Hooked for Life (3 page)

I
do not know where, historically, the crocheter’s deep-seated need to cover inanimate objects with crochet was born. It might have been during the Victorian era. Crochet’s first big heyday occurred during a period of time in which home decor was fussy to the point of near-clutter, when there was a cover for anything from a leg of lamb to a table leg that had anything to do with any part of the body—anything at all that might in the longest stretch of the imagination be remotely considered carnal.

Tables had doilies, upholstered furniture had antimacassars, and cases and covers were made for everything from sewing needles to lingerie to items whose original purpose is shrouded in the mists of time. No surface left unadorned, no small item without its proper covering. The Victorian crocheter never ran out of projects to make for her home, which served the dual purpose of keeping her personal domain in style and showing off her accomplishments as a needlewoman.

I believe the toilet paper cover craze is the spiritual descendent of the Victorians. One couldn’t possibly leave something as pedestrian as a roll of toilet paper out in the open for the world to see—how vulgar!—and yet it needs by its very nature to be close at hand. So cover it in crochet so that it is decorative as well as useful! Does toilet paper actually need to be covered to perform its function? No. Does it need to be protected from the elements by a thick coating of yarn? No. Does any crocheter anywhere actually think she can trick you into thinking that what you are looking at is really not a spare roll of toilet paper? Probably not. But it is there, and so it must be covered. Afghans, when you think about it, are just sofa or bed covers, right?

What amuses me to no end today is the enormous number of patterns available so that the crocheter can cover with crochet all of the electronic devices within a 500-yard range of her hook. IPod cozies, laptop cases, cell phone covers… we are now covering up items our Victorian ancestors never even dreamed of. I almost understand the electronics-covering rationale—a cell phone could in fact get dropped or scratched, and a crocheted cover might protect it from damage. But as fast as we blow through electronics, I have to think by the time your laptop gets scratched up due to lack of a crocheted cover, you will be ready to buy a new one anyway.

Makes one wonder what the crocheters of the future will be making covers for, doesn’t it? I can pretty much guarantee they will be making covers for something…

T
he lure of thread is powerful. For those who feel its call, there is nothing like it. You are the master of the tiny hook and the delicate thread; you can carry around a month’s worth of crochet in the palm of your hand (unlike, say, an afghan junkie); you can use your crochet to beautify yourself and your home. And you will never be bored with your work because thread projects have endless stitch and pattern variations. I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a threadie. I need my Finished Object (FO) gratification way quicker than a thread project can provide me with my limited threadie skills. What I don’t quite get is the proliferation of doilies. Some of us, my friends, have what I might call a doily problem.

I think there is something inherently beautiful about the contrast of a delicate piece of crocheted lace against a polished wood surface. A doily centerpiece on a dark wood table? I am so there. The problem, for
me, comes when the doilies proliferate—now there are two on the sideboard, one on each shelf of the glass-fronted china cabinet, and a few more on the table. Next thing you know, the doilies have marched into the living room—tacked with pins onto the backs and arms of all of the upholstered furniture.

At least this practice is rooted in purpose. In the olden days, fashionable men used a gooey substance called Macassar oil in their hair to give it gloss and sheen. It also gave the furniture a big old grease stain should someone so anointed lean back in his chair. So the chair doily, called
antimacassar
by the Victorians for just that reason, protected the furniture—it could be washed and freshened up much more easily than the upholstery could be.

The doilies-on-furniture craze lasted well past the era of Macassar oil, and I have noticed the look is sneaking back into the public eye. It is a very pretty, vintage/retro sort of look. But beware, you will be chasing those doilies all over the house because by and large your guests are not sitting in your chairs sipping tea and nibbling cucumber sandwiches—they are acting the way people in the new millennium act. The Victorian hostess didn’t have to deal with folks throwing things at the television during an election year or the Super Bowl, kids running through the room to check in, or Cheetos dust. Unless you are planning on hot-gluing those lacy bad boys down, they are going to migrate.

Doilies can be very pretty in the bathroom, too—edging a shelf or under a soap dish. And heck, if you are doily crazed, pretty soon you are going to run out of flat surfaces to cover in the main rooms; you’ll have to expand your search for an area that could benefit from a bit of lace. Just be on the lookout for those heathens in your household who might dry their hands or wipe off their makeup with the closest thing available, even if that thing is not a towel or a tissue. Until you nip that little issue
in the bud, you will spend more time washing and blocking your doilies than crocheting new ones. However, if you have a doily addiction, this may be a good thing.

When all horizontal flat surfaces have been ornamented to the doily maker’s satisfaction, it’s time to cover the vertical flat surfaces, the walls. Intricate doilies can be framed in such a way that each and every perfectly executed stitch can be seen and admired, yet since they are framed you neither have to chase them around nor worry that someone will damage them. On the wall, the doily looks like what it is—a cunningly wrought piece of artwork. In fact, I often prefer doilies on the wall to ones hidden under other objets d’art. I get that doilies serve a useful purpose by protecting that highly polished wood from some object that might scratch it. But what makes me nuts is that if you place something like a candlestick on top of a six-inch doily, you can’t see the pretty pattern in the center anymore. You spent many happy hours making a gorgeous lace circle, and all anyone can see is the scalloped border. I won’t say that’s a waste of time, because I know you had a good time making it. But if a piece of crochet is displayed, I want to see it, darn it!

When the wall space too becomes crowded, it might be time for a bigger house. If that is not an option, it might be time to switch to a bigger project that will take more time to complete. I hear that king-size thread bedspreads will soon be all the rage…

W
hat cause? Well, pretty much any cause. I do not know what it is in my nature that makes me react to any tragedy in the world by picking up my hook and some yarn and making something for someone somewhere, but I do know that I am far from alone in my reaction.

One thing that makes crochet such a natural fit for charitable giving is the speed with which you can make something useful. I made a chemo cap the other night for a local hospital that worked up so quickly it drew a few startled looks from the ladies at my Sit and Stitch night. “Didn’t you just start that?” one of the other members asked. Yup, started it, screwed it up, ripped some out, finished the cap, and all in about an hour and a half.

Actually, if I may digress as I sometimes do into my half-cocked ideas about the history of crochet, there seems to have been a relationship between crochet and charitable giving practically since its inception.

I found a book printed in 1898 that taught the ladies how to run a charity bazaar or “fancy fair” to raise money for others.

In other words, crocheting for a cause gave otherwise idle hands purpose and meaning, and the money raised for a good cause went to, well, a good cause. The author went on to lament the preponderance of antimacassars, pincushions, and tennis aprons (whatever those are) and went on to propose almost four hundred pages of other items that could be crocheted or knitted or sewn or painted so they could be sold. There were hints on crocheted items from bookmarks to petticoats to baskets to rugs—anything for a buck, so long as that buck was going to the needy.

The potato famine in Ireland brought about a different sort of charitable endeavor. Women were encouraged not to crochet items for others, but to buy crocheted items made by women who would otherwise have little or no income of their own. The maker and the purchaser were joined across thousands of miles by the slenderest of threads—but connected nonetheless.

Contemporary crocheters make thousands of items for all sorts of charities—blankets for Project Linus and for pet shelters, warm hats and scarves for those who need them, clothing for hard-to-fit premature infants, soft hats for those who lose their hair due to the ravages of cancer and its treatment. You can make any sort of crocheted item that appeals
to you and find someone, somewhere, who needs it—you get the pleasure of your craft and of doing for others, and the recipient knows not only the warmth of the item but the warm feelings it contains. In this transaction the human element is as important as the fiber one—the maker has given from the heart as well as from the wallet, and the receiver knows that someone cares enough to make something for them with their own two hands.

Comfort, both physical and spiritual, is the name of the game for items crocheted for charity. Whether they are in the same room or on opposite sides of the country or planet, sometimes a group of people tied together by a crochet group online or in real life, get together to provide comfort to someone who has suffered a loss by making an afghan as a group project. Crochet is the perfect craft for a joint effort, because it is so much easier for each crocheter to make a square and send it to a central location for assembly than to pass a piece of knitting around and have everyone work a few rows. Like participants in the quilting bees of the past, we can come together and make the work of keeping people warm go more quickly. We take pleasure not just in knowing that our work will be appreciated, although that is a lovely feeling, but in the fact that we took care of business together. We draw strength and companionship from one another, and pour it into our work, until that comfortghan is positively vibrating with fond feelings. This finished project warms people from within and without, everyone who touches it, no matter what their role.

I once read a post on an online bulletin board in which a poster said that charity crochet was a stupid idea—a way for crocheters to pass off shoddy, second-rate goods and to pretend to themselves that they were doing good, when they should just write a check instead if they felt strongly about a cause. And that post still bothers me a few years later.

Obviously, the crocheter gets something positive out of making something for others, be it pride in stash reduction, learning a new technique, or making something fun to make that she might otherwise not have a use for. We all love to crochet, and sometimes it’s cool to have a socially acceptable reason to do it all the time. “Yes,” you can say to the passer-by with the raised eyebrow, “I do crochet a lot, but look at all the preemie caps I made for the hospital!” Charity crochet can give us validation that we may not get otherwise, and that even the most militant of us sometimes need.

Just as obviously, there are times when a check is a better donation than an afghan. Although I wanted to make blankets for Hurricane Katrina victims, I knew that finding shelter and food was a more pressing need for most of those affected, so I sent a check first and made granny squares later.

But my crocheted items send a message that cold hard cash does not. They tell the recipients that someone cares about them. They provide warmth, both physical and emotional, because as everyone from Mr. Scrooge on down will tell you, money isn’t everything. A trauma victim needs services, but he or she also needs, on a visceral level, personal connection.

Cash cannot replace love, but crochet is a pretty good substitute.

F
ashion for the female has always had a place in the development of the art of crochet. But crochet has also had a large role in the creation of fashions for the home. For many people who learn to crochet, their first project is not something to adorn their body but something that is more likely to adorn the family room sofa: an afghan.

I have been curious for some time about why an afghan is called an afghan. When I was small with limited knowledge about world citizens and their names,
afghan
meant a crocheted blanket, not a person from Afghanistan. The etymology of the word never meant much to me one way or the other.

As best I can tell, brightly colored fabric from the country of Afghanistan traveled home throughout the nineteenth century with various UK citizens that spent their time in the East. (Or getting kicked out of the East—check out the Anglo-Afghan Wars I, II, and III.) If
you look at Afghani textiles from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (coincidentally the time when interest in crochet was picking up steam), you will see large pieces of fabric with repeating motifs, some of which are square, with contrasting colors and textures. And in Europe these pieces were most often used as home decor, no matter what their original purpose was. Shawls and wall hangings doubled as throws, smaller pieces were used as cushion or tray covers; it is no great leap in logic to see an industrious crocheter at the turn of the last century replicating the parts she admired in the imported textile with her hook.