Learning to Crochet

     When I was around 7 years old, my mom used to make these gorgeous crocheted doll dresses. They were made big to spread over the bed. I used to love seeing them when she finished. This is when I first asked to crochet. I had seven year old dreams about making these beautiful dresses just like she did. Of course she set me to work doing the basic stitches, chain and single crochet. Starting off I would just chain forever. HAHA! Here is what it looked like, but imagine it being something like four of five feet long...

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Then after she taught me to single crochet, it was all potholders...

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I quickly moved on to other things that seven year olds are more interested in. 

      Skip forward several years (we won't discuss how many). I was in my 20s with my second child just born, and I decided I wanted to make him a blanket. Before he was born I had been quilting a lot. He had several quilts I made, but I wanted something different. I was walking down the craft aisle at WalMart and saw the yarn. I thought about how I hadn't crocheted since I was a kid and how fun it sounded. I grabbed some yarn and it eventually snowballed into the online crochet presence that I have today. 

     

      However during all these years of crocheting hats, scarves, purse and even sweaters, I have yet to make one of those bed doll dresses that were the reason I even learned to crochet in the first place. I decided that this would be the perfect project for my Advanced Comp final. I would make one of these dresses and explore how I learned to crochet, why I learned to crochet and how it lead to my online identity that I have today. 

     I researched bed doll dresses quite a bit and found that there are very few patterns out there for them and most of those are in print, not available online. It seems to have become a lost art, something that you might see on grandma's spare bed. I turned to my mom to see where she got her patterns when she was making them all those years ago. Turns out that she never used a pattern... WHAT?! A lady taught her how to make them and she would design them as she was crocheting. (I guess I get that designer gene from her.) So I decided that if I was going to make one of these dresses like my mom used to make, then I would have to make it the way she made hers. Completely spontaneous and made up along the way! We'll see how that goes. Stay tuned for updates along the way! 

P.S. Here are a few pics of bed doll dresses for those that may have no clue what I'm talking about. The one at the top is the closest to what my mom used to make. 

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The Project

     This blog and the project that it includes came about through my Advanced Composition class. In this class we spent the semester talking about multimodal compositions. These multimodal compositions were both analog and digital. Analog being more arts and crafts style. Digital being things like blogs, videos and anything that uses a digital component of some sort. Throughout these compositions we still had to create it in the same method that you would write a typical essay. We needed to have an introduction, body with an argument and supporting data, and a conclusion. We kept a theme of "Identity" throughout all the projects as well.

     This project is for my final. I chose to do a blog and crochet project about part of my online identity. I have a strong presence online in the crochet community. I have a page on Facebook called The Fancy Hooker. It actually turned five years old today and has 5700+ followers. When I first started my page it was created to show off crochet projects I was working on and to sell small items. When my son started school and I started working outside of the home, the focus shifted. I no longer had time to sell items. Deadlines became something that I couldn't meet any longer. My focus then shifted to designing crochet patterns instead. I also hosted auctions in which other businesses participated. There are several crochet groups that I'm active in on a daily basis. Crochet is something very much a part of my online identity.

     That brings me back to the project. In this blog I will talk about why I learned to crochet, how I came back to crocheting after not doing it for a lot of years, and tracking the progress of the crochet project. The crochet project itself is going to be a bed doll dress. It's something that my mom made while I was growing up and why I wanted to learn to crochet. There will be more about that on my next post. I hope you all continue to follow along this path with me.