Look what I made,” Knotty Habits began taking shape.
Not simply as a T-shirt shop.
As a way to celebrate the people who understand why yarn is never just yarn.
The people who have stayed awake for one more row.
Bought one more skein.
Frogged the same section five times.
And discovered that making something with your hands can sometimes help you find your way home.
It started with one baby blanket.
But that blanket was only the first stitch.
And we had no idea yet how many people would eventually become tangled up in the story with us.
Maybe your story started with a grandmother, a daughter, a friend, or one project you were determined to finish.
However yarn found its way into your hands, we’d love to hear it.
Share your story in the comments below, or email us at hello@knottyhabits.com if you’d rather tell it privately.
The Knotty Krewe is still growing, one stitch and one story at a time. 💜
