Cat Mad Crochet

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

I read James Walters’s Crochet Workshop after I read Dora Ohrenstein’s The Crocheter’s Skill-Building Workshop: Essential Techniques for Becoming a More Versatile, Adventurous Crocheter. I loved Ohrenstein’s book and decided to read Walters because she thanks him in her acknowledgements as both her inspiration and her model. It’s always good to read the influences of those you find inspiring, so I bought Walters’s book. 

It is, I think, one of the first in what Walters himself calls “crochet literature”, which are crochet books that teach design and technical details without necessarily having patterns. Think of an Alton Brown book about cooking. It was sorely needed at the time. He published it in the late 70s during a time when Julie Dale was exhibiting the works of various New York fiber artists, many of whom worked in crochet. You can check her out here: Julie Schafler Dale – artist or in the book Off the Wall: American Art to Wear edited by Dilys Blum. Go watch the documentary. It excited me so much I bought the book. 

At the time, mainstream crochet was, well, horribly plastic and filled with granny squares and stiffness. Art crochet was amazing and creative and stunning. Walters worked with Sylvia Cosh in London during this period and they are credited with developing scrumbling or what we know as free-form crochet. He was a crochet visionary and wanted the freedom crochet was experiencing in the art world to make its way to the everyday crocheter. No small task.

His book is a discussion of the technical aspects of crochet, but also a call for the home crocheter to seize the opportunity to develop their own creativity and style. He asks us to use well written crochet books and magazines with examples of good design as little courses in design and technical matters. He wants us to take these well written patterns and toy with them. They are just recipes and we are allowed to play with the directions as much as we want. We can make, let’s say, a sweater pattern as written the boundaries of our sandbox and build castles of our own making within it in the shape of sleeves, hemlines, shaping, color, and the like. This is a bit of advice that we should be heeding today. There aren’t a lot of books out there laying out how to crochet on a level beyond getting started, but there is so much more to learn and discuss. Walters starts that conversation here. Ohrenstein continues it and is worth reading, too. 

Walters doesn’t provide any patterns in this book. He gives us hand drawn stitch diagrams and tons of advice from an experienced artist on what crochet can and cannot do and where we can continue to push the boundaries. Hint: It can do nearly everything. And even things he was unsure of have now been solved, like how to shape items made from motifs. Don’t believe me? Check out Sophie Digard’s sweaters in Bright Star or Doris Chan’s book Convertible Crochet. 

Some of his tips I see now portrayed as someone else’s great invention, like starting a new color with a standing stitch in which the knot is at the top of the stitch and you just yarn over and start working without a turning chain or another join. He mentions this. So much of what is new in crochet is just people re-discovering the old stuff. A lot of that old stuff is in this book.

I love his idea about not joining a long chain at the end of the chain when working in the round, but instead joining at the end of the first row. It makes no difference to the project and a whole row of stitches is far easier to keep straight than a single line of chains. After reading his book, I took up leaving a nice long tail when I start a project requiring a long row of chains so I can add the chains I need at the end without having to worry when I inevitably lose count because the world around me came crashing down and I had to go save the day or my mind wandered or I forgot what comes after 73. 

I am trying a project now using his advice about not turning every row if your color changes will require you to keep cutting yarns. Yes, you read that right. If you are doing striping and one of the colors is on the left side when you need it on the right, just go back to the beginning of the row you just worked, pick up the color, and work another row without turning. It’s going to be okay. Especially in basic stitches, this works quite well. I was so caught up in the rules of turning after every row if you are working flat that I did not think of this. He has an entire discussion of the concept with diagrams. 

Was the book, at times, a bit patriarchal? I hate to say yes, but yes. I think both the book and the author were products of their times. It’s hard to escape that. He upholds some of the nonsense about how to hold hooks and he makes some, let’s say, choices about hook size for yarn weight that I would question, but he was working a specific way with the yarn he had available. 

Is some of his advice dated and a bit weird? Yes. I think some of what he was saying came down to the limited supplies he had available and how they could be worked and manipulated. For instance, he only talks about pressing, which he warns can fuse your yarn and never about wet blocking. I’m not sure at what temperature wool would fuse. I’m not sure it has that physical capability. I think we might see fire before fusing. But he only had the mostly plastic yarns of his time, which was not near what we have now. He states on page 221: 

Since the only yarns in the market place intended for crochet are, by definition, those that can be manufactured efficiently and cheaply and sold in huge quantities, the reactive worker cannot expect to make anything at all individual using them alone. He will need to experiment with a much wider range of materials and become involved in the preparation of his own yarn. 

This quote is sad and worrying because he lived in a time when there were even more strict “rules” about crochet and yarn. Imagine what he could have done if early on in his career he had had access to all of the gorgeous yarns we have available today? We have an explosion of yarns to play with and the wisdom of other crocheters to build upon. We can take all of these ideas and run wild with them. Read this book, take from it what works for you, and go be amazing.