Sweden is a good place to be located for someone researching the historical and contemporary use of flat hooks for slip stitch crochet. It’s only a thirty minute walk from the desk where this blog is maintained to a folkcraft store in central Stockholm that regularly stocks such hooks, so it was easy for me to… Continue reading From shepherd’s knitting to shepherd crochet
I’ve devoted quite a few posts to historical evidence of slip stitch crochet. It is firmly attested in illustrated instructions beginning in 1785 and there are vaguer footprints of it having been around significantly longer than that. One of the more important issues raised by the less certain evidence is the possibility of slip stitch crochet… Continue reading Crochetedness vs. nalboundness
A few months ago, I began a series of posts discussing two pieces of child’s footware which might conceivably be the oldest exemplars of what is now generally termed slip stitch crochet that have yet come to light. If their provenance is correctly attributed, they represent two regional traditions, one Northern European and the other… Continue reading Shepherd’s knitting in 1780
The term ‘slip stitch’ has figured prominently in the preceding suite of posts, designating the definitive element of plain crochet. The same label is used for something quite different in knitting, where a slip (or slipped) stitch is a loop that is moved from the holding needle to the working needle without knitting a new… Continue reading Knitless knitting
In the past few posts I’ve considered different approaches to the graphic description of looped fabric structures. Although largely in abstract terms thus far, my intention is to apply relevant aspects of them to the analysis of specific objects that have themselves been the focus of other posts or are in the queue for such… Continue reading From knitted loop to crocheted stitch
The preceding two posts present formal numerical and graphical procedures for analyzing and describing looped fabric structures. By intriguing coincidence, the first of the cited publications was issued at the time when attested documentary and material evidence of slip stitch crochet was first beginning to appear. Similarly, the later texts were published when slip stitch… Continue reading Drawing pains: the slip stitch
The chain of loops illustrated in 1771 by Alexandre-Théophile Vandermonde (discussed in the preceding post) appears in another seminal text on knot theory. Peter Guthrie Tait presented a number of papers on that topic to the Royal Society of Edinburgh during its 1876–77 session, with a condensed version appearing as an article titled “On Knots” in… Continue reading From loop to knots
