A cheerful young man (young being the operative word; he looks late teens, maybe early twenties?) is attacking some yarn with a crochet hook, narrating as he goes. The video is called Let's Learn Crochet (Part 1) and he does indeed seem to have started this endeavour with no idea what he's doing, but he isn't perturbed when he makes a mistake, just figures out how to untangle (sometimes literally) the problem and goes right back to following the instructions in his beginner's crochet kit. His voice is calm, pleasant, soothing, and clearly audible; his face, although the video doesn't show much of it, is also very nice to look at. (His hands are pretty nice to look at too.)

He drops a few sly hints over the course of the video about what the kit is supposed to make, but doesn't actually admit it until the last stitch is in place, even after he's put together enough of it that it's pretty clear he is making a wee little penguin plushie approximately the size of an egg. At the end of the video, he gives the penguin tiny headpats with a fingertip, laughing softly about how it's 'just so darn cute'.

Oh no it is indeed so darn cute!!!

oh no it's cute!!! 🐧🐧🐧🥺🥺🥺

intensely relatable process 

Wait'll you see the next one!

Um, yes???

He is once again doing the bit where he won't say what he's making until it's completely finished, even though he spends several whole minutes at the very end trying to get the little egg-sized bunny's ear to flop just so. At last he succeeds, and carefully pulls the ears through the ear-holes in the tiny top hat he crocheted at the start of the video, and holds it up to the camera to announce, "Aha! It's a bunny!"

it's a BUNNY in a HAT

She appends a picture of a little needle-felted maneki-neko.

What a good fuzzy friend you have there! I'd love to see how you made it.

It's needle-felted. I stabbed it into shape

Nice! Maybe I'll make that my next project after crochet.

don't swear at the poor kitty!

It's okay, he knows I don't mean it. Anyway I fixed his stuffing so now he is capable of standing upright and can join tiny crochet creature society.

you could have made him a tiny wheelchair

I am not nearly that good at crochet!

After a longer interval:

not a crocheted tiny wheelchair

Appended is a picture of the needle-felted maneki neko perched on a wheelchair constructed out of cut popsicle sticks, jar lids, and pins

Oh wow, does it roll? It looks like it might roll. Impressive! I will admit I did not think of that.

it rolls! if, like, a person, was trying to use it, I would want to do something to the wheels so they had more friction with the ground. but it rolls

I think that's a fine amount of rolling under the circumstances!

Aaaaaa that's so cute. 

He mentioned her! In a video! She wiggles excitedly. Her next comment is a mess of hearts and exclamation points. 

Please, teach me your needle felting wisdom! How am I supposed to manage those ears???

you felt them SEPARATE and then stab them to the critter!

Miraculous. I'll have to try it next time.

I am a huge fucking hypocrite but you are slightly reinventing the wheel <3

I have a plan! A plan that involves reinventing the wheel a little bit! But hey, if you made a needle felting tutorial video, I'd watch it.

hah. I don't know anything about like...cinematography

That's what teaching yourself as you go is for! And Google. Definitely also Google.

point. google is

A few weeks later, a youtube channel called "kellygreenjellybean" posts a video titled "Needle Felting like you know what you're doing"

"Hi. I'm, uh, you can call me Jellybean." She's wearing a bright green sweater and barrettes, possibly as an excuse for the other half of her username. "So Liamlearns sorta half-dared half-asked me to make this video..." 

She's not a perfect teacher. She uses a lot of hesitation phenomena, and it's clear she's largely self-taught and has done a fair bit of reinventing the wheel herself, and there are several parts where she refers to something as easy, "unless it's just that I'm naturally good at it and don't know how to explain it to someone who has difficulty; so if you have difficulty, uh, sorry." 

She goes over some mistakes she made in previous needle felting projects ("You want it denser. No, denser than that. You know how you can just pull a puff of fibers apart? You don't want to be able to do that to a finished needle felting piece.)

By the end of the video she has produced three pieces of increasing complexity: first a smiling apple with a heart-shaped leaf attached to the stem ("suitable for giving to teachers"), then a cat standing upright on all four paws, and finally a chubby moth with the wings, antennae and legs all felted separately and then stabbed together. 

Oh no, that moth is so fuzzy...

All needle felting is at least a little fuzzy! There are ways to get them actually fluffy but I don’t know how

Oh, I have an idea...

Benguin and Little Bunny Froufrou

also you know they sell little doll combs for like barbies and stuff, right?

They sell them but I haven't bought one yet!

Interesting suggestions. But wouldn't Froufrou harass my poor defenseless mice? Maybe it's only field mice that are at risk, and teacup mice are safe.

No, no, it's little bunny Fou-Fou who harasses mice. because he is a fool. in french. twice. Froufrou has better things to do

I stand corrected. Unless Froufrou turns out to have a weakness for teacup mice.

for snuggling them perhaps. not for scooping them up and bopping them on the head. ...possibly for scooping them up and patting them gently on the head

It will be so.

...He referred to her as "the delightful Jellybean" as though she were also, like, a legit person with a channel. She--only has the one video up, and it's not very good. Does this mean she ought to put up more videos? Hmm...

A few days later a video goes up titled "[ASMR] combing" and is of her combing a doll's hair with a tiny plastic comb smaller than some of her fingernails while softly humming whatever comes into her head. 

That comb is very little indeed.

Her next video is titled “cameo carving ✨✨✨” and credited to “the blatant enabling of Liamlearns” 

the video doesn’t actually start out with carving. First she explains that she had to decide what material to carve, and explains how she selected a homemade clay recipe from the internet, and shows a time lapse of herself mixing up white modeling clay, then dividing it into two unevenly-sized lumps and mixing blue food coloring into the larger. She takes out a rolling pin and rolls out the blue clay, then squashes the white clay on top and rolls that out to approximately the same surface area. 

Then she takes a round jar lid and cuts out circles of the clay arrangement, setting them out to dry and harden. The remaining scraps she squishes into a paler blue and sets aside in plastic wrap for later. 

The video cuts to when the circles have dried, and she explains how she carefully sketches out designs on the top, white layer, then carves away all the white clay that isn't part of the design, leaving a raised white relief image on a blue background. 

She carves a total of five circles in the video, less than the number she cut out of the white-and-blue soft clay. The designs are a leaf, a ten-pointed double star, a heraldic rose, a sailboat, and a tree under a sky dotted with raised white stars. 

"I'm only showing you the ones that worked," she says wryly after the last one. "Expect to mess up. Like, a lot."

He comments on her video with three sparkle emoji.

In his second air-dry clay video, he reveals that his overambitious design choice was to try to make an ornate little dollhouse-furniture-scale rocking chair. The video runs a little long compared to his usual, because he's documenting his failed attempts and there's a lot of them. In the end, though, he successfully creates an adorable little rocking chair and puts it on the Non-Creature Shelf next to the piggy bank. (His accent sounds British, but the nickel that has mysteriously appeared in the piggy bank's coin slot since the last time it showed up onscreen is American.) He also mentions in his ending blurb that Jellybean has caused him to alter his plans for his next video slightly, "because I'm like a magpie, I see a shiny crafting idea and I just have to take it home to line my nest."

Oh that sounds like a challenge. 

Her next video is much shorter, and shows how to weave a God's Eye on popsicle sticks with yarn. "I'm not personally religious, but a religious friend taught me how to make these at summer camp, and they're soothing."

That's so pretty! It's a shame I have a personal rule about not messing around with religious traditions I don't follow.

Christianity is culturally dominant, it's at worst punching up. Obviously I don't condone disrespecting anyone's religion, unless they're, like, the westboro baptist church! hopefully nobody is going to look at this video and go 'ah, hm, more poorly-thought-out potential satanism' but like even so

Oh, no, that's not the trouble. I don't think you're disrespecting anyone! I just have a personal quirk here. I can try to explain but I don't think it's an explanation that belongs in your comments section; email me?

She thinks carefully about giving him her email by contacting him but decides to go for it. 

Hi! This is Jellybean. Tell me of your quirks. 

(Her email is kellyabigailgreene@[hypotheticalmailservice])

Aha, and now I see where the jellybean came from. Clever!

So the thing I didn't want to get into in public because it's embarrassing is that I have a bit of a superstition about not calling on supernatural forces in case they turn out to be real, and the thing I didn't want to get into in public because it's just a bit strange is that I often find myself thinking of other people's religions that I don't believe in as... sort of like their families? Jesus is many people's weird uncle but he's not mine and I don't want to be overly familiar with someone else's weird uncle. Even though, or perhaps especially because, I don't think he's around to object. It would be like, I don't know, walking into a graveyard and striking up a conversation with a stranger's gravestone. It's not necessarily bad, from many perspectives no one is actually harmed by it, I would not be offended if I saw someone else do it, but it's just sort of weird and I don't want to!

that's pretty valid honestly! 

talk about quarrelsome family reunions though

An angle I admit I have never before considered.

do you know anything about the thirty years war

I do not! Tell me more.

ok so once upon a time a monk named martin luther nailed his manifesto to a church door and started the protestant reformation. fast-forward to the earlyish seventeenth century and there are a bunch of kinds of protestants around and the catholics decide this isn't on and a war happens about it. lots and LOTS of blood shed, and worse, ostensibly catholics against various protestants and various protestants against each other with the jewish people caught in the middle and everyone keeping a leery eye on the muslims to the southeast. except of course it was deeply entangled with dynastic boooolsheet and you get things like catholic france backing Gustavus II Adolphus, champion of protestantism, bc he was fighting catholic spain and france was more worried about spain than about what the scandinavians were getting up to in the germanies

This world has so much fascinating history and I know so little of it! I was vaguely aware of the protestant reformation as a concept but I don't think I've ever heard the name Gustavus II Adolphus before in my life. It's a very good name. Has a pleasing sort of not-quite-symmetry to it.

he was this famous swedish king! I live in minnesota and we have a TON of swedish blood. buncha stuff named after him around

Neat! My family moves around a fair bit so I haven't had quite so many chances to accumulate local lore. What kinds of things do you name after famous Swedish kings in Minnesota?

churches, monuments. at least one college

A variety of things! Though I suppose there's a case to be made that churches and colleges are each a kind of monument.

Oh noooooo, that's so cute. 

In her next video she reveals that it turns out that you're supposed to finish the cold porcelain recipe she used by applying a sealant of some kind so it doesn't get damaged by moisture; she has a handful of cameos carved with a simple bunny shape to which she applies various sealing options, testing them out and reporting on the results. The clear nail polish performs the worst; she has some commentary on how nail polish is not intended to be permanent punctuated by edited-in photographs of nails with chipped polish. 

Strong opinions about nail polish, I see!

I MAY have learned much of this information the hard way

Experience is the most reliable teacher of them all!

I do not currently plan to do a video on homemade knitting needles though

Is that also a subject you have experience with?

Oh the way I learned the nail polish thing the hard way was by trying to make double-ended knitting needles by lacquering skewers with nail polish

Interesting! The first question that springs to my mind is, what else did you try lacquering them with, and did you find anything that worked?

school glue and no, it's fine for sealing clay but the thing about knitting needles is that like...they have a LOT of wear, especially on the ends

Oh, of course, that makes perfect sense.

And now I'm wondering what a better way to make homemade knitting needles would be... have you tried anything not involving skewers? For that matter, have you tried sanding the skewers?

I have tried sanding the skewers. helped, but not enough. what I think I would have to do is soak them in a resin that would penetrate into the wood instead of just putting something on the surface that could chip. but I don't, like, have resin

Tell you what, if I get my hands on some resin I will try it myself.

What about materials other than skewers? Like, I don't know, I'm imagining sanding one of those plastic curtain dongles (what are they actually called?) down to a point, but I suspect they might be hollow so actually that wouldn't work, and also I imagine you don't have a spare one lying around. But there might be some form of plastic rod out there that would, and if it was already plastic you wouldn't have to seal it with resin afterward. I think.

That would probably work! I have not tried it because I do not have any spare plastic doohickeys lying around 

If I come by any spare plastic doohickeys I'll try that one too.

Aww good for him!

Jellybean’s next video is a survey of various methods of constructing doll clothes and accessories she came up with as a small child. She recommends not emulating her child self in the following ways:

A) If you’re going to use candy wrappers as a craft supply you should probably wash them first

B) Probably don’t destroy fully functional brooms in pursuit of straw with which to construct tiny nonfunctional brooms for witch dolls, there have got to be better ways.

C) That foamy fabric stuff is on the coathangers for a reason, if you’re going to harvest them as a craft supply make sure they’re YOUR coathangers

consider: your child self was adorable

I mean yes but also all children are adorable

a fair point, but not all of them are presented so charmingly!

well. it's your fault I'm doing this at all

an outcome I am glad to be faulted for

you SHUSH YOUR CUTE MOUTH

never!