>Clueless about what to get that deserving crocheter on your gift list? Here are my top ten Gifts for Crocheters, from tiny treasures to a total mind-blowing finale.

1) Yarn. First, foremost and forever it’s about yarn. Whether it’s one really special ball of yarn to stuff in a stocking, or a basket filled with enough to make an afghan, yarn is good. If you aren’t comfortable with choosing yarns and colors, then go with a gift certificate to the store or site where your crocheter likes to shop.

2) Crochet hooks. Don’t think that just because your crocheting loved one already owns dozens of hooks that a few more wouldn’t be welcome. One can never have too many hooks. Hey, what if the H-8 (5.00 mm) hook you’re using for that scarf accidentally gets dropped and jammed between the sofa cushions. Extras come in handy. If you are in doubt as to which style or size hooks to purchase, simply peek into the tool chest and see what’s in there. Get one of the same. No kidding, this is not a stupid gift. It’s thoughtful. From 2-5 dollars at the craft store, but up to 20 or 30 dollars for hand carved, special woods and fancy doo-dad ones.

3) Stitch markers. For crochet you need the kind of markers that can open and shut, like those round split ring or little plastic safety pin ones. I’ve lost so many sets of Clover safety pins and swear to have back-ups at all times. Around 5 dollars.

4) Storage. All that stuff had got to live somewhere. For yarn, projects in progress and for those nasty UFOs (unfinished objects) I like medium sized pop-up hampers. They can be flattened when not in use, pretty handy when space is limited. Also consider crates, baskets and totes, or carry-alls created specifically for yarn crafts. Anywhere from a couple of bucks for a plastic basket to 50 or more for a designer bag.

5) Really good scissors. I mean REALLY good. I splurged on my first pair of Gingher 4-inch embroidery scissors and they’ve become indispensable. Around 15 dollars.

6) Magazine subscriptions. See which ones she buys, the ones you find lying around the house everywhere. Interweave Crochet, Crochet Today, CROCHET! are some of my must-see mags. If she already has subscriptions, check to see if you can add time to them. Maybe 20-30 dollars for a year.

7) Hand cream. For soft, smooth hands and happier handwork.

8) Books. Stitch guides or dictionaries are superb additions to any crocheter’s library, no matter what her skill level. Great for reference or for inspiration. My favorites are the Harmony Guides. 20-30 dollars, with possibly better online deals at sites like Amazon. Or design books. May I do a bit of shameless self-promotion and suggest the volumes listed to the left on this blog? From SFTD (Straight From Today’s Designers) you can find Crochet Belts From the Hip and the first two volumes of Strapped for Bags. And if she doesn’t own my two books Amazing Crochet Lace and Everyday Crochet, be assured they are terrific gifts.

9) Lighting. The better to see the crochet with, my dear. I swear by Ott lights that provide true color, non-glare, full spectrum illumination. There are other manufacturers, too. You can find desk and task lamps for around 30 bucks. I especially like my portable rechargeable battery lamp that can go with me anywhere, around 70 bucks. Floor lamps are versatile choices, some with bend-y necks or add-ons like a magnifying lens, from a hundred bucks and up.

10) And… the sublime grand finale…. celebrate your crochet independence with a Crochet CRUISE to Canada, July 4-9 2009 sailing from New York! Starting at around 700 for an inside cabin to over 800 for ocean view, this would be the ultimate gift. More about the cruise in future posts. For now you can see some of the early details here.

Only a dozen shopping days left, so get going. Happy, happy, joy, joy to all.

>

Ah-ha! Made one. I used the new Caron Simply Soft Eco, made from acrylic and 20% recycled plastic bottles, in 0012 Wine Country, 0018 Greenfields, 0003 Wheat. Rather a Victorian Christmas colorway.

I’m offering the pattern as a free download from Ravelry. Click here.

>It never fails. Immediately after Thanksgiving, after the last dinner guests have been kicked out… uh, I mean have made their fond farewells and head home… I start hankering for Christmas. Not in a hurry-up-and-please-be-Christmas kind of way, as a kid would wish. My thoughts center on making the holiday season last as loooong as possible.

My parents had little experience with or reverence for American holiday traditions. Our little family had to make it up as we went, trying our best to assimilate and fit in with our neighbors. So we hunted for Easter eggs. Ate turkey and cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving. And even though Mom and Dad had no idea about the Christ in Christmas, they grudgingly went along with the tree, the decorations, Santa and presents because it was the thing to do.

The first tree in our house that I can remember was the most magnificent sight a five-year-old could behold. It was a tinsel tree. Yup. Silver, with a color-wheel. And it was real metal foil, not the soft mylar of today’s silver trees. This was a tree with (ouch) teeth. Gingerly, Mom put her own spin on the decorations, draping the branches with strings of Chinese lanterns and origami birds.

My mother truly enjoyed the decorating part. Long after my brothers and I fled the nest she continued (to the consternation of my dad who was sort of a grouch about most holidays) to put up garlands and lights and Christmas doo-dads all over the house. I don’t know where she learned or copied it, but one year I came home to visit and found these little handmade stockings hung everywhere.

She demonstrated how easy it was to crochet. With a few strategic tweaks to the design I was off and running my own personal stocking factory. It was my habit to begin crocheting them every season, starting just after Thanksgiving. Over the years I cranked out hundreds, as ornaments for various trees, as gifts, gift enclosures, as handy holders for candy and lucky money.

I can’t find a single one today, so in a bit I will scrounge around for some appropriate yarn and make up a sample for photography so you can see it. But for now I will post the pattern I developed from the stocking my mother showed me.

Mini Motif Stocking
Skill Level Easy
Size about 4 1/2 ” tall as shown
Materials
small amounts of worsted weight yarn in three colors
The obvious red (A) /green (B) /white (C) for Christmas come to mind, but feel free to use unexpected colors
Size J-10 (6.00 mm) crochet hook
Yarn needle
Gauge (not critical)
Hexagonal Motif, before assembly= 4 1/2″ at widest point
Instructions
Body of stocking is a six-sided granny motif. This is dense motif, that is, it has no chain spaces between the groups of stitches as you’d use in a traditional granny square. I find this leaves fewer smaller holes for the candy to fall out.
Motif is crocheted in rounds with RS always facing. Fasten off and change colors after each round (or not).
With A, ch 5, sl st in beg ch to form a ring.
Rnd 1: With A, ch 3 (counts as dc), 17 dc in ring, sl st in top of beg ch, fasten off A — 18 dc
Rnd 2: With B, join in any sp between dc, ch 3, 5 dc in same space between dc, [sk next 3 dc, 6 dc in next space between dc] 5 times, sl st in top of beg ch, fasten off B — 6 6-dc corners

Weave ends.
Assembly
This motif ruffles a bit, but that is a good thing. Fold hex in half along the dotted line as shown in diagram, with wrong sides together, matching stitches all around. RS facing, begin at the tip of fold at the toe, with A, join with sl st through the back loop only in the middle (2nd) dc in the 3-dc group. Ch 1, sc in same back loop. Going through the back loop of both thicknesses each time, sc in next 21 st, mark last sc for clarity. To form the top opening, going through the RS of one layer only, make 2 sc through the front loop in each of next 11 dc, ending up at the last of the joining sc (marker), sl st in marked sc. For hanging loop, ch 15, sl st in same sc (marker), fasten off. Weave ends.

Cute, EH? Hope to have an image of a finished one here soon. How many will you make?

>You just never know from whence inspiration will come. The Cutaway Jacket designed for Caron International Yarns, now appearing in the January 2009 issue of CROCHET! magazine, is an example of what happens when an aging former radio announcer is asked to make a list of her all-time favorite recordings.

I couldn’t do it. Every and anything I hear that evokes an emotional or intellectual response has the chance of becoming a favorite. It all depends on time, place, context. Knowing it would be a hopeless task, I tried anyway to narrow down the list to a few. But rather than taking the easy way (admitting to the pop tunes that are currently pumping through my earbuds), I went back and flipped through my record collection to remind myself of the vintage music I actually owned.

Because, the same way a crochet designer has access to yarns, a disc jockey has access to music. I purchase for personal use only those yarns that I truly enjoy. Back then the same held true for recordings. What music did I admire so greatly that I shelled out bucks to own?

I unavoidably date myself when I mention that I started working in radio when we still put stylus to vinyl. Yes, I played records. Do you ever have gut-twisting nightmares concerning your job; the frustration dreams where time slows to a crawl, every little incident is magnified and you are swimming through molasses to avert impending catastrophe? My recurring radio dream, what had me waking up in a cold sweat at least once a week, was the horror of not being able to get to the air studio in time (due to monsters or locked doors) and hearing over the air monitors not a song off the current playlist, but the “psssst-pop, psssst-pop” of end groove. That was a sin a gazillion times worse than “dead air”, trust me.

I digress. So I am looking through my album collection which is quite limited due to having moved house too many times, having pitifully little storage space, and mostly having replaced records with the technologically new formats as they became standard and no longer owning a turntable. Aren’t downloads a trip? I’m constantly amazed that a two-inch memory stick or micro drive or hand-held player can hold as much or more music than I used to store in racks of records.

Most of my stuff was collected back before I made music my profession. I lingered over my original copy of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Wasn’t it fascinating fun trying to identify all the celebrities in the album cover collage? Did you know that there is an end groove after the last track that contains a 15 kHz tone, too high pitched for adults to hear but audible by dogs? According to the legend, John Lennon did that on purpose to piss off your pet. Hey, I did not make this up.

My biggest “OH, WOW!” moment was finding a recording of “Kites are Fun” by the 60’s vocal group The Free Design. The song has glorious multi-part harmonies, sunshine-pop lyrics and a childlike quality that makes me smile.

“See my kite, it’s green and white
Laughing in its distant flight
All that’s between us is a little yellow string
But we like each other more than anything
And we run along together through the field behind my house
And the little drops of rain caress our face and wash my blouse
And we’d like to be a zillion miles away from everyone
Cause Mom and Dad and Uncle Bill don’t realize
Kites are fun.”

Not long after this stroll down memory lane, I was asked by Caron to design something with their new Simply Soft Paints, a variegated yarn with short repeats of happy colors. No surprise, considering the music running around in my brain, that the result was this jacket.

The original concept was to use only one shape, a four-sided elongated diamond (kite) but that plan turned out to be unworkable. In order to make a garment that fit the body I had to add the triangles (kite bottoms) and sleeve wedges. Although the colors are not Sgt. Peppers day-glo, the overall effect with bold geometric motifs, contrast trim, button accents and cutaway shape put this design firmly in the realm of 60’s iconic-retro-pop-psychedelic-Peter Max-ish culture. More or less. Kudos to KJ Hay for the tech edit and assembly diagram, without which the pattern would have been totally incomprehensible.

>Before I get all sidetracked with this backstory and bury the headline, l have to show you this gorgeous Pineapple Shawl, designed not by me but by Karen Drouin. The pattern has just been posted as a free download from Caron International Yarns.

Two years ago, weeks before Christmas 2006, this lady gave me the most perfect gift a designer could hope to receive. My first book, Amazing Crochet Lace, had just hit the shelves a few weeks earlier. I had been invited to Danbury, Connecticut, to speak at a meeting of the Happily Hooked on Crocheting Club, a local chapter of the Crochet Guild of America.  I entered the room in a state of high anxiety as this was my first gig as an author and I had no idea what to expect, when what to my wondering eyes should appear! I was met with a heavenly vision that beat the heck out of the miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer; an attractive, stylish young woman wearing one of the designs from my book.

My immediate thought was “Hokey Smokes, that girl stole my garment sample!”.  And then it dawned on me that she, Karen Drouin, had gotten my book and had already crocheted her own Sambuca Jacket. That experience still reigns as one of the coolest moments in my design career.  It’s not about the paltry fees, the seeing your byline in magazines, your face and book covers on the web, the grins and looks of shock and recognition when you meet readers at book signings.  Nope.  For me designing is all about crocheters enjoying the making of and wearing of their new stuff.  The sight of Karen in her Sambuca coming so unexpectedly and serendipidously at that moment, well it made me cry.

Karen crochets like a mad woman, producing many unique items for gifts, charity work and for sale each year.  Little did I know that she also had her sights set on designing.  As a member of CGOA, Karen, smart girl, applied for the Professional Mentoring Program.  My buddy Tammy Hildebrand, who was at that time the mentor coordinator, had been pestering me for months to get on the program and mentor an aspiring designer.  For months I declined, citing all the usual excuses: not feeling I had anything to offer, not being ready, not having enough time, selfishly not forseeing any personal benefit and, frankly, not wanting to be bothered.  How shortsighted I was.

Remembering how I burbled on and on about Karen, Tammy figured we two would be a good match.  So in the spring of 2007 Karen became my first (and so far only) mentee. Not only was she a joy to correspond with, but worked hard, asked a ton of questions (some of which I could answer), took control of her destiny and made it happen.  I could not be prouder.

This is definitely Karen’s year.  At the CGOA National Conference in Manchester in July I had the honor and pleasure of modeling Karen’s latest cardigan design in the fashion show. Look for that one to be included in a book from one of our favorite crochet publishers.  Visit her project pages at Ravelry.com where she is karend325 and find out why I consider Karen to be a brilliantly creative interpreter of my designs. And now that you have heard the story, take another look at her Pineapple Shawl. WHOO-HOO, Karen!