Amy Lu's View

I recently discovered that I can make even latch hook harder than it needs to be. 

I love latch hook because it doesn’t require much brain power. Once you learn the basic hooking technique, you’re set. As Chad has said, it’s basically “yarn by numbers.” It’s definitely possible to latch hook while you’re brain is doing something else–like listening to podcasts or audiobooks, or having a conversation. 

Yes, I will sometimes expend emotional energy lamenting the quality of the yarn, or how yarn has exploded all over the house, but that doesn’t take great thought. 

The only thing that sometimes gets intellectually tricky is figuring out the pattern, and learning the key so you know what color on the canvas corresponds to what color yarn. Kits will have a chart you can follow, but I often find it hard to match the colors on the chart with the right yarn. 

I was explaining this all to my friend Patti a couple of weeks ago as I was trying to show her how to do latch hook. And she said, “So that’s why the yarn bundles have letters on them, so you can match them with the letters on the chart.” 

“No, the bundles don’t have letters on them,” I replied. 

“Isn’t that the letter here?” Patti asked, pointing to the letter. 

“No, that’s just a random…oh, wait, yeah, that is a letter. Oh, wow.” 

I’m not sure I described this situation very well, but the key takeaway is that I’ve spent a fair amount of time and thought trying to figure out what color a bundle of yarn was supposed to be and giving it the right letter code, when the letter was already on it. 

Chad laughed so hard when I described this to him, and showed him how I had actually written letters with a Sharpie above the letter that was already there. 

I’m thinking about this on No Brainer Day, as latch hook is basically a no brainer activity, that I somehow managed to turn into a some brainer activity. (Although many of the kits I do are clearly intended for children and are so simple that there is no need to have any pattern chart or any type of color or letter coding scheme–as long as you can tell blue apart from pink, you’re set). 

I could also count a post about latch hook as an observance of Retro Day–you can’t get more retro than latch hook. But I don’t have too much more to say about the “classic” nature of latch hook, other than I’m a big fan of contemporary kits that already have finished edges so you don’t have to do any sewing (or, in my case, duct taping). 

I’m sure that it’s not just latch hook that I make harder than it needs to be. How many things do I overcomplicate by simply not recognizing what is clearly there, because I’m too set in my ideas of how I think things are?

At least I was able to pivot rather quickly, and accept that the letters were indeed on the yarn bundles (although I had a set back the next day when Chad had to help me see that yes every bundle had a letter on it). While it’s likely that I’m probably oblivious to many things, I hope I can be open to being shown that I was wrong and making adjustments. 

Being willing to change after learning that I’m wrong–that really seems like a no brainer.