Handmade: Why Crochet Machines Aren't A Thing

 

Crochet Machines Aren't Real

Why can crochet only be done by hand? That's what we're going to explore today. Crochet is back in fashion, and crochet items are everywhere on social media. Many fashion retailers are selling crochet items, and AI images are trying to get into the game as well. 

Last week we talked about pricing of handmade items and why they may be more expensive. Knitted garments have been around for a long time. They can be mass produced, as there are very clever machines that can make knitted items faster than a human can. Which is great! 

Crochet is different. Crochet involves countless types of stitches and ways of combining these stitches to create so many different shapes from the humble granny square to an entire plush toy. You can crochet into the top of a stitch, into the spaces between stitches, and around the middle of stitches. Front loops, back loops, twisting the yarn before completing the stitch.

The more you learn about crochet, the more you realise how versatile this form of textile art actually is. All of this is created with one strand of yarn and a humble little hook. It's amazing, but if you look at the mechanics of how the hook is manipulated, you realise how much dexterity is involved. The type of movements that only a hand can achieve.

Hand Mechanics

The human hand is quite the marvel of biomechanics. Look at what it can do, from writing to playing music to drawing to sculpting to performing surgery. One thing that we have that a lot of other animals don't is our opposable thumbs. This allows us to grip and manipulate things in a way that most mammals just can't. 

The process involved in moving just one finger is a complex one involving several nerves and muscles, parts of the brain involved in coordination and fine motor control. There are conscious and unconscious inputs from the brain. It's a lot. 

While many machines can replicate a lot of tasks that used to be done by hand, it is extremely difficult to make a machine do the kind of complex manipulations required for something like crocheting. Even now, prosthetic hands are still not as efficient as the real thing, although they have advanced considerably. 

For a machine to be able to crochet, it needs to know where to put the hook to create the stitch, know that it has put the hook in the right place, manipulate the yarn around the hook and pull it through. That's a lot of sensory input and fine motor output to ask a machine to be able to do. If you still doubt me, go and watch some crochet tutorial videos (I have a few on my YouTube!) and really think about all the little things that go into creating the stitches. 

Is It Possible to Make A Crochet Machine?

It probably is, in some way. We likely have the technology available and someone will have the brains to program such a machine. However, there's also the question of economics. It's likely that a machine would only be able to create one type of crochet stitch, and limited patterns. So you would need different machines, made differently, to match the variety that a person can create with a hook.

These machines would be very complex, and expensive to build and maintain. Would they be able to be as fast as a human crocheter? Would they be efficient enough? That, I doubt. How prone would they be to mistakes or jamming up. I mean, printers have existed for decades and they are still temperamental and frustrating to use. 

So would they be efficient enough to be profitable? Remember, if you are buying a machine to make items to sell, you would need the production to be efficient enough that you make your money back and remain profitable on top. So while it might be possible, in theory, it seems unlikely that it would be financially viable. 

Why Does This Matter?

In part, it's because crochet items are showing up in a range of fashion retailers, and some of the items are being sold very cheaply. Machine knitted items can be sold fairly cheaply, because a machine can knit faster than a human being and can churn out items much faster. With crochet, if it is truly crochet, it's likely that a cheap item has been made by hand. 

That matters because even a fast crocheter would take a couple of hours to make a hat or a pair of gloves. So if a company is selling a crocheted hat for $6, which would take 3 hours to make, then are they being paid properly for their time? I can't see how they would be. 

Let's do the maths on this. So, the hat is being sold for $6. Large companies can buy materials in bulk, so the yarn may be much cheaper than if a person bought enough yarn to make the item for themselves, so let's say $0.50 for materials (which is insanely cheap). A profit needs to be made for the retailer, so mark-up could be like 50%. So $3, leaving us with $2.50. Divide that by 3 to give us a wage of $0.83 per hour. 

Not exactly a great wage, is it? That leads me into next week's topic, which is about fast fashion vs slow fashion and how you can make more ethical decisions when shopping. For the sake of the environment, and for the sake of people who are working to make these items and deserve to be paid fairly for their efforts. So join me next week for that!