marykate@2 wrote

on Apr 11, 2007 10:53 PM

You’ve done it again: a sweater, tank top, jacket, or skirt that could stand up just as well as you, without you in it…

You’ve split your yarn so much it looks like it's had a run-in with your cat…

The lace edging is so stiff, you look like a Shakespeare Festival reject…

The handbag is so holey it sets free every pen, lipstick, bobby pin, and unmentionable...

I have done it too. Many, many times. Sometimes I have been tempted to resort to the art-school scapegoat: blame the materials. “This yarn is crummy! It can’t be crocheted! You can’t make a flowy crocheted sweater! Waah!”

Despair not! All of the above problems can be usually be solved by simply changing your hook size: up for better drape, down for more stiffness.

I know, I know…you’re a responsible citizen and you read the yarn label. And if they’ve been nice enough to include a little hook icon and a size, it says RIGHT THERE what’s recommended. See? Yes, they recommend that size. But are they going to stand over your shoulder and check? Will they send the Yarn Police to get you?

“Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to put that hook down right now. That yarn clearly calls for a size H or smaller hook.”

You aren’t cheating on the yarn company. Your garments will usually look and drape a lot better with a bigger hook size. Trust me.

Drape: It’s not just for curtains

I’m no seamstress, so I hadn’t heard of drape when I started working with yarn. I knit some scarves, crocheted some ponchos, dang near carpal-tunneled myself trying to get thick boucle yarn around my teeny hooks, and wound up making garments more in common with lampshades. Soft yarn with a beautiful sheen was wrestled into impossibly tight stitches, losing its softness in the dense fabric. My stitches were choking the life out of the yarn.

I’d look through pattern books to see what I was doing wrong, and always felt a pang of jealousy when I flipped past some knitting patterns. Why do their sweaters look like there’s a body underneath, and the crochet sweaters look like armadillo hide? Why does it seem that crochet sweaters have an identity crisis: “I know I’m not knitted, but I want to be SO MUCH!! Pleeeeeease make me look like knitting!!”

I was really at a loss until some good books came out, I bought some bigger hooks, and I spent a lot of time playing with different combinations of hook sizes and yarns. The difference—even jumping two hook sizes--is really tremendous. The soft merino is even softer, the acrylic doesn’t exfoliate my skin…scarves actually wrap around my neck…it’s brilliant.

After all the experiments and research, I realized the biggest problem I had was this assumption: Because I’m using yarn and a stick of sorts, crochet should work just like knitting. It doesn’t, and will surely disappoint one who works with that idea in mind.

Here’s what happens: drape is “the way in which cloth falls or hangs,” according to Answers.com. There was no falling or hanging with my pieces, because each stitch was so tightly locked to the others. That’s fine if you’re working on potholders or bathroom rugs, but it doesn’t cut it when you want any bounce or breathability, let alone sexiness, in your wearables. I’m not just referring to lacy things that can achieve fantastic drape in crochet. I’m talking about your standard, run-o’-the-mill stitches, in a solid fabric, that can actually hang well on a human form.

The Grand Experiment

For this article, I crocheted a boatload of swatches in a downright scientific way, and then observed how well they drape. Here were the controls:

Teal Group

Yarn: Red Heart Soft in Teal (one of my absolute favorite colors), worsted weight acrylic
15 rows of 30 half double crochet (except with P and Q hooks. They became absurdly large, so I stopped at row 8 for them)
Swatches made with these hook sizes: F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, P, and Q

Shell Group

Yarn: Caron Simply Soft in Heather Grey, other worsted-weight scraps from my stash, mostly acrylic
6 shells wide (shell pattern: 1 SC, skip 1 ch, 5 DC in same chain, skip one ch, 1 SC) and about 18 rows tall
Swatches made with these hook sizes: H, I, J, K, L, N, and P

The Testing Apparatus

I rigged up a shoulder-sized testing dummy with a skein of yarn shoved onto a hanger, and a lamp. Someday I would really love a dress form. Sigh.

Then I draped the swatches on The Apparatus, attaching weighted clips to the swatch edges. The weights simulate the pull of a sweater’s worth of yarn on the stitches.

The Evidence and Observations

Here’s how everything looked.

The Teal Group

Doesn’t the Q swatch look like a completely different animal?

The Shell Group

Since tactile websites are a thing of the future, you’ll have to take my word for it that swatches made with larger and larger hooks were much more bouncy, softer to the touch, and more prone to stretching.

Hook Size Pros and Cons

Great! But what about…

…The Foundation Chain?

The foundation chain poses a bit of a problem, no matter what hook size you’re dealing with. Generally, crocheters make the foundation chain too tight. With smaller hooks, this makes it difficult to work your first row of stitches into the chain. With larger hooks, it’s easy enough to make the first row, but subsequent rows “creep” outward from the much-tighter starting chain. Pieces become trapezoidal when you want them to be rectangular.

There are several solutions to the chain problem. The most obvious option is to make your chain as loosely as possible. It’s easy to be inconsistent with your tension that way. The other two options I learned this summer in a class by Lily Chin (her new book Couture Crochet Workshop is much like the class, with many more helpful techniques and patterns).

First, you could make the foundation chain with a bigger hook than the one you intend to use for the piece. Tension remains even, and you don’t have the creep. Just remember to switch back to the correct hook afterwards.

The second option is to use foundation stitches. Doris Chan uses this method almost exclusively in her Amazing Crochet Lace book, and it’s a great technique. You chain enough for the first stitch plus one, add one chain to the bottom of the stitch, make your stitch and crochet into the extra chain for the next stitch and so on. It’s springy as can be, and really helps the counting-impaired among us. See below for directions.

1. Chain enough for first stitch plus one:
   
   
   


2. For SC, insert hook into first chain, YO, draw up loop, YO, draw yarn through first chain on hook (i.e., make 1 chain). (For other stitches, YO as needed normally, then do the this step.)
   
   
   


3.  YO and finish stitch:
   
   
   


4. For next stitch, find the extra chain at the bottom of the stitch you just made and insert hook there. Repeat steps 2 and 3 until you have the desired foundation.
   
   
   

…Yarn Weight?

Hook Size’s evil twin sister, Yarn Weight, creates even more thorny issues to think about. A great number of the crochet patterns out there call for worsted weight or heavier yarns, using not-so-big hooks. In fact, over half the garments in the latest crochet magazines were made with worsted weight or heavier yarns.

But look through the store-bought sweaters in your closet. Do your most flattering sweaters use worsted weight yarn? I didn’t think so. Crochet designers, take note! Yarn companies, make some affordable, lighter-weight yarns in colors other than Baby Jamboree! Thank you. 

Yarn choices are, of course, very subjective, and trends change so quickly that it’s hard to make any definite statement about what looks good on whom. Just check out the huge knit hats and 80’s-style sweaters that were “in” this Fall. But generally, big fat yarn makes people look big and fat. A relief for those poor emaciated supermodels, and maybe for knitwear patterns’ standard size model (size 6 or 8), but the proportion is wrong for average-sized folks. We don’t need the extra bulk.

Crochet stitches are naturally thicker than knitted ones, and the structure of the fabric is very different from springy knits. Yarn weight should be considered if you want your fabric to drape well and have flattering proportions. Naturally, there are exceptions, but the design should really be spot-on for bulkier yarns to work.

One more highly opinionated thought about proportion: I’ve seen a few forays into the absurd with big ‘ol hooks and knitting needles, where a person makes a poncho or a shawl with an S hook and laceweight merino or something. I’ve tried it too, and it just doesn’t look good. It looks more like you’re trying to “stretch” one little skein of yarn (which was kind of the idea I had…since it was expensive yarn…and it works up so fast…). The gaps between stitches are no longer in human proportions. If you’re making fishnets for the Jolly Green Giant, go right on with your bad self. Otherwise, take it down a hook size or two. Just my two cents.

Now that I’ve managed to offend nearly everyone…

I might as well hang it up now. Oh, horrible pun! Stop it! 

Ahem, yes.

Crocheting with a bigger hook is going to take some getting used to. It will feel sloppy at first, you’ll go through yarn alarmingly fast, and the regimented stitches of yesterday will be hard to give up. But you will gain so much more just by experimenting a little, and that extra-special soft Italian stuff you bought will absolutely sing when it has some more leg room. You may even find that ho-hum stitch patterns take on new life with a different hook, and new design possibilities will open up. So relax! Try some bigger hooks. 

Just don’t get pulled over by the Yarn Police.

Further Reading:

Check out Dora Ohrenstein’s article in Crochet Insider for more about the special qualities of crochet.