The Light I Wear Around My Neck When I Crochet

My floor lamp stands at my left shoulder and that is the whole problem. I am left-handed. I hold the hook in my left hand and work mirrored, right to left, and the light comes over that shoulder and my own hand lands between it and the stitch I am trying to count. Thirty-five years of crocheting and I never once thought to blame the lamp. I just held the work up closer to my face and squinted.

Two winters back I was finishing a baby blanket for our church winter drive, a shell pattern in a soft worsted, and I ripped out the same row three times because I could not see the loops. I moved the lamp. I moved it back. I sat up straighter, then gave up and sat crooked, and by nine o'clock my thumb was stiff and the row was still wrong.

Walt noticed the Glocusent neck light before I did. It was in one of those catalogs that turn up in October, and he pointed at the page and said I looked like a woman who could use a headlamp. He was teasing. He was also right, which he has been about a number of things.

So I bought one in October of 2025 and it has hung around my neck most evenings since. It is sold as a reading light and the box says so, but I do not read in bed. I crochet. It rests around the neck and it is cordless, so both hands stay free, and it weighs 126 grams, which is nothing. There is a push button on it and three color settings: amber, warm white and cool white. Each of those has three brightness levels. It charges by USB at my kitchen counter about once a week.

What it did for my counting is simple and I will not dress it up. The light sits on my chest and aims down at my hands, so my left hand is no longer in the way of it. The listing calls the beam ninety degrees, narrow enough that it lands on the work and not on the whole room. The shadow was gone the first evening.

The shadow was gone the first evening, and I did not have to move the lamp once to get rid of it.

How I Actually Use It

After dark, and only after dark, in addition to the floor lamp and never instead of it. The warm white setting stays where I left it and I keep the brightness in the middle. Warm white is easier on my eyes at nine o'clock than the cool setting, though I know women who prefer cool for counting a dark yarn and they are not wrong to. The amber setting I have used exactly twice, both times in the car when Walt and I drove to Beth's and I wanted to finish a hat.

One more thing about fit, because I am five foot one and things built for a taller person sit wrong on me. The neck part of this one is narrow, which the listing makes a point of, and on me that means it stays put when I lean forward to check a stitch. It does not swing down and knock the work. I have had that happen with a clip light that hung from a cord, and I gave up on that one inside a week.

There are things I would tell you against it, too. It does not light a room. If I set it down and walk to the kitchen for a glass of water, I come back to a dark chair. It has to be charged and I have forgotten twice, and a fading light on a long row is worse than no light, because you keep going. The band felt stiff across the back of my neck for the first week or so. And on a bright afternoon in June I do not touch it at all.

It changed where things sit, too. The wooden bowl is on the small table at my right and feeds yarn across to my left hand, and the light on my chest picks up the strand coming off the ball. Before, that strand was the first thing to disappear into the shadow. Now the row, the hook and the yarn are lit at the same time, which sounds like a small thing until you have spent an evening guessing.

Before this I tried the little clamp lights. I had one that clipped to the cover of a pattern book and one that clipped to the arm of the chair, and both of them lit a page or a patch of upholstery rather than the stitches under my hand. The clamp on the chair arm I still use for the newspaper. It is a fine lamp. It is aimed at the wrong thing.

I did not expect a reading light to matter this much to a hobby, and I am still a little put out about it. Walt has not let it go.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you were across from me with your own work in your lap, I would say this. The Glocusent is not a cure for tired hands and it does not claim to be. It is a light. What it fixes is the particular misery of being left-handed under a lamp that lives on your left side, and the wider misery of working after dark in a room lit for watching television and not for counting stitches. If that is your evening, it is worth the trouble of charging it.

If you crochet by a window in the afternoon, or your lamp already sits where it should, save your money and put it toward a better hook or a bowl that stops the ball rolling. Keep the floor lamp either way. A small light on your chest is a helper, not a replacement, and anyone who tells you otherwise has not tried to find a dropped stitch at the bottom of a dark bag.