Couvrette with Dahlias: in progress

Here's a quick taste of the first pattern I'm translating: a couvrette (cover) with dahlias.  It's got a surprising and fun bit of hyperbolic crochet in it!

One of the dahlias in progress

The whole couvrette

Domain name update, and a revisiting of this project!

Trying new things to get this old thing off the ground-- first, I'm doing a lot more writing about fiber arts in general for my work with the Geek Girl Crafts podcast and zine, which has given me a great deal more confidence in talking about knit and crochet.  It's funny how I could have impostor syndrome about something I more or less taught myself when I was a little girl, but so it goes.

Patterns! after wrestling with the idea that I would go over her basic instructions on how to crochet and knit, and thus teach the reader of this website how to learn to crochet and knit in the English fashion from a book that is 145 years old, I decided to forgo this as a game for chumps and direct the absolute beginners to modern materials and techniques to get started in the hobby. The black and white engravings, though still quite clear for their age, really don't hold a candle to the nice photographs available on the Crochet Guild of America website, or the handy videos you'll find on KnittingHelp.com.  You would have much more fun learning the basics there than you ever would here, believe me. With crochet especially, once you learn the basics, you'll be quite ready to add component stitches to component stitches and create some of her patterns in the book.

And so, patterns will be shown in two ways: the original, with illustrations if it has any, and the modern translation, with my photograph.

A note about crochet translations: I am American, so traditional UK crocheters, please bear with me. I'll try to cite metric information as much as I do imperial, but based on what I've seen, American terminology for crochet, e.g.; a loop pulled up in the work without a yarn-over is a slip stitch, a stitch pulled up and through with a single yarn-over is a single crochet, and a stitch made with two yarn-overs and two pull-throughs is a double crochet, seems to have clinched worldwide status, if patterns from Norway and Japan are any indication. Fortunately, crochet is delightfully easy to graph, so if folks need that, I'll try to draw it out upon request. 

Let's get started!