From STEM to Stitch: Agnes Song’s Rise as a Crochet Influencer
After leaving behind the corporate world, Gen Z content creator Agnes Song is paving a new career for herself in the fiber arts community.
Like many creatives, Agnes Song picked up knitting and, later, crochet during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, she was a full-time bioengineering student merely looking for a hobby to distract from the monotony of quarantine.
“I fell in love with [knitting] instantly,” Song said. “It felt like a great intersection between artistry and engineering.”
Though she didn’t know much about social media at the time, Song started documenting her crafting process as a way of connecting with others online. In 2022, she started her page @yaejiyea on YouTube. Due to her love of teaching, Song saw content creation as the perfect avenue to make educational knitting and crochet tutorials more accessible.
”I wanted to enlist people into the cult of fiber arts, essentially,” Song said.
The fiber arts community — which comprises artists across the mediums of knitting, crochet, embroidery, felting, and more — quickly embraced her. Up until graduating from college, Song continued to post casual tutorials of her work.
Turning a Hobby Into a Career
The daughter of immigrants, Song experienced the usual pressure to pursue a career in STEM. Despite the emotional challenges of studying engineering, Song stuck with her degree even though she had always wanted to pursue something more creative.
“[Knitting] was a reprieve from all of my coursework,” Song admitted. “At the time, I was doing a capstone project on the mechanical properties of human burn tissue, and it was a lot. Emotionally, it was a lot.”
Song didn’t initially view content creation as a viable business venture. However, as her online community grew, she found herself investing more time and energy in her crochet projects. Song recalls that an increasing number of people would ask her specific questions about her craft, such as how to perform a stitch or how to handle one’s yarn more efficiently. Her background in tutoring came in handy as she connected with more viewers through her educational videos.
Even as her online presence grew, she still felt like full-time content creation was risky. The artist noted she considers herself a perfectionist and found it most difficult to create content that she felt completely proud of.
”It was clunky,” Song said. “Even to this day, I still feel like I’m years behind other creators sometimes.”
But Song persisted. Rather than applying for engineering jobs after graduating, she began focusing more on her crochet projects. She said her growth as a content creator mirrored her personal journey finding her identity in her early 20s.
Song moved to Chicago, where she was newly inspired by the city’s architecture and harsh Midwest winters.
“I remember my partner and I were exploring different neighborhoods like Logan Square [and] Wicker Park, and there were a lot of these brick townhomes with ivy growing all across the walls,” Song explained. “It looked like nature was reclaiming these townhomes, and that really inspired me to make a dress design with these vines and roses just kind of climbing all over the body and the bodice of the dress.”
This is a standard step of Song’s creative process. She said her projects usually spawn from her surroundings. At the same time, she has always prioritized sustainability in her work and said the act of making her own clothes has taught her to appreciate the labor and creativity that go into crochet more deeply.
Teaching Through Crochet
Song continues to emphasize the educational aspect of her craft, urging her audience to keep practicing even when she finds a pattern to be especially difficult. For Song, fiber arts is more than a social media business; it is a medium through which she can learn more about her own goals through creative expression and storytelling.
”Not everything has to be perfect,” Song shared. “Even if it’s not perfect, there’s always something that you can take away.”
In fact, Song has embraced the notion of fiber arts as a never-ending learning process. In addition to new techniques, Song has also learned more about her cultural background through crochet.
Song was born and raised in the United States, but resonates closely with her Korean heritage. However, she didn’t always feel connected to her ancestral homeland. As a child, Song helped her parents run their dry cleaning business. The work was challenging and also one of the primary reasons why her parents wanted her to steer away from a career tied to fashion or clothing. Yet, Song still found comfort in being around clothes all day.
Now, she’s honoring her heritage through her content. In various storytimes or informational reels, Song shares childhood memories and important pieces of Korean and Korean American history with her audience. In one such video posted on her TikTok account, Song shares the history of Haenyeo, female free-divers who harvest a variety of sea life from the surrounding waters of South Korea’s Jeju Island. She notes that for much of their history, the divers lacked modern diving equipment, instead opting for their own traditional diving attire. Inspired by their unique equipment, Song set out to design a crochet collection celebrating the history of Haenyeo.
“Part of me creating art that’s inspired by my Korean heritage is like me teaching myself about parts of my culture that feel so distant from myself,” Song said.
As Song continues to create content, she said she looks forward to making more connections across her culture and finding inspiration from her everyday experiences.
