Mood Tracker Strip Crochet Tutorial

Craft type: Crochet
Yarn: Any type, 3 or 6 colors
Tool: Crochet hook with size matching your yarn
Stitches used: Chain Stitch and Single Crochet Stitch
Others: A blank piece of paper and a pair of scissors

If you already know how to crochet chain stitches and single crochet stitches, this mini craft project takes a couple of minutes a day to track your mood. At the end of the week, you will have a mood tracker strip that reflects your feelings from that week and a small desktop décor piece that carries your story. I used mine as a display mat for my maneki-neko (招き猫) collection.

1. Get your yarn and assign each mood with a yarn color.

Here are some references of moods to track. Feel free to choose your own.

• If using 3 colors, assign a color to each of the following mood:
  pleasant, neutral, unpleasant
• If using 6 colors, assign a color to each of the following mood:
  Happy, creative, calm, sad, angry, anxious

On a piece of paper, write down the dates, moods you’d like to track, and colors that correspond to moods.

2. Start your project.

The Starting Day:

1. Take the yarn with color that represents your mood of the first day of your project and make 21 chain stitches as a foundation chain.
• Starting with 21 chain stitches is just a reference. You can make your strip longer by adding more chain stitches or shorter by reducing the number of chain stitches. Always make one more chain stitch than your intended number of single crochet stitch.
2. Starting from the second stitch from the hook, make 20 single crochet stitches.
3. Make 1 chain stitch to secure. Then, fasten off the yarn.

Subsequent Days:

1. Take the yarn with color that represents your mood that day. Attach the yarn to the row from the previous day by pulling a loop through the first stitch of the row, and then make 1 chain stitch (doesn’t count as a stitch) to secure.
2. Make 1 single crochet stitch into each stitch from the previous row.
3. Make 1 chain stitch to secure. Then, fasten off the yarn.
4. Keep making one row each day until reaching the final day of the mood tracking project.

The Final Day:

1. Repeat the steps in the “subsequent days” to finish the row for your final day.
2. Trim the yarn on both sides of the strips. The mood tracking strip is completed.

*This project is designed as a one-week-long project, so try to make one row each day for at least seven days. If you’d like to expand the length of the project to a monthly or even yearly project, feel free to repeat the steps in “subsequent days” above as much as you’d like.

I hope you will enjoy a couple minutes of intentional creative time every day during the week of your mood tracking project. Thank you for making something with us!

This beginner-friendly project is part of our Mini Craft Calendar series–a collection of small projects designed to fit into weeknights or weekends. Each project takes less than 60 minutes, so you can enjoy intentional creative time without a big commitment. Learn more about the Mini Craft Calendar or view the July program:

Click to Learn More

View the Calendar

This guide, including the step-by-step instructions, photographs, videos, logos, and text, are intended for personal use only and may not be used for any other purpose. You may not make, share, sell, distribute, or publicize (nor cause any such actions to be taken with regard to) any tutorials, demonstrations, lessons, or other guides, in any format for any purpose, that reference or replicate XY Craft Studio’s guides, patterns, photographs, videos, or text, in whole or in part. No part or aspect of this guide may be made available to or used to train artificial intelligence (AI) systems or reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including web crawling, photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without prior permission in writing from XY Craft Studio.

If you would like to share this guide with others, you can share a link to this page.