Hey, I'm Maren, the real crocheter behind Novacrochet
I’m so glad you found this corner of the internet, and yes, the actual person behind Novacrochet. Not a “we.” Not a content team.
If you’re here to check whether a crochet blog can still be run by a real human, that’s a fair question these days. Every pattern on this site is designed, crocheted, and rewritten by hand before it goes live, nothing here is generated, and nothing gets published until I’ve made it myself, more than once.
How I actually got into crochet?
First project: a fox, for my sister’s baby shower. I had no idea what “sc2tog” meant, so I guessed, badly, it turned out. The ears came out lopsided, and one eye sat noticeably lower than the other, which is a nice way of saying it looked like it had lost a fight.
I’d followed a free pattern I found online, three blurry photos, a wall of abbreviations, and zero explanation of what half of them meant. It should have put me off crochet completely. Instead, I got a little obsessed with figuring out exactly where the pattern, and I, had gone wrong.
Who am I outside of crochet?
I’m Midwest through and through, a decade deep into a crochet habit that’s shown zero signs of slowing. I love the actual craft, and, if I’m honest, I love buying yarn for projects I haven’t started yet almost as much.
“This genuinely is my full-time thing now, not a side hustle, not a content farm, just me.”
A few fun facts about me
- Biscuit, my beagle, considers himself head of quality control.
- I hike more than my knees appreciate.
- My reality TV taste is genuinely questionable.
- I have a whole drawer of unfinished projects I'll get back to.
Why Novacrochet?
A few years in, friends started sending me patterns they’d bought and couldn’t make sense of, stitch counts that didn’t add up, steps that skipped whatever the designer already knew in their own head.
I’d rewrite them just to help, and somewhere in doing that over and over, it turned into something I wanted to build properly.
I picked the name because I didn’t want a site that only lived in one corner of the hobby. “Nova” is the new-and-rising part, crochet is the actual point.
One place where a five-minute keychain and a full blanket pattern can sit on the same shelf without either one feeling like an afterthought.
MAREN
NOVACROCHET
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A few things people usually ask - FAQ
Yes, me, Maren. I write, crochet, and photograph everything here myself. No content team, no AI drafting tools, no stock photos pretending to be my living room.
Honestly, check the designer first. Is there an actual name attached, with a history you can trace back, not just a shop logo and a wall of product photos? Then look at the stitches themselves. Too smooth, too symmetrical, weirdly “perfect”, that’s usually the tell.
Every single one, more than once. I follow my own instructions cold, the way exactly a first-time reader would, before anything goes live.
That’s kind of the whole point of testing it on myself before you ever see it. If what I make doesn’t match what I photographed, it stays in my project bin, not on the site.
They’re built for that, yeah, written for someone who’s never touched a hook, not someone who already knows what “sc2tog” means without looking it up. (Ask me how I know.)
Through Contact page, those messages land in my inbox, not a queue.