A Living History

I can still remember the first piece of crocheting I ever saw. It was a small yellow doily, surrounded by lavender pansies, in the living room of the parsonage, and my seven- or eight-year-old mind thought that it was the most wonderful creation in the world. "They look just like real pansies!"

"It is only crocheting," sniffed my mother. "Come over here and sit down and be quiet."

Not too long after that, I saw a wondrous white lace table centerpiece. It sat like an angel's crown, stiffly starched into curved ruffles, in the center of a polished dining room table in a home where we had gone to sell eggs. "Look at the beautiful lace, Mama!" To a child inured to the grinding poverty of worn-out, mended, and faded artifacts of the Great Depression, it was the loveliest thing I had ever seen.

"Hush, child, and mind your manners. It is not real lace; it is only crochet," scolded my mother. "Belgian lace is the only real lace," said Mama, who also thought that "genuine oil painting" was the only real art.

"Would you like to touch it, little girl?" asked the nameless woman of the house.

"No," interrupted Mother. "She may not touch anything." Which only made me love the lace more.

And then, for my graduation from the eighth grade, my grandmother in Louisiana sent me a white drawstring bag with bands of inset white roses. "Look at the beautiful lace roses," I cried, happy to own something beautiful for myself.

"It is only crochet," sniffed my Aunt Martha. "Venetian rose point lace is the only real lace."

Undaunted, I asked, "Could I learn how to do it?"

"Poor people do crochet," sniffed my older sister. "Fine ladies do needlepoint." But I treasured that white cotton drawstring handbag embellished with roses and vowed that someday I would make lace like that.

For the second daughter of a struggling middle class couple, born in the midst of the Great Depression, that day came sooner than anyone could have imagined. When I was fourteen, I went to work after school and on weekends at the Woolworth's 5 and 10 cent on California Street in Huntington Park, California. I worked in a dark corner of the store in the Art Needlework Department (at fifty cents an hour) under the tutelage of a stern and proper woman named Margaret Mines. At the end of the first day she said, "Well, if you're going to work here, you're going to have to learn to crochet and to knit. Here —" She handed me a ball of royal blue Coats and Clark Knit-Cro-Sheen, an instruction book, and a ten-cent steel Boye crochet hook.

I learned — because I needed the job. I went home and I struggled, as a young high school student does, with freshman Spanish and first-year algebra and the steel hook and the dark blue thread. It took me a long time to figure out that you have to rotate the throat of the hook down to face the ground in order for the loop to slip off. It seemed that the Spanish alphabet and basic equations (A+B=10) were easier to understand than "sc in 2nd ch sk 2, dc in next st ..."

I did make a purse of double crochet shells out of the dark blue Coats and Clark Knit-Cro-Sheen, then graduated to delicate lace edgings on the many cloth handkerchiefs we used in the days before Kleenex. By the time that was accomplished, my fondest dreams were on other things than roses and starched lace — a scholarship to college and dates with boys to relieve the tedium. I had all I could do to go to school, help out at home, and work besides. There was no time or energy to indulge myself in lavender pansies or elegant white thread roses. It would be years — decades — before I ventured into crochet again.

When my sons began to go off to college, I went to work as "The Knitting Lady" at Buffum's Department Store in Pomona, California, where advice and problem solving were offered to patrons who purchased crocheting, knitting, and needlepoint supplies there.

On the first day, the first customer brought in a badly clobbered attempt to make a cloverleaf pattern edging along with the badly written printed directions. The photo in the brochure and the written directions did not match. I had to figure out what was wrong and then write out the corrected directions. The second customer brought in a half-made vest and the instructions to finish it. "I don't know what 'dec 2 dc in nxt dc' means or how to do it." I didn't either. Together we looked at the photo, reread the instructions, and figured it out.

At that time I weighed 113 pounds and measured 34-24-36 and could wear all styles of wonderful clothes — and I did. I made myself a gorgeous "Irish rose" blouse. (Now my granddaughters Gia and Pilar play "ancient days" dress-up in the attic with it.)

After I wrote Knitting in Plain English (and it was a success), my editor, Barbara Anderson, suggested I write the same kind of book for crocheting. So I did, and this is it. I hope you enjoy!

A Short, Incomplete, and Possibly Inaccurate History of Crocheting

Strangely, there is very little recorded history about crocheting. There are few ancient pieces in museums, no old woodcuts showing men and women sitting around a fire crocheting, and few references to it in the diaries and histories of the time. This lack of references seems strange, because of all the textile arts, crocheting is the easiest, the most versatile, and perhaps the most beautiful.

The first time that researchers have found any mention at all of crochet is in the 1840s, about the time of the Irish potato famine. Oh, there were rudiments of it, learned and lost, in a Southwest Native American culture as an inner structure to coiled and slab pottery, but no real crocheting to make fabric. There is some suggestion that it may have developed in Scotland to make "ruggies," but why so late in the history of women and men when clothing the body has always been a fearsome challenge, and decorating it such a delight?

Why, when all that is required to crochet is a ball of twine and a...