The Happy Hooker

I can only imagine what sorts of attention this post title will generate, but here I’m merely providing a short book review (she said, batting her eyes innocently).

While visiting my husband’s family in south Florida, I found a good local yarn store in which to perform a yarn hunt. By the time we arrived in town I had managed to generate a blanket and three scarves for gifts, and with yarn purchased at the LYS, I’ve already created a fourth scarf while hanging out on holiday. (Pix to follow eventually, I hope.) I also found a copy of the new book Stitch ‘n Bitch Crochet: The Happy Hooker. (If you thought I was referring to this book, get your mind out of the gutter.)

I now own several dead-tree-based resources that explain the basics of crocheting, as well as having studied numerous websites and recently borrowed Crocheting in Plain English from Lauren. No one resource seems to have all the answers nor does a perfectly good job of the ones it does provide. Plain English has a wonderful friendly style and good advice about crocheting paraphernalia, whereas Happy Hooker is breezy — okay, even saucy — in style and excels at the explanations and pictures for basic stitches and other tasks. (I’m afraid the English isn’t quite Plain enough for me in the other book when it comes to actual instructions.) Neither bothers to reverse the explanations and pictures for the left-handed — which I am — but I’m used to that now and I just reverse everything in my head. Isn’t that one of the tests for Mensa or something?

Hooker is the first book that’s gotten me to try fringes and add new yarn in the “approved” fashion. Here’s a passage that provides one key piece of information, without which I’d been having a rougher time than necessary. It’s from a section called Swinging Singles:

If you examine the last row of stitches you made, you’ll see that a single crochet stitch is three-dimensional and, seen from the front, looks like a V with another V lying across the top of it, sort of like a lid. In fact, you can think of your crochet stitches as being a bit like a to-go cup of latte from your favorite java hut. A single crochet stitch is a short shot, while later on you’ll learn to make taller stitches — more like those grande and venti cups. They’ll always have that lid on top, though, just like all good coffee does. Also, observe that the “cup” Vs are not stacked directly on top of each other, but are a bit offset, which is probably just how you’d stack ’em, too, if you had to make a wall of coffee cups.

Hooker suffers from the same structural difficulty that lots of other crochet books do: Many complex crocheted items look kind of frumpy, no matter how beautiful the models you put them on, so lots of the patterns are things I probably wouldn’t make (a cowboy hat??). But it does offer a skull pattern that can be applied to sweaters and bags, and even has some fun with a purposely ironic crocheted anarchy symbol. These patterns ratchet up the coolness factor quite a bit. If I’m ever going to get past crochet kindergarten, I think I’ll have to do it with a Jolly Roger sweater.