The editors of CrafterNews asked best-selling Potter Craft author Doris Chan if she would do a Q and A with them about Mother’s Day, and she replied that she would love to do something but could she write an essay about her mother instead. So voila, here is her delightful, sweet, and tender essay about herself, her mother, and crochet.

My mother is a wonderful and generous soul, but also the most stubborn, aggravating woman on the planet. She would and often does offer me the shoes off her feet and all the food in her pantry. But then I have to listen to endless complaints, like how the line dance teacher at the senior center snubbed and insulted her last week. This is the reality of moms, and the price this daughter has to pay for leaving Mom’s house with huge supplies of coffee and chocolate.

Mom’s stubbornness is evident when the subject of my crochet comes around. It’s 2006. I rush to her house to present her with a copy of my first book, Amazing Crochet Lace. I explain that I am a professional crochet designer. But Mom still doesn’t quite get what I do.

“Oh, I like this, beautiful” she coos, pointing at a book image. “You can make for my friend?”

“No, Mom, I don’t make things for people. I sell designs.”

“That’s okay, she can pay for it,” cajoles Mom.

“No, Mom, I don’t sell crochet stuff. I only make it once as a sample for the pictures. Then I show how you can make it for yourself from the pattern.”

Her face falls. “I can’t do that, it’s too hard.”

I know very well that she wouldn’t, couldn’t crochet anything from my patterns because she doesn’t understand or read English well enough to follow along. I know this because of how I learned to crochet from her when I was a girl, by example, by rote, in the same way she learned from her mother. Mom stitched, I copied. There were no patterns, diagrams, stitch dictionaries, or schematics in her crochet world. Her hands simply remembered how to make what she wished. Beginning with granny squares, moving on to scarves, flowers, and pineapple doilies, Mom stitched, I copied.

The roles reversed as I picked up techniques and skills she had never experienced. It became my turn to stitch while Mom copied. She was completely taken by the new novelty yarns at the time, and as soon as I showed her how to work with them and gave her a few original samples, she obsessively cranked out furry, glittery, or wildly colored hats, scarves, and ponchos for herself, family, and friends. Without exaggeration, Mom has crocheted enough of these objects so that she could wear a different one every day for a year.

I had stumbled onto the perfect way to broaden my mom’s crochet horizon and get out of having to crochet things for her friends. Each visit I try to bring a new project, sometimes a prototype of a design that eventually had to be remade for publication, sometimes a piece that’s still in the R&D stage. I know that if she sees it she can crochet it. The tactic has worked well, up to a point. In my new book, Crochet Lace Innovations, I explore alternate crochet techniques, broomstick, Tunisian, and hairpin lace and nuances of seamless garment shaping that she won’t be able to master by copying samples. Here we go again.

“Oh, this one is really, really beautiful! I bet my friends will go crazy if I wear it.”

When I started designing, neither of us could fit into the tiny-sized garment samples required for publication. But since then we’ve both dropped a few pounds. In Mom’s case, she has gradually lost weight as she balances her diabetes. In my case, since she avoids stockpiling candy, there’s no more Mom chocolate to take home. It’s a strange win-win situation. The point is, both of us can now squeeze into quite a number of design prototypes and original samples, and it’s a happy little battle to see which one of us gets which garments. So look closely under the jacket and you’ll see that Mom is wearing a pink prototype of the Isabeau top that graces the cover of my new book.

Her friends did go crazy!

Doris Chan’s books include Amazing Crochet Lace, Everyday Crochet, and the newly released Crochet Lace Innovations from Potter Craft. In addition to writing books, Doris supplies design support for Caron International and NatuallyCaron.com, Tahki Stacy Charles, and Coats & Clark. Her work has been featured in Crochet Today, Crochet!, and Interweave Crochet magazines, among others, as well as on Knitting Daily TV and Knit and Crochet Today on public television. She is an avid professional member of the Crochet Guild of America (CGOA) and writes the popular blog, Everyday Crochet: www.doriseverydaycrochet.blogspot.com.

Categories: Knitting & Crochet |

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