Review of The Crochet Dude Crochet Hook

Hey everyone, it's Deja from CrochetEverAfter.com. Today I'm going to do a review of this Crochet Dude Boy crochet hook. So the Crochet Dude, this guy here, is Drew Amborski. He's a, I think, previous football player. He turned crocheter, and now he has his own line with Boy for crochet hooks and beginner kits and other things. But the reason that I got this specific hook Is because it's an 8mm USL and Clover, my favorite brand, Clover Soft Touch, does not go that large. And I like having kind of the extra handle. And my other L, my other 8mm, I'm not really a fan of the... The The embossed, it's not embossed, it's raised, but the raised printing on it, because it's kind of scratchy and I don't know, it gives me that feeling of like nails on a chalkboard kind of thing when I'm working with it, when I get my fingers over it, because it's really quite raised and it's not very comfortable for me. Thank But I also... Like this is a more of an inline hook which I've found that I kind of like the not inline hooks a little bit better So I saw that this was a not inline hook and it had a nice comfortable looking grip you. So I wanted to try it out. The reason that I was kind of hesitant was because the shaft length. You can see that it's a very short shaft. So the shaft is the actual size of the hook, so the 8mm part is only half an inch long. On here, it's pretty short too, but I can go and push my stitches further down. So if I'm making a DC two together, so double crochet two together, I'm going to need a few loops sitting on my hook to do that. And I was afraid that this may not give me enough room because of the stopper. Usually I like the stopper, but you can see down here it's much further. So if I had to push stitches down, I would have room and it's only It's slightly bumped here, you can see that it's a little bit bigger than the shaft so it's not going to affect my stitches too much. On this hook, I'm just going to get stuck, I won't be able to push stitches any further. So I figured, you know, I might as well give it a try, maybe I'm missing something, maybe it'll work just fine. So I'm going to make up some swatches, I'm going to show you how I crochet with it and we'll see if this short shaft is going to be a problem. So far I like everything else about it, I'm not sure how well this is going to hold up, it looks like it's just printed on so I don't know if that will wear off over time, but we'll give it a try and see how it works out. Okay, I'm using the hook for this project, and so far it's okay. There's a couple things that are not quite that I'm loving, and one is the seam, so how this rubberized handle is put together. The seam on it wasn't really trimmed down, so it's actually quite raised to where when I'm crocheting it, I can feel it, so it's kind of digging in a little bit. Not perfectly bad or it hurts. But I can definitely tell when I'm crocheting, like I can feel it a lot right here on this side, so it's a little bothersome, but not horribly. The yarn seems to be sliding very easily, the hook is pretty good, I probably wish that this was maybe a little bit wider. It's getting caught a little bit, but the size of the shaft isn't too bad yet, but I'm only making single crochets, so I'm going to go ahead and get some other yarn and try some combination stitches like double crochet, double! Double crochet two together and other stitches like that where I put a few loops on the hook and see how well it can hold those loops. So far so good for small projects like single crochet. We'll see how the rest of it goes in a little bit. So I've been crocheting with this hook for a little bit and there are definitely some pluses and some minuses to it. So the actual hook part is... It works well, I have no problems catching the yarn, pulling the yarn through, it's just the throat, or I'm sorry, the shaft, it's way too short, so if you see, if I just do a double crochet here, you can see that I'm already losing this loop to the throat, it's already getting pushed down, so I have to sit there and kind of squish everything to get it onto the shaft if I want to keep consistent stitches to keep those loops all the same size. Here I did a double crochet two together, so that's even harder. So yarn over, go to my next stitch, pull up a loop, two, put the next two, three on here. I wouldn't even be able to do a dc3 together because you can see this is already sliding down. So there's just no room on the shaft here to really do anything other than kind of single crochet. The single crochets that I did down here, they fit well because it's only two loops. Anything over that, if I'm doing a half double, I stop three loops and I have that last loop that's falling off. If you're a lifter, it's probably not going to matter. So if you see my Golden Loop tutorial, there are three types of crocheters, some that tug down when they work, some that lift. So if you make really loopy kind of stitches where you pull up a lot, it's not gonna be too much of a problem for you. But if you are a rider, which is when you keep your stitches all on the size of your shaft, Then this hook is really not going to help you much. And the seam on this is very pronounced after crocheting for a while. It really starts to bother my hand. I don't know if all of the hooks are like that, I don't know if this is just a bad one that I got and the rest of them are smooth. So if you have one of these, let me know how you like it. How the seam is on yours so that other people can get informed before purchasing these. I don't- I think the smaller hooks have more room, it's just the large size hooks. If this didn't have the seam and it had more of a shaft, it would be a really good hook. But it just doesn't quite work for me for what I need it for, so if you're doing bulky projects, bulky yarn projects where you have increasing and decreasing, this hook is going to be really difficult. But since I started using this or when I bought this, they did not have the Clover Amore or the Clover Soft Touch in a larger size, but they actually just started making them and I picked them up. So I'm going to do another review with those so you can see the difference between this one and the Clover. It's actually the Amore. They still don't have the Soft Touch in the larger size, but the Amore has the large size now. So I'm going to get those and show you the difference between those. So stay tuned for that one. But this one is all done, so let me know what you think. If you have them, are the large sizes good for you? If you have smaller sizes, let us know how you like those too. So let us know in the comments below, and thank you for watching!