“This Wasn’t The Plan”: 73 Crochet Projects That Went Seriously Wrong

Just over a decade ago, in 2015, a photo of a man standing in a room full of tomatoes appeared on Tumblr, posted by the account CursedImages. Staring expressionlessly into the camera, the old farmer looked like “someone’s nice grandpa,” as Emma Grey Ellis wrote for Wired. Yet there was something unsettling about the scene: the fuzzy focus, the crates of produce piled up in a wood-paneled basement, the inexplicable context. The caption, therefore, was oddly fitting: “This image is cursed.”

The initial image gained just over a thousand notes, making it hardly viral by today’s standards. Still, it seems that with that one blurry image, a whole new internet genre was born: “The concept of the cursed image took off,” Paper’s Matt Moen explains, “with scores of copycat blogs popping up across Tumblr, then migrating to Twitter, Reddit, Instagram and, if you were particularly desperate, Facebook.”

Since then, as Jia Tolentino wrote for The New Yorker, we’ve seen “cursed” become “central in the online vernacular,” with countless accounts across the internet dedicated to sharing cursed content. And so perhaps it was only a matter of time before that fascination with all things captivating in an “ew-lol way,” as Ellis put it, found its way into the crafting world.

And really, it makes sense. We’ve all surely seen a kid’s drawing that’s inexplicably creepy, an ambitious cake-icing project that’s taken a turn for the horrifying, or a handmade doll that looks more Annabelle than adorable. And if you thought the cozy, homely crafts of crochet and knitting could be spared, think again. That’s exactly where r/cursedcrochet comes in.

“Home of your best crochet fails and scares,” the subreddit was created at the start of 2025 and has since amassed some 36.7K followers who delight in yarn projects gone terribly—or wonderfully—wrong. Its members share creations that range from a little derpy to downright disastrous: pattern fails, amigurumi atrocities, creepy-cute creatures, and the occasional Frankensteinian oddity.

Some look nothing like what their makers intended. Others leave you wondering why anyone would want to make them in the first place—let alone spend hours doing it. And yet, somehow, they’re hard to look away from.

Part of that comes down to a tension at the heart of most “cursed” things. Speaking to Tolentino, artist Jenny Odell called it an “unholy juxtaposition”—things that shouldn’t go together but are combined anyway to create what she calls “normcore horror.” And crochet, it turns out, is perfectly suited to this kind of juxtaposition.

The craft comes loaded with preconceptions: cozy blankets, delicate patterns, cute amigurumi, things made with care to be cherished. So when those same stitches are used to make something bizarre or unsettling instead, the contrast becomes the joke itself.

Then there’s the time involved: a single piece can take hours, days, or even longer to complete. In other words, someone didn’t just dream up a cursed object—they sat down with a hook and yarn and patiently brought it into being, one stitch at a time, which somehow makes it all the more wonderfully absurd.

Perhaps that’s why these creations can inspire such a strange reaction. Ellis describes cursed images as being “unaccountably horrifying, hilarious, and baffling all at once.” And it’s that “yuck-yum, ew-lol, love-hate tension” that she says is at the heart of creepiness and cursed images: we’re repelled and entertained at the same time.

And maybe that’s the perfect response to cursed crochet. It doesn’t matter if the result comes from questionable execution, questionable judgment, or deliberate design. You don’t necessarily have to understand why it exists, appreciate the craftsmanship, or even like what you’re looking at. Sometimes being simultaneously horrified, amused and utterly baffled is enough.