Edwardian Fancies

How did it begin, you ask? One summer day (July 9, 2014, to be exact) LDearie and I were pouring over our ”new”collection of antique crochet patterns and came upon a picture of a 1910 circular shawl. Not even a full picture of the shawl, just an image of a tiny section, along with some brief and cryptic directions.

But I fell for it. I actually felt myself falling - unbeknownst to my best friend sitting beside me - back through time, my mind’s eye seeing the shawl being crocheted over 100 years ago by countless unnamed women. Who were they? Did they proudly wrap the finished shawl around their Edwardian finery? Did they huddle under it through the terrors and deprivations of The Great War? And what happened to all those lovely shawls? In museums, mouldered away, gone and forgotten now? But the pattern remained, a tenuous link to the past… It preyed on my mind, haunting me with its siren song, and I knew I was hooked – I had to make it, or something like it.

First I recreated the tiny swatch; it would make a nice shawl for a Barbie doll… Then I decided to change the original circular shawl into a ¾ circle. I began on July 16, the morning of DH’s surgery – obsessively crocheting those dc-between-dc in the hospital waiting room. When the nurse came in to tell me the surgery was going well, I broke out in an Exuberant Row of Celebratory Shells (see them in the middle of Edith’s Ground)! I continued the shawl as DH recovered in the hospital, and when he was released 6 days later, “Lady Edith’s Comfort” was complete. A true “prayer shawl…”

Then came “Lady Sybil’s Crescent “– similar in the “dc-between-dc” ground, similar (but more extreme) in the “Stacked-Shell “edging – but elongated to please the Crescent-Lovers. “Lady Mary’s Lace” came next – she has a few “dc-between-dc” rows in the pattern repeat, but not much else in common with her sisters; by then I was longing for an “Excess of Lace” to celebrate how well DH was recovering!

I thought I was done, but there was one more to come: “Rose’s Guilty Pleasure.” She turned out to be a high-spirited, flirty shawlette - no worries, just a riotous celebration of life! (Pattern will come as an automatic update to the eBook in September 2014).

And what will remain of my shawls 100 years from now? Will someone stumble across one of my patterns and wonder about the crocheters of the bygone year of 2014? Will they wonder who we were, what we wore, what we thought, who we cared for? Will our lives seem as strange to future crocheters as the lives of those Edwardian women seem to me? One thing I believe – crocheting will continue, as much for the beauty of the final product as for the comfort and joy inherent in the creation.

eBook