More Hooks

I am still working on my sewing room, and my afghan, but the afghan only gets worked on when its too hot to do anything else (just the small squares, I won't put them together till this winter). I do the house work in the morning and then crochet in the afternoon, its supposed to be a 94 or so today, I tend to wilt in the heat, but I dread putting the air conditioner in the window this summer. I postpone this until I must, air conditioning aggravates my arthritis something awful. I can't move in the mornings all summer without a pain pill. Sometimes the pain is just too much.

On a brighter note, there are always those brighter notes! I've acquired some more crochet hooks. I hate bidding on ebay, but it seems to be the only way to get things like this. I am not sure what the top ones are, they were labeled crochet or tambour hooks, I am uncertain which they really are. They don't really look like tambour hooks, but they are so tiny that I can only use really fine thread like 60 or 80 with them. There is a tiny handle in the wooden holder that fits over the end of them to make them longer. They came from France.

 The ones on the bottom, I am trying to find out about, right now. They look like the Ross hooks, but they have a patent applied for printed on them instead of an actual patent number. If they are prior to that, they are over a hundred and thirty years old. There are only two or three sizes, but there are two or three of each one. They came in the pretty lacquer box. They came from right here in Missouri.

I love learning about the history of crochet almost as much as doing it, I suppose eventually I will get tired of looking for hooks and settle down to use what I have, I always do, I like to use the old hooks for things, but I'll be honest, some of the older hooks are much harder to work with than our modern hooks, its hard to believe some of the beautiful things women used to make with the older ones, they are hard to hold, but look very pretty and dainty in the hand. It could be that we are just plain spoiled today because what we have to work with is just so easy to use. Here is another photo of some of the newer hooks, these were acquired before this last group was.

I believe the tiny silver one is a tatting hook but can't be sure on that either, it goes through fabric easily so it could be a hook made to crochet an edging directly on fabric. The others are bone and steel and the pretty brass handled hook and one celluloid handled hook. I managed to get one Evelyne hook, they work very well, wish I could find some more of them. I managed to get one of the triplex hooks too. Only three or four of these hooks came from the states, the rest came from England. They seem to have many more of this kind of thing there than we do.

I do think I am about collected out though, I didn't want a lot of each, just one tow representatives of each kind of hook. I did enjoy getting them and cleaning and repairing some of them so they are now usable. The last photo of hooks I'm going to post is some of the ones I've had for a while. If anyone knows anything about some of these hooks leave a comment, information on some of these is very hard to come by, and I've been working on it for weeks. These are the ones for the most part I posted before.

I always hope that someone will know something and leave a hint for me. I use my scanner, to take the pictures because I have a rather crappy older camera, and the scanner gives really good detail.

Other than the hooks, my time has been spent making an Etui for sewing, I looked at all the ones on Ebay and the antique shops and wound up making my own, I wanted a place to store my vintage brass sewing tools and now I have one. It is also large enough and has a compartment for my antique crochet hooks. I still need to tweak it a bit to make it right but that won't take a lot of work. Anyway, maybe if I get a chance I'll post a picture of it later.

Have a nice week.