Bosnian crochet

The magazine Crochet Insider is exploring Bosnian crochet in Central Asia: Adventure Begins. I'm very excited about this journey, as it will tell me more about the crochet technique that I have come to be fond of. I'm eagerly waiting for more about Bosnian crochet from the editor, but meanwhile it's interesting to read about her travels. Usbek, Samarkand, Bukhara, all are places I want to visit. For me, they are the places of sagas, adventure, textiles, the Silk Road. The roots for much of what I'm doing.

 I have also purchased a new crochet hook from Joel:

Joel's hook

This hook is perfect for my hand. I can see and feel the use it has been through while it was a spoon, and I can admire the wish to make something beautiful that the craftsman must have felt when he designed the spoon.

On top of it is the excellent workmanship of the crochet hook. OK, you can take a spoon or a knife or a fork and you make a hook of it. But you have to know the slip stitch crochet technique and the yarns used to make the angle of the hook perfect. Joel knows, because he is a crocheter himself. So I am grateful. Thank you Joel, once more!

Crochet Hooks

My father was very particular about his tools and equipment. He kept his hammers, saws, screwdrivers and knives clean and in order. They had to be of good quality (not an easy thing in the '50s, after the war). He said you do more harm than good with a bad tool. I'm sure he was right. During the years he gave me some of his tools, a hammer, a small pen knife, a tong. I still use them, but not always for the purpose they where designed for. The tong is now in my kitchen drawer. It's very useful when I want to pick bones out of salmon :)

My textile tools have to be good, too. I have bought new knitting needles, spindles, spinning wheels and sewing machines during the years. Now I'm buying new crochet hooks. Plastic crochet hooks are not always fun to work with, but I love the wooden ones.

On Thursday this week the postman brought me five wooden KnitPro double hooks and one Trapper Joel stainless steel hook. What a day! I had to try them at once! Among my UFOs was a hat in Bosnian crochet, for which I was using a hook from my youth, a steel hook from Inox, 4.5 mm (UK/US 7). The hook is too rounded for Bosnian crochet, but will do if you have no other choice. I like to work Bosnian crochet with a pointy hook. The hat would be a good piece to try the new hooks at.

From left to right: steel hook from Inox, five wooden KnitPro, Joel's hook made from a spoon handle, steel hook from Inox, steel hook from JMRA, my grandmother's homemade metal hook.
The yarn is a variegated 2-ply spun at Kehräämö Musta Lammas in Finland. I like this yarn with it's deep, clear colors. Some years ago the mill started selling so much carded wool for felting, that they decided to stop spinning. The hat is from Kerstin Jönsson's book Smygmaskvirkning, a Swedish book about Bosnian crochet

I tested Joel's hook first, naturally :) I think Joel had Bosnian crochet in mind when he made it. It's very pointy, which is good when you work slip stitches. My first impression was that I really like this hook. I tried the casting technique, where you keep the yarn and the hook in the same hand and throw the yarn under the hook instead of picking it from one of the fingers on the other hand. It worked quite good, but when I tried picking, I soon found out that works even better for me. I'm right handed, and the hook is made for a right handed person. It's very smooth, so the only problem for me was that the pointy hook sometimes got trapped in the yarn. I will work looser stitches in my next project, because that will solve the problem. I'm very pleased with this hook. Thank you again, Joel!

I like the wooden KnitPro hooks. They are smooth and light, but they are not so good in Bosnian crochet because of the rounded hook. The idea of two hooks in one is handy. I know that quite a few persons with joint problems have been able to go on knitting and crocheting with the lighter wooden needles and hooks. Wood can not be used in fine hooks, so I still have all my small stainless steel hooks in my hook cloth. My smallest wooden hook is 3 mm, and my smallest needle 2 mm, both from KnitPro.

I also bought a hook at the local yarn shop, a 2 mm (UK 14, US B/1) steel hook made by Inox. It has a plastic handle for easier grip. I have small hands, so the hook was far too long for me. I took some masking tape and made the steel part a bit shorter. This is a good hook for all kinds of crochet, even if I have a suspicion my shortened steel part will be too short for bullion stitch. Is that a good reason to by another one? Is there such a thing as "too many crochet hooks"?

My answer is no. Every new yarn needs it's own hook. If you have only one 2 mm hook, it might be the right size for the yarn, but it still doesn't work because of the shape of the hook and the handle. Sometimes I try 3-4 hooks before I find the right one. That's why I won't throw away my old hooks when I buy new ones. I even keep the impossible hook I found in my grandmother's button box after she died in the late '60s. My father thought it was made during the war, probably by grandfather, as a means to keep grandmother calm at a time when every new day could bring a dreaded message from the front line. I have tried the hook a couple of times, but I find it to be a very bad hook. What has grandmother crocheted with this? I don't know. She was a very skillful lace crocheter, so most of her hooks where much, much smaller, size 0,5 to 1,5 mm. This hook might have been for wool rather than cotton yarn. And yes, my grandparents did get that message. My uncle died in battle. Did grandma keep the hook as a memory? She kept the buttons from my father's uniform in that box, too. My father survived the war, and lived the rest of his life as a pacifist.

Trapper Joel's Hook

Trapper Joel sent me pictures of one of the beautiful crochet hooks he has made out of a spoon handle. Here is one of the pictures:

Flat hooks like this one have been used for Bosnian crochet, at least in Scandinavia. Sometimes they are made from silver spoons.  Silver is a wonderful metal, so I am now looking for an old silver spoon that Joel could transform into a crochet hook for me. If you want to buy one of Joel's hooks, you can contact Amy at The Yarn Stash in Minot, North Dakota. She is yarnfloozie on Ravelry, where you can find links to her shops on her profilepage. I bought one of the two Joel-hooks she had only yesterday :) Joel says it's difficult to find spoons to make hooks from.

You can read more about Trapper Joel in Carol Ventura's blog. If you already haven't read the interesting article about Bosnian crochet "From Carpet to Jourabs" that Carol links to in her post "History in Making", remember to read it! But for Joel, scroll down until you find him! Look at his amazing hats!

On Ravelry you find Joel as Trapper336. He is now working on hats in Bosnian crochet, look at his Ravelry Projects. Joel says he likes increases better than decreases, so he works from the top to the bottom. I understand why he does that, because in crochet increases often look better than decreases. I'm very taken by the fact that Joel is left handed, but learned to crochet with his right hand. I'm right handed. The last few weeks I have tried to learn how to crochet left handed, but it's NOT easy! In some amigurumis you  crochet backwords in a round without turning the piece.

Joel also mailed me copies of articles he had gotten from Mr. Larry Smith last year. One of the articles is "Old World Crochet", written by Priscilla Gibson-Roberts, and published in the summer issue of Spin Off 2001. I greatly admire her way of making both history and technique visual and easy to understand. If you have that magazine in your bookshelf, do look at it again, there are some great photos! Gibson-Roberts lists some of her resources at the end of her article. Among them are some very interesting publications, that I now have in my wish-list. I didn't subscribe to Spin Off that year, so I had not seen that article. I'm happy that Interweave is now publishing digital editions of back issues, as this is not the only year I thought I could survive without that magazine! There is a tutorial article in the same issue, written by John Yerkovich: "Old World Crochet Bags".

One of the articles was from a Swedish book I have read some 20 years ago, but did not try to find for my article about Bosnian crochet in western Finland: "Gamla textila tekniker i ull", written by another of my favorite authors on textile: Kerstin Gustafsson, a very skilled spinner and weaver. The book was published in 1988 by LT förlag. It's a fantastic resource when you want to get a first look at old techniques where wool is used. It's interesting to note that Kerstin Gustafsson did not know all the Swedish terms we now have for Bosnian crochet. When Kerstin published her book, there was almost no elder books in Swedish where Bosnian crochet was mentioned, and little was known about it at that time. The picture shows how you hold the flat hook:

It seems to me that this hook is made of bone or wood, but I can't say for sure. The picture has traveled around the world in different shapes a few times :) It shows a hat, that is crocheted from the brim up to the top. In Joel's Ravelry Projects you can see his version of this hat, crocheted in a beautiful coopworth yarn.

Intermezzo, lament: Oh, all the books and magazines I have seen and read during my 40 years as a librarian! And oh how many of them I should have bought when they were published and still available for a reasonable price!

 

Back to more of the interesting texts Joel sent me:

In a letter from Larry Smith to Joe, Larry writes that the flat hook has been used in "pjoning", which is one of the terms for Bosnian crochet in Norwegian and Danish. Larry Smith mentions that some people find it easier to use the flat hook than a standard hook in pjoning, and that is what I have found, too. You hold the hook inside your hand, like a knife, and cast the yarn with your hook hand the same way as in twined knitting (twoendknitting, Swedish tvåändsstickning). Once you get used to this technique, you find it very comfortable and natural for Bosnian crochet.

On copy was from a Norwegian book, "Strikke, hekle, binde" by Gjertrud Saglie, published in 1989 by Landbruksforlaget. In this excerpt I got more terms in Norwegian than I had before: krokbinding, påting, bosnisk hekling, gobelinhekling, mosaikkhekling. Here is a picture from that book, showing an old and a new hook:

Thank you, Joel! You sent me some interesting texts and pictures. I will add them to my library ( my private one, not the one where I work!)

Now I'm sitting here wishing that someone with much knowledge and skills would write a book about Bosnian crochet in English. There is a lot of information that could be put together: history, culture, fibers, yarns, hooks, a lot of pictures, and some patterns, too. A thick book printed on good paper, and in a bind that stands opening and reading over and over again.