Hooked for Life (4 page)

Soon crocheted afghans were all the rage. A clever crocheter could make something unique and lovely without ever having to leave her home country! And the word
afghan
came to represent any kind of crocheted blanket no matter how it was made or assembled, and people who had never given a thought to the country of Afghanistan wound up with afghans all over their homes.

I have noticed in recent years that many publications now refer to crocheted blankets as
throws
rather than
afghans.
I don’t know if the term
afghan
has become politically incorrect, or if the switch is an attempt to modernize our shared crochet language—afghans turn into throws, granny squares into motifs. But I prefer historical language to hip, so I still make afghans… lots and lots of them, one piece or strip or section at a time.

It amazes me today that so many crocheters make so many afghans—afghan patterns are among the most popular books and downloads. There just can’t be as many naked sofas and beds in the world as there are afghans being made. But then I look at my daughter with her two current favorites, and I get it. Afghans might be acquired during a specific point in your life, even birth! But they go with you from place to place, a little (or a large) marker of an earlier, perhaps simpler time.

When she was very small, my daughter picked out a pattern from a booklet and begged me to make her a ripple afghan in neon colors, with appliquéd lizards and cactus all over it. Of course I did it. In her mind, that blanket conjured up happy memories of a trip we made to Arizona—it was her desert afghan, and she loved it, even though the colors made me (and everyone else who watched me make it) cringe.

Five years later, her tastes are somewhat more refined (thank goodness), and that neon blanket doesn’t match a darn thing in her recently redecorated room. But she won’t take it off her bed. It isn’t that she doesn’t have a more color-coordinated bed cover, or that she really needs the blanket for heat, it’s that it contains not only my love for her in a general way, but a specific set of memories that she treasures. I can see that blanket getting packed for college and then for her first apartment—its worth to her far more important than its utility.

The other afghan she keeps near was made for her by my mother, who spent hours and hours working traditional granny squares like the ones that inspired me to learn to crochet so many years ago. Despite suffering from arthritis in her hands, my mother wanted to make something for my daughter so that her granddaughter would always have some Mom-mom love close to hand when she needed it. When my daughter is sad or injured or sick with a cold, that Mom-mom blanket is never far away. An afghan can be a woolly hug—and who in the world can’t use more hugs?

A
lot of crochet projects in the earlier part of the twentieth century were not completely crocheted, but involved crocheting an edging onto something else. Hankies were a big hit to edge—even with the most delicate hook and thread, you could get one finished in a pretty short amount of time. And no self-respecting lady would be caught dead without a hankie. I suspect prettily edged hankies made great gifts, too. In the days when I was scouring estates to find vintage linens to sell, I found the best collections of handkerchiefs in homes that belonged to teachers or nurses, perhaps because they received many of these foldable tokens of esteem during a career of giving service to others.

Sheets and pillowcases received their share of edging treatments, sometimes with deep crocheted lace borders in white or cream, other times with brightly colored edgings to go with embroidered flowers or scenes. There was a time when Southern belles in their crinolines were
very popular on pillowcases—maybe to match the bed doll and the toilet paper cover as well? I don’t know how Southern belle got to be a decorating style—I think the movie version of
Gone With the Wind
may have a lot to answer for.

It was a short hop along the linen closet from the sheet shelf to the towel shelf. Delicate woven linen hand towels had lacy borders attached, and even terry-cloth towels could do with a decorative edging in heavier thread.

My favorite towel edging treatment brings back memories of my childhood. My mother’s friend Laurie cut terry-cloth kitchen towels in half, tacked down the cut edge with blanket stitch, and crocheted handy-dandy little handles on them that you could fold through the handle of your refrigerator or stove and fasten with a button, so the towel was always where you needed it. Laurie was quite fond of making these and we had some for every season—orange and brown on a Thanksgiving towel in the fall, red and green on a Christmas towel, and so on. The changing of the fridge towel heralded the coming of a new season in our house!

Edgings are really popular today. It is quite stylish to put a crocheted edge on just about anything from a garment to all sorts of linens, hankies, and felted items. Just stay away from the crinoline girls—they tend to spread and take over a home’s decor when you aren’t looking.

I think edgings are serving another, broader purpose in our time. A lot of knitters are learning to crochet so they can finish off their knits. The more they wind up with a hook in their hand, the more converts we will have to the art of crochet! Mwa ha ha ha ha…

I
don’t know why toilet paper covers get such a bad rap. On the surface they seem like such a great idea—everyone has a spare roll stashed somewhere in the bathroom, and you don’t just want it laying there on the back of the tank as if you brought it home from the grocery store and forgot to put it away. So why not cover it in some pretty crochet so it looks like decor rather than something you dropped?

Except it seems like many anticrochet types use toilet paper roll covers as Exhibit A in their list of reasons why crochet stinks. I think the real culprit is not toilet paper covers in general, but those that look like dolls in particular. It was a trend that all of us of a certain age are familiar with—not only did our mothers have one (or more) in our bathrooms, but every house we visited had one, too. Some of them had actual plastic doll parts in the middle, complete with female
proportions not found in nature, sticky-feeling hair that can never be untangled, and glassy eyes that sort of stared at you unblinkingly.

It was bad enough when they were just sitting there being decorative, but the worst thing was when you wound up actually needing the spare toilet paper roll and had to practically dismember a Southern belle to get to it. If you thought it was looking at you before, you really thought you were getting some nasty glares when you reached up under its skirt and yanked its oddly truncated body (the plastic parts were all pretty much torso on up, as I recall in my nightmares) out of the cardboard tube. And then what did you do with it? Put its desiccated form back on the tank or the shelf that it formerly occupied? Take it to your hostess and mention that it needed a refill? Emily Post did not cover in any of her columns the etiquette of rifling through a toilet paper-stuffed doll.

Many years past the heyday of the covered TP, contemporary crocheters seem to be taking back the form, making interesting, witty patterns to hide the toilet paper instead of relying solely on the old ones. I am particularly fond of one found on the Internet that looks like a sushi roll! If we celebrate what others mock, we take away their weapons. The spare roll still has to go somewhere, doesn’t it? And within reach of the seat seems to me to be a fine idea compared to the darkest reaches of the hall closet, for obvious reasons. I think I feel a new project coming on…

G
auge, or tension, is the fine art of making sure you get the same number of stitches and rows per inch as the designer did. If she got four double crochets to the inch and you are getting three or five (or two or seven), you are going to have some serious sizing issues. And size matters. Even for a scarf, you don’t want something to turn out to be 3 inches wide if you had intended it to be 6 inches, or 18 inches wide, either, for that matter. Don’t ask me how I know, let’s just say I have some personal experience with the “you don’t need to worry about gauge on scarves” school of thought. My personal experience is two feet wide and nine feet long, and despite the fact that I am a tall person, when I wear this scarf—and I do—I need to arrange it artfully lest I look like I am being devoured by blue merino.

If you are getting more stitches and rows to the inch than you should, you need to go up in hook size until you get where you need to be. If you
are getting less stitches or rows to the inch, you need to go down a hook size or more. Or sometimes, it’s the yarn substitution you made that is throwing you—you might need a thicker or thinner yarn to obtain the right gauge. Or the needle material—metal is slipperier than bamboo and switching from one to the other can change your gauge. Or if you are happy with your crocheted fabric, you can redo all the math in the pattern to make it work out for the gauge you are happy with, or go up or down a size from what you would normally make to accommodate the difference. Or you could do one of these two things:

For tight crocheters:
Just add water. Fermented water, that is—a glass of wine or three or a couple of beers is bound to loosen up a too-tight gauge. Just make sure you knock back a few each time you want to crochet or your gauge will be inconsistent throughout the project. This technique might interfere with an accurate stitch count, but hey, we are talking about gauge here.

For loose crocheters:
Watch the evening news, call your least favorite relative, or do your income taxes. All of these are likely to make you at least a little tense, and you will tighten up a loosey-goosey gauge in no time. Alternate these activities with other guaranteed stress producers throughout and not only will your gauge be right on, you will be so happy to sit down and crochet instead of doing anything else that you will get a lot of crocheting done in no time.

See? Gauge is important, but there are many techniques available to you to help you achieve your goals.

Oh and I forgot one more—check for pattern errata. There may have been a misprint in the stated gauge, yarn weight, or hook size. Oops…

E
ven being the up-with-crochet type of person that I am, there are certain items that cause me to wonder what exactly the crocheter was thinking when she thought making this was the best use of her leisure time. Beer-can hats come to mind. Come on, you’ve all seen them—there are even some fine folks out there making new patterns up for them. Someone thought it was a great idea to cut the fronts of beer cans out, poke some holes around the edges, crochet around them, and then join them into a fun and frivolous hat to wear in public. And then, instead of running in horror, many thousands of other crocheters said, “Hey, that’s a swell idea! I want to make one too!” And a fad was born.

Now, there are all sorts of fads I wish I could wipe from my memory: pet rocks, shoulder pads that made you look like a linebacker, neon-colored clothing for anyone past the age of five. But the beer-can hat has haunted generations of crocheters with the mockery it has attracted.
Many awful fads fade gently into the mists of time and better taste; however, the beer-can hat, like a zombie in a sci-fi flick, just won’t die.

As for the first designer, I can only assume that she consumed in rapid order the number of beers she used in the hat. She was sitting there with her crocheting, a little soused, and thought, “I could totally crochet around those and it would be SO cool! Honey, get the tin snips—I’m going in!” She must have sobered up eventually, so why did she share her idea with the world? And why on earth did the world respond with hearty approbation?

Perhaps the beer-can hats were a subtle form of revenge. The crocheter wasn’t the beer drinker in the household but wanted to get one over on the person who was. “I’ll just turn these empties into a craft project and shame my husband/daughter/best friend into wearing it to the football game. They will look even more like idiots than they already do after a six-pack, and I will be able to laugh quietly in the corner. Especially when they tell me how stupid I look crocheting in public.” This sounds more like the devious crocheters I know.

Beer-can hats were not the first fad that combined crochet and beverage consumption. Coming, I suppose, from the same instinct that brought us toilet paper roll covers and combined with the thrifty crocheter’s desire to use anything and every possible material in her crochet, I give you the soda-bottle-cap trivet. The idea was to individually cover a handful of soda caps with a cover of crochet in purple variegated thread, sew them all together in a bunch-of-grape-like configuration, tack on a few thread leaves in green at the top and—voilà!—a delightful item to place on your kitchen table to protect it from hot serving dishes.

You can’t blame this fad on the contents of the bottles—I don’t think people get drunk from soda consumption. Perhaps the creators were nipping into the vino instead of the grape Nehi. And while I know the metal
bottle caps were supposed to keep the heat from damaging the table, I am not exactly sure how anyone thought having scratchy ridged metal poking through the thread was not going to scratch the table, especially with ten pounds of cast iron and chili sitting on top of them. But this fad, too, swept the world of crochet—I can’t tell you how many of these grapey trivets I found in my estate sale-stalking days.

Today, there is a bit of a fad for crocheted coffee cozies. Instead of using the paper cup holder from the coffee shop or deli, you crochet a thick ring of fiber to wrap snugly around your to-go cup, where it will protect your fingers from the heat. I love these from an environmental standpoint—it has to be better to have a reusable finger protection device than to throw one away every day, and they are a great way to use up scraps that might otherwise get thrown away (if you are one of those people who can throw out yarn). But as a crochet project, I find them a little disappointing. By the time I get going and sit back to relax and get in my crochet zone, I am finished with it. At least I don’t think crocheted coffee cozies are going to embarrass us to future generations, unlike the beer-can hats.