Hooked for Life

by Mary Beth Temple

  My, that was a long one, wasn’t it? Thank goodness, we have our crochet language to help us shorten our sentences or we would never be quiet long enough to get any crocheting done!

  One last example:

  “No, I haven’t started that sweater yet, I am still swatching to get gauge,” loosely translates to, “Even though it is a fall sweater and November is rapidly approaching like an oncoming freight train, I am making annoying little square after annoying little square after annoying little square in my pattern stitch, using every freaking sized hook I own (including using two sizes on alternate rows because I am just that anal retentive) because I cannot for the life of me get anything remotely resembling the number of stitches per inch that the designer got, and if I can’t solve this problem I am going to have a sweater to fit a three-year-old or the World’s Tallest Man, when what I wanted was a woman’s size medium. I think I am going back to afghans. And don’t ask me again!”

  As you spend more and more time in the crochet community, you, too, will pick up words to express your passion for crochet. And some of them you might actually be able to say in front of your children without fear that they will get in trouble for repeating them at school.

  Crocheting In Public

  If a poll were taken on hobbies, crochet would be found among the top five favorites. Certainly there are very few: hobbies you can take with you to luncheons, picnics, and Aunt Emma’s tea party… relaxing soothing and strictly non-strenuous, crochet is a complete rest—cure to be taken in easy sittings.

  —Elizabeth L. Mathieson, The Complete Book of Crochet, 1946

  I am rarely without a hook and a ball of yarn within grabbing distance. It’s as if I have a wooly umbilical cord that will only let me get so far away from the possibility of needlework, and I don’t want to get too far lest it snap and cut off some vital nutrients. Crochet, for me, is an ambulatory mood-altering substance that is both completely legal and unlikely to spill and make a mess. No matter how long I am stuck in traffic, how many people are in front of me in line, how late my daughter’s class runs leaving me stuck in the carpool lane, if I have something to crochet I am not wasting time. And therefore, I am less likely to want to murder whoever is responsible for the holdup. The world around me is a better place if I have some crocheting to do, both for me and for those I must interact with. Trust me on this, for I know it to be true.

  I started bringing crochet projects to school during the middle school years and quickly discovered which teachers cared and which didn’t. I am pretty sure I finished a poncho during eighth grade honors English—as long as my work was done and done well, Mr. Beckett didn’t care what I did with the other parts of my brain. Mr. James, however, who taught social studies, was insistent that he required my full attention and my hands to be still. I disliked Mr. James fairly intently—until it turned out he was a needleworker, too. He sat in on my sewing class one day (I have no idea why) and taught me a cool trick for untangling threads during hand sewing. But I digress. Middle school gave me the guidelines for crocheting through my continuing education—prove you know your stuff, quietly bring out some needlework at an opportune time, and see if the professor freaks out or not. If s/he does, give up for a while and try again after midterms. If s/he doesn’t, bonus!

  But what about those joyous occasions that require almost constant interaction with those around you, whether you like it or not? Situations that are arguably less stressful, such as luncheons, picnics, and Aunt Emma’s tea party? Madame Mathieson’s advice aside, there are often places where I am just itching to get some quality time with my current work-in-progress but experience has taught me that whipping out the hook is going to cause me some grief. Weddings, religious services, school plays, dance recitals … while I understand that these events take on epic proportions in the minds of those most directly involved, honestly, the rest of us could probably get by with half of our attention elsewhere. And with a little fiber in hand, we could probably get more enjoyment out of the event, at that! But start double-crocheting away at one of these events and you are bound to attract the ire of a noncrafty attendee.

  I am good at multitasking. I really will hear every word of the wedding vows even if I am making a sweater for the baby shower that I suspect is soon to follow. And in the unlikely event that I miss something, in this era of high technology there is bound to be a highlight reel available within forty-eight hours of the event.

  Of course, part of the reason I know I can handle all this multitasking is that I am very careful to match my projects to the affair. I plan for large events by bringing appropriate WIPs—even in my finishing-hungry delirium, I know better than to bring to Little Junior’s christening an entire throw or a lace pattern that requires me to count every row. But try explaining your considerate forethought to those around you who are firing you nasty “How could you?” looks. If it looks as if I am about to be strung up afterward by insulted parents and in-laws of those who are center stage, I usually cave in and put my crochet away—not because I think I am wrong, but because tea parties, like traffic jams, shall pass sooner rather than later. My crocheting will wait.

  Sometimes just knowing I could crochet if I wanted to is enough to get me through an event. I may know ahead of time in my heart of hearts that there is no possible way I could work on my shawl during Great-Great-Uncle Whatsit’s funeral without setting off World War III, or at the very least insulting a cousin or two whose feelings I would spare during this stressful time. But I’ll tuck the hook and the skein in my purse anyway … purely in case of emergency. I keep a fifth of good vodka in the freezer for much the same reason—I rarely need it, but knowing it is there and ready for me when and if I do is a comforting thought.

  Now, if only I could convince the nice lady at the gym that carrying around a pound of yarn that I know I won’t use is aerobic in nature. The gym, of course, is a social situation that does not lend itself to crochet. But only because I don’t want my yarn to get all sweaty or to entangle myself on the stair stepper to the point that I would need scissors to get away.

  Crochet on the Runway

  I have crocheted for years and years (and years, but I don’t like to admit to that last group). Crochet has always been fashion driven—it was popularized to glam up ladies dresses with lacy goodness—but recently it seems to be taking over the runways from Milan to Paris to New York.

  Now, I am not a big follower of fashion, as a brief glance at my wardrobe would attest. My daughter keeps threatening to put me on one of those television makeover shows, although could you imagine the bleeping if the host tried to throw out one of my crocheted tops? I suspect I would not be ladylike about that at all. But I do love paging through the fashion magazines—you know, the ones that are about the size of the New York phone book—and checking out all of the crochet.

  Some of it is more than a little odd. I know fashion design is supposed to be pushing the envelope, but some of these things should have stayed sealed up. And I just know that thirty years from now, knitters will be still be mocking us—not for the granny-square shrink tops from the ’70s but for some of the asymmetrical, oversized, randomly fitted “fashion” that is strolling down the catwalk today. And it won’t be the average, everyday crocheter who will have been responsible for these atrocities; it will be a big-name designer.

  Not that it’s all awful, by any means. There are some Seventh Avenue designers doing wonders with crocheted lace and beautifully tailored pieces that fit like a dream. Sometimes when I want a laugh, though, I stop in at a high-end store and look at the prices on a crocheted jacket—they can run into the thousands of dollars. I laugh not because I don’t think they are worth that—we all know the amount of time a beautifully finished garment can take so a few thousand dollars seems about right to me—but can you imagine what would happen if any of the thousands of crocheters who sell finished items tried to get those types of prices? There would be a panic in the shops! Because something tells me the maker of th
at sweater doesn’t get nearly as much money as the person whose name is on the label.

  Actually, as fashion styles trickle down through the price points, what bothers me is not the $3,000 sweater at Neiman Marcus but the $15 poncho at Target. Whoever made that crocheted garment, and if it is completely crocheted it was definitely a person not a machine, didn’t get paid nearly enough money for her work. I understand that the cost of living in whatever country she lives in is not the same as in the United States, but she probably got an hourly rate that we could pay with pocket change. If we train consumers to shop a discount store for crocheted fashion, then when they run across someone selling a few pieces for a fair rate, the customers think they are overpriced.

  Anyway, if fashion history tells us anything, it is that no one trend lasts for too long. If you like crocheting garments for family and friends to wear, quick, do some nowwhile they are still in style. I have crocheted when it was in style and I have crocheted when it wasn’t, so I know that we have to take advantage of our current stylistic cachet while it lasts. In a few years, only the crocheters will be wearing crocheted garments.

  The Crochet Time Warp

  I am an experienced crocheter—I have been doing it for decades. I should know how long it takes to make a stitch, a row, a sweater. Yet each and every time I set a firm deadline for a project I find I have underestimated the time I need to finish something by a rather large margin. If I say, “Yes, I can absolutely have that in the mail to you by Tuesday,” and it happens to be Thursday, I can pretty much guarantee you that the only way that would be possible without breaking any of the laws of physics would be if I neither slept, nor ate, nor took potty breaks. Those first two I might manage, but the last is problematic …

  I have been known to choose delivery services based on what time their lobby window closes rather than which one is cheaper or more reliable. For the record? The local UPS deadline is 1:00 P.M., the USPS is 5:00 P.M., and for those really desperate dashes, there is a FedEx a twenty-minute drive away that accepts packages until 8:30 P.M. You get a FedEx package from me, you can pretty much bet that I was weaving in ends until 8:29.

  Recently, I had an afghan to finish, and the crochet time warp was already on my mind, so I did a little math. I looked at all the pieces I had done and wrote down which pieces were not finished. I was on public transportation and was starting a new section so at the end of my forty-minute ride, I counted how many rows I had finished. Twenty rows in forty minutes (okay, they were pretty narrow rows) equals two minutes per row, give or take. When I got to the subway, the next leg of my journey, I used the calculator on my cell phone to figure out how many rows were left to do (X rows times two minutes, plus X hours to assemble the pieces and X more hours to crochet on an edging). When I started, I was guessing it would take about ten hours to finish the afghan but the calculator told me it was a bare minimum of twenty-eight and a half hours if all went well. As it happens, it took me about thirty hours. Ten hours? Ha! I wasn’t even close. Of course, how much crochet time did I have to comfortably make it to UPS? Twelve hours. Darn, FedEx again! And no sleep, and no meal breaks and—well you get the idea.

  The other facet of the crochet time warp is that when I have my crochet mojo going, time passes and I am completely unaware of it. Same project, different day … I had the house to myself and a deadline to make, so I sat down in front of a crime show marathon on cable TV and started to crochet. The marathon started at noon. I was going to town on the afghan border and my stomach started to growl a little, so I thought I might take a break and go get some lunch. It was a little darker than I expected—was there a rainstorm blowing in? No, it was dusky and I was starving because it was six o’clock, not two, as I had thought. Where had the time gone? Lost in the crochet time warp.

  As you can see, sometimes the crochet time warp is a bad thing (missed deadlines due to underestimation of time needed) and sometimes it is a good thing (blasting through a project without it feeling like work). What I think we need to do here is harness the power of the crochet time warp so that we can use its powers for good and not evil.

  If only I could crochet through a root canal, those are some hours that I wish would flash by at the speed of light.

  How Small Is Too Small?

  To keep, I mean. We talk about stash taking over the world, and at least in this house, it does. But stash, to me, is mostly full skeins, or sometimes half skeins that go with other skeins—sizeable chunks of the same color and dye lot that I could conceivably use for a project with little to no trouble.

  But then there are the other storage boxes—smaller than my regular stash storage boxes—that are labeled “odd balls and bits.” I started collecting the smallish bits of leftovers to store in one of those boxes, and next thing you knew there were two boxes, then three. Frankly, there are a lot of wee little balls of yarn in this house that are leftovers from finished projects. And when I set out to find them on my last ill-advised attempt at yarn containment, I found many more than I bargained for. It seemed like a good idea to get rid of some of them, but I find it physically impossible to throw yarn away. So here they sit.

  Sometimes I consciously start on a stash-busting sort of project that is specifically designed to use up the partial skeins I have lying around. But often times those projects call for small amounts of yarn that are still smaller than what I have lying around so I use some odd balls but I don’t use them up. If there is anything more useless than a thirty-seven-yard ball of yarn, it is a seven-yard ball of yarn. But back in the box it goes, because I can’t throw out yarn.

  I donate a lot of yarn to a local senior citizens’ center, but I don’t want to give them the ratty little balls because I think that would be at least a little bit insulting. I want them to be happy when I come in holding garbage bags full of yarn, rather than thinking I am giving them actual garbage.

  In perusing a knit and crochet publication put out by the New York Herald Tribune in the late 1940s, I saw directions for a crocheted, multicolored afghan that began with the instruction, “Gather several lengths of worsted yarn such as everyone has about the house, and tie them together, winding them into a ball as you go.” (Etc., and emphasis mine.) Such as everyone has about the house … then it’s not just me, and it hasn’t been just me for quite some time! Everyone has these yarn ends about the house—too small to use but too pretty to throw away.

  Sadly, my other phobia in relation to this issue is knots. I hate weaving in two trillion ends, but I hate knots in my work even more. I nearly foamed at the mouth at a recent crochet and knit conference, when the class instructor told us to change yarns randomly by tying them together with a tight overhand knot, and trimming the ends close to the knot. Knots in my work? On purpose, no less? I did it because I am a good student (who did not really want to foment revolution in the classroom) but it made me crazy. It’s making me a little bit crazy just now writing about it. So I am guessing that making my own Magic Ball, which is what many contemporary crocheters call these tied together yarns, is not the answer.

  I decided that I had to have some standard—a firm mathematical concept that would guide my bits storage. If a ball of yarn has less than X yards remaining, it is no longer a ball of yarn, it is trash. I had to be able to think of something I could actually do with the yarn or it had to go. Of course it doesn’t take a whole heck of a lot of yarn to do the first round or two of a granny square, so the smallish balls didn’t really go anywhere but back in the box.

  Recently I was finishing up a bunch of afghan models for a pattern book. I had left way long ends on the squares because I wasn’t sure how I was going to assemble them, so I figured the ends would make good stitching-up yarn. It turned out that I didn’t need a foot or more of yarn dangling in every color, so some colors I used to assemble and some ends I had to weave in, cutting off an eight- to twelve-inch tail when I was through. The tails started to pile up, and I had to do something with them. Had I finally reached my mathematical limit? C
ould I throw away a foot-long tail? I decided I could, and was heading off to the kitchen trash can when my daughter stuck her head in the doorway. “Hey, aren’t those wool?” she asked. “You know, I could needlefelt with those, you should keep them.” And then she went on her merry way.

  I grabbed a ziptop plastic bag and threw them in, collecting more and more as I finished the afghan, until there were at least a hundred pieces in there. I looked, and I thought, and I pondered, and then I went to the trash can and threw them all away. Apparently I had found my limit and twelve inches was it. I was even good enough not to separate the longer tails from the shorter ones. I just threw caution to the wind and chucked the entire contents of the bag.

  I am kind of hoping though that the seagulls and other nesting animals that hang out around the garbage dumps will snag these little woolen bits and take them home. Just think how soft and warm their nests would be. And then the strands would not have gone to waste. Maybe I should take up needlefelting …

  No Brain Cells Required

  I love all of the many forms my crocheting can take—from delicate lace made with a tiny hook and cobweb-weight cotton to a thick scarf made from bulky-weight wool. But sometimes when I am picking a project, I am less interested in what it’s going to turn out to be than in how it fits into my available crafting time.

  If I am home my comfy corner chair with my special light on and every tool I could ever want on hand, the sky’s the limit so far as technical challenge goes. There is something incredibly satisfying about working on a very complicated pattern and watching the results grow under my fingers. Even if I have to frog my efforts twelve times, that thirteenth time, when I win the battle of crocheter vs. crocheting, at least temporarily, can leave me grinning for days. And while I am working on the piece, I am totally involved in it … counting stitches and rows, working for hours to get an inch of fabric, trying to imagine how this puzzle piece is going to fit in with all the others and give me the end result that I want. My crocheting absorbs all of my attention—in fact, requires it, lest bad things happen.