7 Quick Self-Care Tips for Crocheters

Look, crochet is supposed to be relaxing. But if you’ve ever spent three hours hunched over a blanket and stood up feeling like your spine aged 40 years, you know it can also wreck your body.

Repetitive motion, bad posture, ignoring your hands screaming at you to stop – these things add up. And then you wonder why your wrists hurt or your neck is stuck at a 45-degree angle.

Here are some quick self-care tips that’ll help you keep crocheting without destroying yourself in the process. Because making things should feel good, not like you need a chiropractor.

Want more ways to make crochet work for you instead of against you? Check out the Wellness hub for more tips on staying healthy (mental and physical) while you crochet.

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You’ve Started Crocheting, & Now You Can’t Put it Down

Good! I mean…yes go feed your kids and pay your bills before getting back to hooking. As relaxing and helpful as crochet can be, sometimes the overuse of our hands can leave us feeling sore and tired. I know that after a particularly long day of crocheting, my hands are so stiff I can barely move them.

I’ve got seven of my best tips for relieving joint and muscle soreness listed here. These are self-care tips collected from avid crocheters. These are things I use in my daily crochet life and they do help, so I hope you’ll try them too.

1. Take Breaks 

The struggle is real. I get it. One more row turns into one more section, turns into four hours later you’re still working. When I get in the zone I don’t want to stop and so I understand how time can get away from you. But taking small breaks really does help. Get up and walk around for a few minutes every hour. Set a timer on your phone, or get up during a commercial break if you’re watching TV.

2. Use Good Lighting

Bad lighting makes you squint, hunch forward, and strain your eyes. All of which leads to headaches and neck pain.

Work near a window during the day if you can. At night, get a decent lamp that actually lights up your project. If you’re working with dark yarn, this matters even more.

Your eyes will thank you. Your neck will too.

3. Switch Up Your Projects

If you’ve been working on the same repetitive stitch for hours, your hands are doing the same motion over and over. That’s how you get carpel tunnel injuries.

Rotate between projects with different stitch types. Work on something with tight stitches, then switch to something looser. Mix up yarn weights. Give your hands different movements.

Variety keeps your hands from getting stuck in one position all day.

4. Stretch Your Hands and Arms Often

This is a self-care tip I need to follow more often myself. After a long session, my hands stiffen up. The next morning my arms and wrists are sore and tense.

Stretching helps shake off the tension and gets you limbered up again. But don’t overdo it – stretching shouldn’t hurt. If it does, back off until you feel the stretch without pain.

A few gentle hand and wrist stretches between projects makes a huge difference.

5. Practice Patience

Even the fastest crocheter in the world still takes time to make their projects. Don’t pressure yourself into finishing by some arbitrary deadline you made up.

Keep working at whatever pace feels sustainable. Don’t quit, but don’t rush either. Before you know it, you’ll have finished something you actually like – without the tension headache or wrist pain as a bonus prize.

Slow and steady means you can actually keep crocheting tomorrow.

6. Frog Your Work When You Need To: 

I know. This one hurts just to read. But frogging (ripping out your work) is sometimes necessary for your mental health.

If you’re too far into a project and realize you made a mistake, it’s tempting to just leave it and work around it. But then you’re spending the rest of the project stressed about adjusting the pattern, trying to remember what you did wrong, and feeling annoyed every time you look at it.

Just rip it out. I promise it feels better than carrying that mistake through the entire project and hating the end result.

Better to redo a few rows now than finish something you don’t even want to keep.

7. Ask for Help – Even the most seasoned hooker sometimes needs help in a tricky project. There is no shame in reaching out to your crochet community and asking for a little guidance figuring out what went wrong four rows back.

Or maybe reading the pattern is getting to be too much and you need some help with terminology. Whatever the case, make sure you’re asking for help.

Bottom line:

The best self-care for crocheters is paying attention to your body before it forces you to stop. (Ask me how I know…)

Take breaks. Use good light. Switch up projects. Stretch. Don’t push through pain. Fix your posture. Keep your work clean. Ask for help when you need it.

Crochet should be enjoyable, not something you recover from.

What self-care tips work for you? Did I miss something obvious? Drop it in the comments – I’d love to hear what keeps you from falling apart mid-project.