#1 “It’s A Waste Of Time,” They Said. “You’ll Never Wear It,” They Said. 13 Years Later…
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.”
#5 I Wanted To Do Something Funny. You Can Take The Eye Out Of The Ice Cream Cone 😅
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.
#13 Crocheting Myself A Life-Sized Friend (Guy On The Right) And It Turns Out The Masks I Make Fit Him! I'm Open To Any Name Suggestions For My Friend 💜
#15 “Oops!… I Did It Again” I Meant To Make A Cute Bunny, But Well… Things Happened
“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.
