Crochet vs Knitting: Knitting Holds a Whole Row of Loops

A live loop, on this page, is an open loop still held on the tool and not yet locked into the fabric. Both crafts are built from loops pulled through loops, and they differ in how many loops stay open while the work goes on, a count that shapes how each fabric starts, ends and comes apart.

What is the difference between crochet and knitting?

Thérèse de Dillmont's Encyclopedia of Needlework, read here in its English edition, defines both crafts by their loops. Knitting, she writes, “consists of loops, or stitches, as they are generally called, formed by means of a thread and two needles.” Crochet, she says, has really only one stitch, since all of it “consists of loops made by means of the hook or needle,” which are “connected together by being drawn the one through the other.”

Neither definition mentions a knot. In a knot such as the square knot, two strands wrap around each other, while a knitted or crocheted loop holds because the next loop passes through it. So the split this page draws between the two crafts is a count: how many loops wait on the tool, still open.

One loop or a whole row

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In standard crochet, each basic stitch in de Dillmont's steps starts and ends with one loop on the hook, which she calls a needle. Her plain stitch draws a loop up through the stitch below, which makes two loops, then pulls the yarn “through both loops on the needle,” which leaves one.

Taller stitches gather more loops for a moment. A treble wraps the yarn once, draws up a loop and so holds three, then works them off two at a time, back down to one. The count rises inside a stitch, then comes back to one before the next stitch begins.

Knitting does not close the row that way. Casting on, in de Dillmont's words, is “the formation of the first row of stitches,” and from then on the whole row sits on the needles. Each plain stitch draws a new loop through a loop on the left needle and drops the old loop off; with eight stitches in a row, eight loops stay live from the first stitch to the last.

The exception: Tunisian crochet

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De Dillmont splits crochet into two kinds, “German crochet, and Victoria or Tunisian crochet.” The second kind breaks the one-loop rule, and she notes that it “is also called crochet-knitting because, you have to cast on all the first row of stitches, as in knitting.”

The tool shows the difference: Tunisian crochet uses “a long straight needle, with a knob at one end,” long enough to hold a full row. In the first pass, a loop is drawn up through each chain stitch and kept on the hook. In the second pass, the yarn goes “through two loops” again and again until one loop is left.

Is Tunisian crochet a kind of knitting, then? In de Dillmont's grouping, no: it is the second kind of crochet. It borrows knitting's row of live loops but works them with a hook, and she adds that it “can only be worked on the right side.”

How it fails: what happens when a stitch drops

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A live loop is the weak point in both crafts, because nothing passes through it yet. In knitting, each loop in a column is held by the loop drawn through it from the row above. Read from that structure, a loop that slips off the needle has no holder, and the loop below it is next. By the same reading, a whole column can open down to the cast-on row.

De Dillmont's knitting chapter guards against this: stitches are cast off, she writes, “to prevent the stitches from unravelling,” passing each loop over the next “so that only one remains on the needle.” Her fig. 387, a knitting pattern with dropped stitches, even drops loops on purpose: its rows say to “drop the 2 overs,” the extra wraps of yarn, and later to “take up the dropped stitch.”

Standard crochet has only one live loop to lose. By its structure, pulling the free yarn would unravel the work only one stitch at a time, last stitch first, because each earlier stitch was closed before the next began. This page could not read a source that tests this, so it stays an inference, one that fits de Dillmont's way to finish crochet: “cut the thread and draw the end through the last loop.”

Crochet or knitting: which for what?

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De Dillmont gives each craft its own uses. Knitted loops, “connected together in unbroken continuity,” make “a very elastic fabric,” which she calls “specially suitable for making warm, and closely-fitting wearing-apparel.” Crochet “can be applied to the domestic requirements of every-day life, to wearing apparel, house-linen and upholstery.” Among her Tunisian crochet patterns is a counterpane, fig. 476.

Download the comparison table (CSV) (what the file holds)

Speed and difficulty are left out, because this page could not read a source that compares the two crafts on either. Thread can also hold a pattern with no loops at all: sashiko hitomezashi builds its grid from running stitches set one at a time.