Once upon a time, to call yourself a “designer” in the crochet world, you had to publish a pattern, painstakingly test and grade it, and (hopefully) accompany it with photos that didn’t resemble abstract art. Now? Everyone with a hook, a camera, and an Instagram account is in the design game. The boundaries of creation have blurred, and in this vibrant patchwork of voices and visions, crochet has become as democratic as the yarn stash itself.
But is this a positive development or a negative one for the crochet community?
I first became a crochet designer back in 2009, though I had been crocheting and knitting since I was a child, I just didn’t know what it was called back then. It wasn’t until I saw
Kirsty’s Homemade Home on TV that I realised I had been missing something in my life as crafts often took a back seat to life and my career dreams. So I returned to work on my passion whilst I was pregnant with my daughter. I started crocheting again and designing my own patterns as I had been a designer for over 20 years, albeit as a web graphic designer, so it felt like a natural progression to me.
In the early days, I didn’t have an HD camera though, it was barely digital. YouTube was in its infancy, and hardly anyone was sharing tutorials. I had never planned on becoming a “YouTuber”, it just happened because someone needed to understand one of my patterns better, and only visuals would do. That’s how my YouTube journey was born. Slowly, over the years, I upgraded my hardware, and here I am today.
But with the onset of technology, easier access to cameras, cheaper and cheaper hardware, and the rise of social media, it seems that everyone has become, not just a crocheter, but a designer too and without the history behind them. Sadly, this has also led to a huge library of very poor-quality designs. These days, it seems anyone can churn out a basic pattern that’s been done to death, write patterns incoherently, use AI to "take" fancy photos, and expect to make a return.
Now, I may sound bitter, but on the contrary, I am thrilled to see more and more younger generations learning to crochet and embracing the designer road map because they are not me and I am not them. We all have our unique design ideas and concepts. However, I am saddened by the lack of quality control and experience that should come with that. I hear time and time again of crocheters complaining about the poor-quality patterns they are purchasing, and I don’t just mean the AI-generated tripe these days. I’m talking about inexperienced designers who can barely put a PDF pattern together. I’ve even seen “tutorials” on TikTok claiming,
“You’ve been doing this WRONG, this is how you do it,” when, in fact, they were incorrect and were being corrected by actual experts because they were trying to pass off a chain-less single crochet as a foundation single crochet, which are two very different techniques. There’s no right or wrong here, just different approaches starting a project.
AI the Pattern Whisperer or Creativity Shortcut?
On an even darker road is the infamous blight on our crochet society called AI. I will say, however, that I don’t completely detest it. It has its place. AI can be useful for researching ideas, offering inspiration, or even helping explain the tax system, but that’s really where it should stay, in the helpful assistant lane, not taking over completely, leaving all creativity behind and stealing people's hard earn money.
AI seems to be everywhere, most noticeably on Facebook and Etsy, and it breaks my heart to see innocent crocheters sucked into the “
I made 50 of these in a day” posts (that’s not the flex the AI poster thinks it is) or “
my grandson made this but he got no likes, please show his crochet some love.” It’s all fake, and people believe it’s real, but it gets worse. More and more, I am seeing people buying AI-generated crochet patterns, sucked in by the fancy aesthetics of the main photo, clearly thinking that what they’re seeing is perfectly feasible to crochet, but upon buying the pattern, they often discover that the instructions produce absolutely nothing like what is shown, if they produce anything at all!
So with that, AI is also diluting the true labour and effort behind a design as well as eroding the appreciation for seasoned expertise along with it. No-one trusts anything anymore. A good example is a fellow seasoned designer, Faye of
Little Dove Crochet, who was accused in recent weeks of sharing an AI generated crochet photo, which was, in fact, a real photo of her own work. She's been creating for years, and her crochet and photography are impeccable! It broke my heart.
The Rise of the DIY Designer
But there is another side to the story and hopefully a little light in the darkness. Scroll through your social feeds for just a moment, and you’ll see it. There's bucket hats with attitude, granny squares reinvented with all neon yarns, bold coordinated sets that could walk a runway. These aren’t “just projects”, they’re people's personal expressions, with someone behind them telling a story, a very personal story, as well as a story of style.
This idea may not be new, but the range of creativity has shifted from those once holding all the secrets (I detest the term “
gate-keeping”), people like publishers, pattern shops, and established designers like myself, to the crowd, the teenager in their bedroom, the child on the school bus, the trendy group that meets each week. People's ideas are no longer stuck behind a paywall or confined to an old-school format like mine was, they can truly spark and bloom into a viral trend, it's trendy and cool and often challenging the traditional crochet establishment altogether!
The Remix Culture
Thanks to social platforms and AI tools, remix culture is also thriving. Crocheters react to each other’s designs, one maker’s tutorial on a classic waffle stitch can inspire a thousand creators’ wearable ponchos, and even my spiral granny square has been re-imagined into tops, bags, and cardigans. Copyright aside, I’m still undecided on how I feel about this, but at its heart, a crochet
idea doesn’t have to be owned, perfect, final, or finished to matter. It just has to be shared. Creativity truly has no end, and I personally feel that’s a good thing.
For me, I feel that if everyone can be a potential designer these days, the focus has shifted from ownership to participation. This isn’t a dilution of craft, quite the opposite. Crochet has become kinetic, it’s moving, shifting, and growing, but not in a linear way, rather instead like a spider web of loops that reinforce each other. You just need to choose which direction you wish to go in, if any at all. The possibilities are endless!
The Future?
Even so, with the darkness still looming over us, this leaves me with a quandary. Am I too old for this new crochet community? Have I become stuck in an old system, will I even be replaced by AI eventually? OR am I a beacon of expertise, security, safety, and reliability? What I say can be trusted, and my website is a place of trusted content and AI can never get inside my brain (I hope!). You know what you’re getting with me and with designers like myself, and perhaps this is the true future, once social media and AI inevitably burn themselves out. People will be looking for that history of expertise and expert advice from reliable channels. At least I hope so.
So yes, the age of “everyone’s a designer” carries its complications. There are debates about pattern attribution, concerns over copy‑paste culture, and tension around quality control, but mostly, there’s a thriving, often messy, yet always creative, conversation being stitched together (pun intended). We just need to be careful how we navigate this new cacophony of designer voices.
I’d love to hear your experiences and thoughts in the comments below! In the meantime, happy crocheting, and be careful out there.
