CROCHETING

Crocheting offers intricate, elegant designs to use for decoration and/or clothing. It entails creating fabric by pulling loops of yarn or thread through other loops. Although similar to knitting, crocheting uses one loop at a time. Crochet is derived from a French word meaning hook.

Prior to the 1800s, there is no evidence that anyone crocheted. In 1824, the first crochet patterns were published. It is thought that perhaps crocheting was practiced before this, but a bent finger was used instead of a hook, so there is no real evidence to support this idea. When the price of cotton thread started to go down, Britain and America began to crochet and alternative to lace. Teaching people to crochet lace was fast and economical. Hooks were crafted from everything from bent needles to hooks made from ivory, silver and bone. In Ireland and France, crocheting became a substitute for other livelihoods due to war.

The process of crocheting is to create a slip knot, inserting the crochet hook through the loop, and pulling the thread or yarn back through to create a new loop. Variations of this create other stitches by pulling more loops through a single loop throughout the chain. Materials used are the crochet hook. These hooks vary in sizes from 00 to 16; this is American sizing. There are also 2.5 to 19 millimeters in hook sizes. There are different terms used between American terms and British terms for crocheting. In Britain, double crochet equals American single crochet, but to make this not a problem, an international diagramming system has been created.