Cat Mad Crochet

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

I’ve been watching lots of shows on television lately, so it should come as no surprise that I have two fun crochet finds and one crochet fake to share with you. Each of the garments I found comes from a show that doesn’t really have a lot of crochet, which is fun because it means crochet can show up anywhere. 

First, I’ve just started rewatching Warehouse 13. I watched it years ago and suddenly remembered when I saw Leena at the Bed and Breakfast that she wore a crocheted shrug and indeed she does! I got the following pictures of her.

This is a cute shrug! It’s just a basic chain and single crochet grid with a shell edge, but it’s very cute and would be super easy to recreate. It looks like perhaps a DK weight or worsted weight yarn.

Eureka

I finished re-watching Eureka recently. It went really quickly because I started watching it instead of the news as I ate my breakfast. There is, afterall, only so much horror one can take at the beginning of the day. Eureka has its share of horrors, but they all get resolved by the end of the show and the authoritarian monsters are always thwarted. We have no such promises in our own world, so I’ve been trying to allow myself windows of time without news.

Anyway, there’s a scarf on Tess Fontana in one of the episodes from season three. Just like the shrug above, it’s a basic chain and single crochet grid. This sort of stitch pattern appears a lot in crocheted garments I find on television shows. I think this is because it is really fast to work up and really forgiving for a wide range of wearers, so it’s cheap to commission and easy to reuse. It stretches well while maintaining its good looks. With this sort of stitch pattern, one gets a unique looking garment for not a lot of time spent making it, or perhaps I should say one doesn’t have to spend a lot of money on having someone handcraft a unique garment.

If I was going to recreate either of these garments, the most obvious stitch pattern is the Simple Trellis from The New Crochet Stitch Dictionary (and a bunch of other stitch dictionaries with other names for the same stitch pattern). It’s easy because it’s just chains and single crochets. You can increase or decrease easily either internally or along the sides so it’s very versatile. 

If you wanted something a little more fun, though, you might try The New Crochet Stitch Dictionary’s Trellis Mesh. It’s a bit more open with the long stitches, so I think a smaller yarn would be more appropriate to avoid large holes in the fabric. It’s more interesting than the basic mesh, so it would be more fun to work and look at. If I were running an increase or decrease on this one, I’d probably try to start with that in the rows with the long stitches and finish the increase in the rows with the shells. A two row increase would make for a smooth transition and avoid lumps in the pattern.

If increasing and decreasing didn’t matter to you, and for a simple scarf it doesn’t, you could always use the Kaleidoscope stitch pattern from the same book. It’s beautiful and looks awesome with a dainty yarn, but I have yet to work out an increase or decrease that works. If you have worked one out, please let me know. It’s a beautiful stitch pattern, and I would love to be able to play with it in shaped garments, but, alas, I am stuck. 

School Spirits

The last find is from the second season of School Spirits. One of the cheerleaders appears to be wearing a granny square sweater. Spoiler: it’s fake crochet. I’ve found it online, and it’s exactly the sort of trendy fast fashion one expects today. Given that crochet was not popular as a fast fashion item in the mid to late 2000s and into the 2010s, I think the garments from Eureka and Warehouse 13 were crafted by a maker for the show or found in a thrift store, maybe, and they are actually crochet. But that’s not the case with crochet in modern shows. It’s often just fast fashion bought from a store and made by poorly paid workers. More horribly, it is sometimes actually knitting running around pretending to be crochet. Unbelievably rude.  

Here’s the sweater for sale on ebay. You can see that the back is just rows of granny stitches. The ribbed neck is definitely knitted. If you zoom in, you can see that the granny stitch (which should be three double crochets worked between two pairs of three doubles from the row below) are actually two stitches. I’m not going to call them doubles because they aren’t. If you zoom in even more, you can see that the stitches are little stacks of v’s on top of each other. That’s not crochet. That’s knitting. The knitting stitches are really clear in the tag photos below and the image of the neck and ribbing below. 

So it’s fake. Boo.

There’s nothing wrong with knitting; however, knitting that imitates crochet in order to make it “okay” for fast fashion to sell it, whatever that even means, just cheapens the craft and dismisses the crafter. I’m not here for it. 

If you remake this sweater, do it better. Do granny squares the right way with three doubles instead of two. I think the sleeves would look better as dropped shoulder sleeves instead of set-in sleeves, as the sleeve connection seems to be a little awkward on this sweater. I would also use a yarn with a little tighter ply. This yarn is splitting just sitting in the garment. It would be a nightmare to work with.  

There was one example of real crochet in School Spirits.

Janet was wearing this scarf during one of the ghosts’ Christmas parties. It looks to be a Christmas themed variegated yarn worked in long rows of double crochets with fringe on the ends. It is the epitome of what people think crochet looks like. It is not poorly executed and shouldn’t be disparaged. Beyond my desire to only see the most awesome examples of crochet on television, this sort of project absolutely exists in the world and its use in the show creates a better sense of the real world the ghosts float on the edges of. It’s also a very accessible point to lend empathy to the characters. Crochet: bridging the gap between the living and the dead!

I’m having lots of fun spotting crochet in shows and movies. I’ll post again when I find more! If you have watched any of these shows and spotted something crocheted that I missed, drop me a comment and let me know!