I took these pictures last night and then forgot to put them up here!
This is what it looks like when you have a row on the hook. If you look at the left edge, you can see how I’m working this new round into the old round.
And this is what it looks like as a row comes off the hook. It’s okay if the sight of my plump, round fingers gives you fantasies about gently touching them with your tongue. Just don’t share those fantasies with me and don’t attempt to live them out while I’m crocheting, Quentin Tarantino. Christ.
Seriously, you guys thought his foot fetish was bad. It’s all going to be women with pleasantly fat fingers doing crafts from here on out. Um, yes, anyway, this is what the back looks like.
And this is what the front looks like. I bought 18 skeins of yarn and I have ten left, so I’m that far into it. Like half done I guess?
I think I missed a memo re: Tarantino….
But that thing you’re making looks AMAZING!!!!
I’ve always thought it would be fun if QT had a crush on me. I’d be super annoyed and super flattered.
First, that’s really lovely. The stitch looks super sturdy, too. Second, I keep trying to figure out why “Tunisian.” I mean, someone sometime must have been reminded of a Tunisian fabric or design by it, but it just doesn’t line up with any Tunisian fabrics I’m familiar with. I’m filing it together with Dalmatian dogs in the “utter mysteries of nomenclature” department.
Gorgeous.
It looks so fucking much like knitting! If you didn’t tell me what was really going on, I would think I knew exactly what I was looking at, and I would be so wrong! You are tricky and wise on the ways of the force. Of fiber. And stuff.
So, I was reading a little bit about the history of crocheting–to especially try to see if there was some Tunisian connection, no matter how loose–and it appears that crocheting is a really, really new craft. Like, late 1700s, early 1800s, and probably originated in the UK. More amazing to me, relatively speaking, knitting is not that much older.
All of the ancient “knit” items are actually made with a sewing needle and worked in a series of loose loops and knots. Apparently, it ends up looking very much like knitted fabric, but once textile scholars began tracing the path of the yarn through the pieces, it became obvious that it wasn’t knit.
I’m vaguely familiar with lace made this way–with a sewing needle–so it doesn’t surprise me that this was the progenitor of both knitting and crocheting, but it does surprise me that neither of them is more than a few hundred years old.
Anyway, I’m going to make a guess about the etymology of “Tunisian crochet.” It drapes beautifully and is easy to work big pieces together with a sturdy seam. If you work it on the big “Tunisian crochet” hook, you could make a row that was a foot or a foot and a half across no problem. If you made two panels each two feet across and five feet long, sewed them together leaving a hole for the head and then again at the other side, leaving room for the arms, you’d have a very simple, but attractive tunic.
I wonder if trying to designate this style of crochet as good for clothing got muddled into a region. Tunician–which is not a word–became Tunisian?