Tools of Our Craft

The new mystery Crochet Club for 2011 brought to the fore a subject that I had discussed with friends about a year and a half ago. My friend David is an incredible crocheter and designer. His passion is creating fabric with crochet that has the same drape and other properties that a knit fabric has.

Both of us understood that hook sizes recommended by yarn manufacturers were usually way to small. Logic tells one that the people who come up with hook sizes are just taking the needle sizes that are appropriate for knitting and converting the millimeter sizing of the needle to the corresponding crochet hook. David has a cabled Tunisian crochet hook that is probably either an 'O' or a 'P' that he uses for his slip stitch crochet. The tip is extremely pointed and this property makes it a very successful tool for this technique.

When he was teaching me slip stitch stitches I had lots of trouble using standard hooks. Using his hook I progressed rapidly. Now the quest was on to find 'pointy' crochet hooks. The company who made his hook is out of business and his research indicates that the tooling used to make them was destroyed.

We tried lots of hooks with little success. So the discussion turned to the possibility of modifying hooks that were easily available. Since the majority of hooks are metal the options were limited. Susan Bates makes a line of hooks out of colorful plastic called Crystalites. So David began using fine sand paper to 'sharpen' the nose of the hook. When he brought the hook to one of our weekly CIPs we were comparing his modified hook and my hook. The first thing I noticed was that the two hooks had different diameters. Looking around the table we found 2 more hooks that were supposed to be the same size and now we had 4 hooks that appeared to be 3 different sizes. So frustrating. How was he going to get enough hooks to be able to teach others the technique and have them be able to create fabric to a set gauge???

Fast forward to today. The new project that I am starting calls for English hooks sizes 2.5 mm and 3.0 mm. I tried swatching with my hooks and was not making gauge. That meant 'road trip'. Three days and 4 hooks later I was back to swatching. Gauge was closer. Then I got the bright idea to double check the hook against my needle sizer. Surprise - surprise. The 3.0 mm hook fit snuggly into the 3.25 mm hole. So its size was not accurate. The 2.5 mm would not fit into the 2.25 mm hole and was way too small for the 3.25 m hole. So its size was probably accureate. This was Saturday and I was once again CIP with friends so we began checking other hooks. Some hooks measured what they were marked. But, others way off. I think that one of the most surprising is that an older Boye hook marked 'D' (should be 3.25 mm) was way smaller.

I will be going to the big box hardware store to buy some calipers so that I can accurately check all my hooks. I am not sure who to contact but I am going to start with the two American manufacturers to see if anything can be done to get some quality assurance implemented.