Authors: Mary Beth Temple
Hooked for Life (2 page)
T
here is a fair amount of well-documented knitting history, with centuries-old fragments of knitted items on display at museums around the world. For crochet, not so much. You might think assembling a crochet history would be fairly easy. No matter whose theories you believe in regarding crochet’s origins, it is generally agreed that crochet in its modern form is not nearly as old as knitting, and a shortish history should be easier to compile than a long one. At least that was what I thought, until I spent several days at a major research library, buried in the oldest crochet books and patterns I could find. Granted, I am not a scholar by training or inclination; however, as I make my living as a freelance writer, I know how to gather cogent facts. But the idea I concocted that I could dive into some crochet book from the 1840s and there would be an introduction that talked about crochet’s history, turned out to be overly optimistic.
So I offer you the details of my research and some amusing bits and bobs I picked up along the way Not to tell you that I have had a eureka moment and can provide you with a concise and witty history of the craft we love, but to share what I do know in the hopes that someone else will continue on where I left off, and that if nothing else, my search is an entertaining story
One of the questions that has been burning in my brain, is why
isn’t
there a popular, definitive history book on crochet? And while I am not one to politicize every area of my life, I can’t help thinking that a lot of it hinges on my impression that in the days when each was new, knitting was something that men did and crocheting was something that women did. I found this quote that told me that I was not the only one to have this thought:
In all ages women may lament the ungallant silences of the historian. His pen is the record of sterner actions than are usually the vocation of the gentler sex, and it is only when fair individuals have been by extraneous circumstances thrown out, as it were, on the canvas of human affairs
—
when they have been forced into a publicity little consistent with their natural sphere
—
that they have become his theme. Consequently those domestic virtues which are woman’s greatest pride, those retiring characteristics which are her most becoming ornament, those gentle occupations which are her best employment, find no record on pages whose chief aim and end is the blazoning of manly heroism, of royal disputations, or of trumpet-stirring records. And if this is the case even with historians of enlightened times, who have the gallantry to allow women to be a component part of creation, we can hardly wonder that in darker days she should be utterly and entirely overlooked.
—Mrs. Henry Owen, Countess of Wilton,
The Illuminated Book of Needlework,
1847
The countess was talking about all sorts of needlework, not just crochet, but she does have a chapter on crochet in her book. No more tasty tidbits on its origins, though—I have to admit I was disappointed by that. I also had to note that while she lamented the lack of women’s influence on history, her byline identified her as “Mrs. Henry Owen,” not “what-ever-the-countess’s-first-name-happened-to-be Owen. “The poor woman churns out hundreds of pages and gets her husband’s name on the cover!
The earliest books on crochet I could find were printed in 1846 but the timing could be just as much due to the increasing ease of book production and printing at that time as it is with crochet’s popularity. Meaning there weren’t as many books on any subject printed prior to the mid-1830s—the process was just too expensive. Early patterns were short and sweet, and often did not have much in the way of illustration. Some of my very favorites showed a line drawing of a hook at the beginning and then instructed the reader to get a hook about the size of the one in the picture, or started a round by stating the crocheter should make a starting chain about this big and go on from there. I have always thought that crocheters in general were very visually oriented and now I wonder if that is because our patterns have always been visual instead of text heavy. I can only imagine the confusion at the local yarn store (LYS), however, if we all went in there with pictures of hooks and yarn and asked for those exact supplies—now if we could just all agree to go metric instead of U.S. number/U.S. letter/maybe the metric size—but that is another story.
So I am still hunting for crochet origins, and I find this:
This pretty and useful fancy work first became fashionable about the year 1838, although it was practiced in nunneries as early as the sixteenth century. The stitch is so simple
that anyone can learn to work it; it requires less care and attention in counting than knitting, and can be more easily taken out if wrong. At the same time, the finer kinds such as Irish point, raised rose, and Honiton crochet are almost as beautiful as lace, and demand much skill and patience.
—
Knitting and Crochet: A Guide to the Use of the Needle and
the Hook,
edited by Mrs. Croly, 1887. Note Mrs. Croly still
doesn’t have a first name, but at least it isn’t her husband’s!
Nineteenth-century crocheters were the spiritual ancestors of today’s “threadies”—they made fine-gauge crochet in silk, cotton, and linen, especially lace patterns, to use as dress fronts and trimming for underclothes and fancy dresses. There is some speculation that the reason crochet developed when it did was because of the increasing availability of affordable commercially spun threads. Homespun threads are by their very nature a tad inconsistent in thickness, even when made by a spinner of exceptional skill. But since the ladies wanted lace that was both affordable and relatively quick to make, smooth consistent thread—and lots and lots of it—was absolutely necessary. Then, as now, several pattern books were sponsored by thread manufacturers to point out how wonderful their products were.
A lot of what we recognize today as nineteenth- and early twentieth-century crocheted lace is known as Irish crochet. Irish home workers (and eventually those from other countries) were taught to make beautiful crocheted lace out of individually made elements or “subjects,” joined with a free-form sort of filet background into a dress front or collar, or other sort of fashionable garment piece. For many years, the purchaser of a piece of Irish crochet could not only stay in fashion but know that her purchase was helping a woman feed her family.
Lest we think that at least Irish crochet has a straightforward history, I went on to read:
Irish crochet did not originate in Ireland. A clever Frenchwoman of the last century, Mlle. Riego de la Blanchardière, succeeded in imitating, in crochet, the old Venetian Needle-Point Lace, and this was introduced into Ireland by some English ladies anxious to help the peasantry, impoverished by the potato famine of 1846. The cottagers not only learnt to make the new patterns, but added to them, and improved them, and, ever since, Irish crochet has been a valuable cottage industry in Ireland.
—Mary Card,
Book of Crochet, Number 3,
1925
Ms. Card—at last boasting her own first name—went on to say, “The art has now been brought to perfection, and is practiced in perhaps every country of Europe, each adding something of grace, beauty, or ingenuity to the common fund of designs.”
Mlle. Riego de la Blanchardière was not shy about taking credit for the invention of Irish crochet. In the introduction to her 1886 book
The Irish Lace Instructor
she writes:
I am but continuing what I did when the industry was first started, having aided them far more than is now generally known. For I may claim that all this class of work owes its origins to me
[sic]
early books, as Crochet Lace did not exist before the publication of my first one on that subject, which appeared in 1846, about the time of the dreadful famine in Ireland. With the help I then gave, the poor of that country soon learnt my ‘new lace’ as it was then called;
Schools and Classes were formed, many ladies of the highest position then as now devoting their time to teaching and selling the work, with so much energy and kind feeling that the enterprise for a long time was a great benefit to those who were, and still are, so much in need of assistance.
Mlle, was quite fond of the patronage of ladies of the highest position, and had a selection of letters that she included in her book just to prove she hobnobbed with the best of them.
Fashion for the body was primary, but then, as now, some crocheters spent most of their time crocheting fine fashions for their homes. Home decor items of the period were still light and airy: tray cloths, doilies, edgings for napkins and hand towels. Larger projects included curtains and valances, tablecloths, and bedspreads, all finely wrought in thread, and all taking up the kind of time that none of us seem to have anymore. I can’t imagine squeezing in the amount of hours to crochet some of these lace pieces must have taken to make.
Wool crochet, or crochet with yarn, seems to have become popular in the early twentieth century. “Now that every grown-up is making woolly things, the little girl will want to be doing likewise,” wrote Flora Klickmann, a popular and prolific needlecraft author of the time, in 1915. The 1925 edition of Weldon’s
Book of Needlework
agrees:
Of late years there has been a great fashion for garments in crochet of all sorts, and this fashion shows no sign at all of dying out. Besides ties, shawls and dressing jackets, we now have children’s dresses and hats, and ladies’ dresses, cloaks and coats and skirts carried out in a variety of charming stitches, while the jumper
[British for “sweater”],
above all, maintains its supremacy.
Crochet in wool gives a charming soft effect, and many crochet stitches look particularly well when carried out in this medium.
There were not a lot of photographs of garments on models in the early twentieth-century books I found, but one of them had a beautiful shot of a woman wearing what I would call a shrug. I was quite surprised as I thought this was a relatively recent clothing development, but there it was in black and white called a “hug-me-tight” in the caption. Wristlets in fine silk were also popular patterns—and I had thought the craze for fingerless gloves was a recent one, too!
The popularity of crocheting with yarn at this time also lead to the early days of crocheted afghans. The Depression fueled the afghan craze to some extent, as an afghan could be made up of scraps from other projects, and using every readily available material was a thrifty way to beautify your home when times were hard.
The separation of crochet and knitting does not seem to be much in evidence in its early days. Although I found several crochet books in the stacks, I found much more material in books on both crocheting and knitting, or about needlework in general. Ladies did all sorts of needlework, and several large nineteenth-century tomes provided instruction in knitting, crocheting, embroidery, needlepoint, and even macramé and tatting. In such books, knitting and crochet went hand in hand in several garments—I started seeing combination patterns for garments in yarn as early as 1915.
To crochet and knit during the 1940s was almost a patriotic act. Making garments instead of buying them during the textile-short years of WWII was much encouraged. The 1940s also brought us the pineapple craze. “Decorative as well as delightful, the pineapple is the all American favorite design,” wrote Elizabeth L. Mathieson in
The Complete Book of
Crochet
in 1946. Grass-skirted maidens danced around in the illustrations for everything pineapple. I am guessing that the desire for pineapple patterns took root around the Hawaiian shirt craze that began in the 1930s, when Hollywood stars from Ginger Rogers to Bing Crosby wore their Hawaiian garb with style and panache.
Then, of course, came the 1960s and ‘70s, when it seems as if crocheted fashions took over the world overnight. Wildly colored shawls, skirts, and ponchos were seen on hippies and hipsters across the United States. This was a homegrown revolution—the flower child didn’t want to buy her clothing from an impersonal store, she wanted to make it herself. Although looking back on some of those trends now, we might laugh… it seems sort of silly to talk about living off the land while crocheting with 100 percent acrylic in acid trip-inspired colors—I think the beginning of today’s crochet pride can be seen during this era.
It might also have been the beginning of the divide between knitting and crocheting. Did those darned long-haired hippie-freak free love loud-clothing-wearing crocheters scare the knitters? I remember the craft magazines I found in my mother’s closet had all sorts of projects in them, in a variety of techniques, knitting sharing photo spreads with crocheting and embroidery. Back then, such women’s magazines as
Woman’s Day
and
Family Circle
also published needlework patterns in every issue. My particular favorites were the ones showing the best-selling patterns to make for craft fairs and bazaars.
And speaking of craft fairs, crochet has often had an impact on the economy one way or another—from nineteenth-century bazaars for charity, to Irish crochet, to hippies in the ‘70s selling their wild creations at the local head shop, and right up to today’s independent pattern publishers and Etsy.com sellers. The author of
Beetons Bazaar
in 1898 had some advice for the sellers of crochet that still applies today:
They should endeavor to sell as much as possible without annoying people. To be teased and worried to buy irritates most people, and does much harm to the cause. The medium between persecution and diffidence must be aimed at, and when attained, great results may be expected.
Words to live by in the business of crochet!
What’s coming next? Who knows? But I hope as crocheters live the history they are making, they take time to take notes. I don’t want the rest of our history to disappear into the sands of time with its beginnings.
