It was 2015 and having just quit smoking, my last regular vice, I walked into a department store in Norwich in search of gym equipment. But instead of buying trainers or weights, I fell in love with the wall of yarn in the haberdashery department across the floor. In some primal, urgent way, I needed to have those balls and skeins of colour and texture in my life, variously fluffy or smooth, shiny mercerised cotton, variegated, solid in rich tonal hues, stippled with flecks of dye. Something about looking at those unwound packets of potential took me back to my childhood, to hours spent with my mom in suburban fabric stores choosing material for homemade clothes she made for me. Some of our happiest times were spent together weighing whether to buy, say, lemon- or saffron-coloured polycotton, the one with the daisies or the one with the Bridget Riley-style op-art pattern (it was the 70s), and contemplating which rickrack would coordinate best with our choice.

Tragically, I didn’t learn to sew from her, a terrible shame because she really knew her stuff having once worked in costume design on Broadway in the 1950s, but I must have picked some maker’s genes from her. She hated cooking so, autodidact that I am, I taught myself how to make a decent dinner by reading cookbooks myself from the age of 10 onwards.

Consequently, I thought I could teach myself how to knit with a book bought in the haberdashery department at John Lewis. But unlike cooking, which has a fairly universal instructional language attached to it, knitting is hard to learn from a book, at least for me. So I turned to the digital mothers, aunts, grannies and crafty big sisters of YouTube, a vast university faculty’s worth of teachers, roughly 85% of them women. Armed with what appear to be mobile phones or consumer camcorders, simple editing software and often surprisingly canny understanding of search engine optimisation and YouTube hacks, this secular order of crafting high priestesses pass on their increasingly rare knowledge, like medieval scribes in the Dark Ages.

Frequently resorting to the space bar to pause and dragging the red progress dot back a few centimetres to rewind the action, I worked out not just how to knit and purl, but which way to wrap the yarn to make a yarn over – or “YO” in the abbreviated language of knitting patterns. Decoding patterns is where YouTube tutorials are truly essential. Any good pattern should explain in its abbreviations section what the terms mean, but nothing beats seeing a demonstration of “Sl2, K1, PSSO decrease”. In fact, increasingly, as more and more patterns are sold individually as pdf files through website Ravelry (the one recently made famous for banning Trump boosterism in its forums) instead of in books or on printed copies at yarn shops, designers will put hyperlinks right in the pattern to direct the maker to video tutorials.

Over time, some video tutors seem to have become more successful than others, judging by their volume of videos, and I expect several now make some kind of living as professional YouTubers, that most 21st century of professions. Staci Perry of VeryPink Knits, for example, regularly tops search results, and deservedly so. Perry is a knitting teacher based in Austin, Texas, and her presentation is exemplary, delivered in a clear, authoritative voice as she talks through the techniques, shown in well composed overhead shots, and frequently enhanced by links to other tutorials where appropriate. She also wears good nail polish, a habit that shouldn’t matter but does, somehow.

Similarly, even though I haven’t got a single tattoo myself, I rather admire the copious ink on the hands of Andrea Mowry, a top designer who produces far fewer videos than her contemporaries but whose film work is still worth a look. Over time, as I’ve fallen ever further down the YouTube rabbit hole of knitting videos, I’ve become obsessed with finding ones with the best balance of clarity, personality, breadth of technique and visual panache both in terms of video technique and what kind of yarns and designs they work with. It’s entirely irrational but somehow skanky hanks – to borrow a phrase from Milli at Tribe Yarns in Richmond, London – are a huge turnoff. Knitting videos are as much aspirational as they are inspirational and instructive, and should model attractive results. If the end project looks tacky or too excessively grandmotherly, then I’ll click away to another video.

Now that I’ve been at this for a while, I’ve mastered a huge arsenal of techniques from brioche stitch to cabling and colourwork, so my knitting video consumption has waned a bit. Recently, I’ve got into spinning and that’s opened up a whole new world of videos on technique, many of them fronted by stout women with southern American accents who seems to live in hay barns – a more eccentric, rough-edged crew than the knitterati, while the dyers hew more towards perkiness in their shiny kitchens. I can’t wait to find out what the crochet kids are like.