Off the Beaten Path: Roses

Nanny's Crochet Rose
Nanny’s Crochet Rose

I was at Craft Night last night when my SILs showed me a piece by their grandmother (DH’s grandmother also). They had gone through her bag of crochet, which SIL#2 has had since she died. They wanted to make something out of the pieces for our niece who is getting married in April.

We have, or had, a doily that was similar made by my great grandmother (Grama Johnson). I showed my mom and she thinks the cream portion is tatted and the rose and leaves are crocheted. I don’t tat or crochet so I have no idea. I have seen tatting and the outer cream work does look like tatting.

Of course, I did a web search to see what I could find. Lots of Etsy patterns that were not relevant. I did find Picmia, which has lots of flowers. What I would really like to see is an index of patterns by technique.

I thought that Workbasket, an older magazine that I believe is out of print might have been a source of the pattern. I found a pay per view resource. It has a free history of the magazine. This is clearly a labor of love, however I found it a little difficult to navigate. I also found an index of Tatting patterns from Workbasket. I didn’t find the pattern for the piece above.

In my web travels, I found some interesting sites. Needlenthread has online resources that include historic needlework sites, coloring pages and vintage pattern sites. The resources appear mostly to be about embroidery.

This is the sort of reference project into which, as a librarian, I could sink my teeth. Too bad nobody pays me for this.

Let me know if you have seen such a thing. I have a couple of vintage books I can look at and will do that later.

Author: JayeL

Quiltmaker who enjoys writing and frozen chocolate covered bananas.

5 thoughts on “Off the Beaten Path: Roses”

  1. I have seen crochet roses, but never the green leafy edging like in yoyr. Definitely a pattern worth hunting up. Soon as i get home i will check my vintage stitch dictionary for you. Fingers crossed:)

  2. That could actually be all crocheting. I’ve done a few doilies in my life and I have some older pieces from my Mom’s side of the family too. I am sure one of your other reader’s is more of an expert than I am and you’ll get better responses.

  3. The first rounds of the cream color around the rose are crochet — it looks like a round of triple (or maybe double) crochet, with two rounds of chain stitch anchored to the previous round with either slip stitch or single crochet (you would chain 6 or however many, then single crochet to attach to the previous round, etc. to make the lacy area around the rose.) The other cream rounds, the one before and the two after the green leaves, could look tatted to me. (I tried to learn tatting years ago but couldn’t get the hang of it — this was before Youtube, so I might have better luck now. So I’m not an expert on what it looks like!)

    It’s not impossible for those rounds to be crochet based on what I’m seeing, but you couldn’t just crochet that in one pass. If it were crocheted, you would have to be working around either a base thread/cord (in the manner of Irish crochet) or a around a crochet chain, which is how I’d approach it if I were trying to reproduce this in crochet. So in this case, you could get the same or similar look by making longer chains than the inner cream rounds, anchoring each of them after x number of choices stitches, and then you’d have to go around the same round again, making single crochet stitches around the chains you made in the last round. The picots in the outer round (the little bumps) could be produced either by crochet or tatting. In crochet, you could stop halfway across, chain a few stitches, then slip stitch to attach to the last single crochet and keep going.

    I’ve never managed to produce crocheted picots this neat, though. I think that it would have been less work to tat those sections rather than go to all the effort of producing the same look in crochet.

    1. I re-read this after I posted it and realized parts of it are a little incoherent — sorry about that! I was typing on my tablet and got randomly autocorrected in at least one spot (choices vs chain) and left random words in other places when I changed my mind and rephrased. I hope it at least sort of makes sense!

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