Crocheting

by bam

Learn to crochet from the manuals that first taught it in print, read side by side with the modern standards. Hold a hook and yarn, make a slip knot and a foundation chain, and work the slip stitch and the four stitches that stand on it. Turn rows, join rounds, and shape a flat circle, a tube, a cone, a ball and a crocheted hyperbolic plane, the model two mathematicians made for their geometry students. Read a pattern in US and UK terms (the same word names different stitches, and both systems were in American print by 1918), follow a symbol chart, and use a swatch to check gauge. Then the history, as the record shows it: hooks before the word, Penelope's instructions in a volume dated 1822-1823, Gaugain in 1840, Irish crochet and the famine, and which origin stories have no source at all. Four projects close it: a washcloth, a coaster, a hat and a hyperbolic plane. Every claim is cited to a page you can open, and where the record is thin the course says so.