CROCHET WITH A HOOK

One of the many things I have in common with Ella Shane is crocheted afghans. Hers are from her beloved Aunt Ellen, beautiful hand-crafted reminders of the family who loves her. Mine? Hideous neon-colored acrylic…but made with every drop as much love by my late grandmother.
My grandmother, one of the younger American-born children in her Scottish immigrant family, probably didn’t know or care that crochet was very much an Irish thing. Ella’s aunt, though, would have been well aware of it – and what crochet meant to the Irish.
It’s not just a pretty fiber art.
It’s a callback to the Great Hunger.
In the 1840s, as the Irish economy fell apart, Ursuline nuns started teaching the women and children in their parishes how to crochet lace as a way to bring in desperately-needed funds. Soon people were crocheting across Ireland in hopes of staving off starvation.
Wealthy women founded stores, and crochet schools, and talked up the product to their friends to help get the industry off the ground, and it worked. Crochet was one of the few things Irish people could do to help themselves during the Hunger, and many seized it as an opportunity.
Initially, Irish crocheted lace was seen as a lesser product than the work of Venetian artisans, but after Queen Victoria herself endorsed it, the crocheters had all the business they could handle.
When the Irish came to America, they brought crochet with them. Some were the highly-skilled artists who helped make a living for their families. Others, though, just knew enough to make useful and pretty household items.
And that, of course, was part of their job. At every spot on the social spectrum, women were expected to do some kind of handiwork. Upper-class ladies did spectacularly elaborate and expensive tapestries and other decorative things. Middle-class women embroidered and embellished their clothing and accessories. (A society woman would not do the fancywork on her clothes because that was for the designer or her lady’s maid.)
Further down the social scale, handiwork was the way women made their homes more comfortable for their families, or made sure that they had pretty things. A tenement mother couldn’t afford to buy a First Communion dress for her daughter, but she might be able to scrape up the pennies for thread and steal bits of time to make a veil.
And then there are afghans.
It’s been the term for a knitted or crocheted blanket since at least the 1860s, growing out of the term “Afghan Shawl” for those cashmere wraps that were everywhere in the early Victorian era. Before reliable central heating, and especially when it was a struggle to afford heat, people needed all the blankets and shawls and throws they could get.
It wasn’t just literal warmth, though.
An awful lot of work goes into making an afghan, even an easy one – and most of them were as elaborate as the maker could manage – so the effort is part of the gift.
Even though Ella’s afghan from Aunt Ella is, as she puts it “a moderately hideous crochet,” and the ones from my grandmother could very easily burn your retinas, they’re the best possible way to warm your soul as well as your body.
You’re not just wrapping yourself in fiber – you’re wrapping yourself in love.

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