About Hook and Gauge

Built by a beginner, for the same questions every beginner runs into.

Hi, I'm Courtney

I picked up a hook for the first time in May of this year, mostly looking for something that would quiet my mind and leave me with an actual, physical thing at the end of it — turns out crochet is really good at both of those. I'm writing this a few months into learning, still very much figuring it out, from Montana.

Why this site exists

Hook and Gauge started from my own questions, not from an expert's checklist. Every time I hit something in a pattern that needed real math — how much yarn a temperature blanket was actually going to eat, where a sleeve should start decreasing, whether a yarn swap was going to work or ruin an afternoon — I'd go looking for an answer and either not find one, or find a blog post that buried a calculator's worth of math under three paragraphs of unrelated story. Somewhere in there I realized I clearly wasn't the only person hitting these same walls, so instead of just solving them for myself, I started building the actual tools.

Still learning, on purpose

I'm not a designer with decades of pattern-writing experience, and I think that's actually useful here rather than something to hide: the questions on this site are the real questions a newer crafter runs into, asked before I had a chance to forget what was confusing about them. If a tool here feels like it's explaining the "why" a little more than a typical calculator would, that's why — I wanted the explanations I wish I'd had, not just the number.

Outside the yarn

When I'm not counting stitches, I'm probably outside — fishing, camping, or up in a small plane, since I fly. I also lose an unreasonable number of evenings to billiards. None of that has much to do with gauge math, but it's probably why the tools here are built to get you an answer and get out of your way, rather than making you read a life story to find a number.

How this site works

Every calculator on Hook and Gauge runs entirely in your browser — nothing you type into a field is ever sent anywhere, logged, or seen by me. There's no sign-up because there's nothing to sign up for. More on that in the Privacy Policy. The site is ad-supported, which is what keeps every tool free with no account and no paywall.

Got a tool idea?

If you've run into a piece of crochet or knitting math that made you want to throw the project across the room, I'd genuinely like to hear about it — that's exactly how every tool on this site so far got made. Reach me at [email protected].

Built with Community Feedback

This list grows every time someone points out something confusing, missing, or just plain wrong. If you spot something, the email above goes straight to me.