The hook you buy first is not the hook you will use at six months. Hook sizing has settled into a reasonably stable standard in the United States, which means the label on a skein and the label on a hook finally agree with each other, and that is genuinely new compared with the era of inherited hooks stamped with letters that meant different diameters depending on who made them. What has not changed is the underlying logic: the hook is a diameter, the yarn is a thickness, and the fabric is whatever those two produce together. Learn to read the diameter and you stop guessing.
The Craft Yarn Council system is the reference point worth memorizing at the start. A G-6 is 4.00 mm. An H-8 is 5.00 mm. An I-9 is 5.50 mm. Those three cover most of what a beginner will touch, and they are the sizes you will see recommended over and over for worsted-weight yarn, which is the yarn most beginner projects call for. If a pattern says G-6 and your hook says 4.00 mm, you are holding the right tool. If it says G and nothing else and the shaft measures something else, trust the millimeter number.
Buy the middle of the range first
Start with an H-8. At 5.00 mm it is the size most often recommended for learning how to crochet with medium-weight yarn, and it is the size that makes granny squares and simple blankets behave the way the tutorials say they will. The stitches come out large enough to see. You can tell a yarn over from a pull-through without squinting. When you are learning how to half double crochet, that visibility is the whole game — the extra loop on the hook is easy to lose track of, and a bigger hook forgives the confusion.
An I-9 at 5.50 mm is the next one to add. It is frequently used with medium to light bulky yarns to create a looser fabric, which is exactly what you want for baby blankets and beginner hats, where drape matters more than density. A G-6 at 4.00 mm is the one to buy third, not first. It is a medium hook commonly used with worsted-weight yarn for basic blankets and hats, and it produces a firmer fabric than the H-8 does with the same yarn. That firmness is useful later, when you are making something that needs to hold a shape. At the beginning it just makes the stitches harder to see.
- H-8 (5.00 mm) — buy this one first; the default learning hook for medium-weight yarn
- I-9 (5.50 mm) — add second; looser fabric, good for baby blankets and simple hats
- G-6 (4.00 mm) — add third; firmer fabric with worsted, better once your tension is steady
- Steel size 1 (2.75 mm) — a different tool entirely, for thread, not yarn
That last one trips people up constantly. Steel hooks are numbered separately from the letter-and-number aluminum hooks, and the numbers run in the opposite direction — a steel size 1 is a fine hook at 2.75 mm, used primarily with crochet thread for detailed work like lace edgings and doilies. It is not a beginner hook and it is not interchangeable with your H-8. If you pick one up thinking it is a small version of the same thing, you will spend an afternoon fighting thread that wants to slide off a hook too fine to grip it.
Ergonomic handles are worth the extra money and are the one place I would spend up. A plain aluminum hook is fine for twenty minutes. It is not fine for the two hours you will lose to a granny square the first time. The trade-off is that fat-handled hooks can change how you hold the yarn, and some people find the grip bulkier than the benefit is worth. Buy one, not a set, and find out which camp you are in before committing.
Match the yarn to the hook, not the other way around
The yarn label tells you the suggested hook size, and it is right often enough to follow while you are learning. Worsted-weight yarn wants the G-6-to-I-9 range. If your fabric comes out stiff as cardboard, your hook is too small for that yarn. If it comes out with holes you can see daylight through, your hook is too large. That is the entire diagnostic, and it works without any gauge swatch at all in the beginning.
Do not start with thread, cotton string, or anything fuzzy. Chenille and mohair hide your stitches so completely that you cannot tell a mistake from a design feature, and you will not learn how to start a crochet chain because you cannot see whether you started it correctly. Smooth worsted in a light color — not black, not navy — is the correct first yarn. Dark yarn under a lamp at 9 p.m. is how beginners conclude they are bad at this when they simply cannot see.
The one place a beginner should ignore the label: when the pattern specifies a hook and a gauge. Then the pattern wins, because the designer already did the math and a different diameter changes the finished size. This matters more as you move from blankets to garments, and it matters almost not at all for a dishcloth.
Learn the mechanics in the order the fabric requires them
Everything starts with the chain. How to start a crochet chain is the first thing to learn and the first thing to practice badly for an hour — the tension on your foundation chain is almost always tighter than the tension on your later rows, which is why so many first projects are shaped like a trapezoid. Make the chain with a hook one size larger than the one you plan to work the body with, and that problem mostly disappears.
From the chain, the order that builds on itself is: single crochet, then half double crochet, then double crochet. Learning how to half double crochet is the useful midpoint because it introduces the yarn over before the stitch rather than during it, which is the concept that unlocks everything taller. Once you can half double crochet, double crochet is a small step, and treble is a smaller one.
Working in the round comes next, and there are two doors into it. How to crochet a magic ring is the one that gives you a closed center, which is what you want for hats and amigurumi and anything where a hole in the middle would be visible. How to crochet a circle by chaining a few stitches and joining them into a ring is easier to execute and leaves a gap. Both are correct. The magic ring is the one worth learning even though it is fiddlier, because the alternative leaves a hole you will spend the rest of the project wishing you had avoided.
How to crochet a granny square is the single best early project because it exercises the chain, the double crochet, the slip stitch, working into a space rather than a stitch, and joining a new color — all in something small enough to finish in one sitting. How to change colors in crochet is a technique you should learn deliberately rather than discover by accident, because the change happens on the last pull-through of the final stitch of the old color, not at the start of the next stitch. Get that wrong and you get a visible blip of the old color in the new row. Get it right and the transition is invisible.
How to crochet a heart is a good second project once the granny square is comfortable — it is small, it uses the same stitches, and it teaches you to increase and decrease in the same round, which is the skill that separates people who can follow a pattern from people who can read one.
Accept the first three projects will be bad
Not mediocre. Bad. Uneven edges, a chain that is too tight, a granny square that curls because your tension wandered in the third round. This is not a sign you are doing it wrong; it is the actual learning curve, and the people who push through it are the ones who later describe crochet as relaxing. The ones who stop usually stop because they expected the first hat to look like the pattern photo.
Work with a light-colored worsted yarn and an H-8 at 5.00 mm, keep a G-6 at 4.00 mm in the bag for when you want a firmer fabric, and do not buy a steel hook until you have a specific reason to work with thread. The standard sizing means you can walk into any shop in the United States and buy the same diameter again, which was not always true. That part is genuinely easier now. The part where your hands need a few hours to learn the motion has not changed at all, and no hook is going to do it for you.