Round Yoke for Corset Cover (1916): vintage crochet pattern

Materials

• Size 50 mercerized cotton crochet thread — approximate; the book prints only “No. 50 mercerized crochet cotton”, with no brand
• Steel crochet hook
• Tapestry needle for the ends
• Fabric for the corset cover body, to set the yoke into
• Hook: Start with a 1.15 mm (US steel 10) hook — approximate, and ours: the book prints no hook size for this design. Change size until the work lies flat.

Abbreviations (US terms)

ch

chain

sl st

slip stitch

sc

single crochet

dc

double crochet

sp

space

ch-sp

chain space

st

stitch

sts

stitches

sk

skip

sh

shell

rep

repeat

row

row

Notes before you start

• Source: "Round Yoke for Corset Cover", The Elite Instruction Book, Pierre C. Brin, Chicago, Ill., 1916. Public domain in the USA.
• As printed — materials: Two balls of No. 50 mercerized crochet cotton. Gauge: Not given.
• Modernisation note: Stitches are converted from this book's own designs, not from a printed key and not from the date. The book prints NO abbreviation list anywhere: all sixteen printed pages are design pages, and none of them carries a key, a glossary or a stitch definition, so the ladder had to be read off the directions. The book names only three heights — s c, d c and t c — and nothing taller than t c appears in it. s c is the modern US single crochet. d c is the modern US double crochet: nine designs open a row “1 d c into the fourth st” (book pages 9, 10 and 11), the modern convention of a 3-chain turning chain worked into the 4th chain, and the filet foundation on book page 7 chains 42 for “1 d c into the 8th st, 11 sp”, three chains a mesh, which is the double-crochet filet formula. t c is the modern US treble, the next step up, and is written tr below; the book opens it with 5 chains rather than the modern 4, which is its own generosity and not a taller stitch — the Yoke for Corset Cover No. 2 joins its opening “8 ch sts” at the 5th chain, and the book has no fourth name to give the step above t c, while its graduated shell “1 s c, 1 d c, 6 t c, 1 d c, 1 s c” (book page 10, No. 5) climbs single to double to t c with no rung between. Note that Clark's 1923 book in this same collection abbreviates “D c” for a stitch that is the modern half double — the identical-looking abbreviation means a different stitch there, which is why this book's ladder was checked against its own pages rather than carried across.
• Modernisation note: The book's wording is written in modern US form: “ch sts” = ch; “s c” = sc; “d c” = dc; “t c” = tr; “sl st” = sl st; “sps” = spaces; “p” = picot; “gr” = group; “sk” = sk. “Break thread” is written fasten off, and “catch” is written join or work into according to what the row is doing. Ordinal row names (“First Row”, “Second Row”) are written Row 1, Row 2, and the book's “repeat *” is written rep from *.
• Modernisation note: The printed paragraphs are split into one row or step per line; stitch order and counts are unchanged. Section headings are added for navigation. The OCR of this scan is rough: it prints “d c” variously as “dc”, “de”, “d ec” and “d ¢”, sets “1 s c” as “1s c”, prints “No.” as “No,” and drops whole words at the column breaks. Those quirks are kept in the excerpts and not in the rows.
• Modernisation note: The book names a thread by maker's number only (for example “No. 30 mercerized crochet cotton”), with no brand. Those numbers are read as roughly equal to the modern crochet cotton sizes of the same number — approximate only.
• Modernisation note: No hook size is printed for this design. The only hook numbers anywhere in the book are the “No. 5 steel hook” and “No. 3 steel hook” given for the Cake and Sherbet Serving Set on book page 2, which is not among these patterns, so any metric hook suggested here is ours, read across from the thread size rather than from the page.
• Modernisation note: No gauge is printed for this design — the book prints no gauge, tension or stitch count per inch anywhere. Work a sample and change hook size until the piece lies flat.
• Modernisation note: No finished measurement is printed for this design.
• Modernisation note: No yardage is printed for this design. The book gives ball counts for a few pieces only, and where it does they are recorded above as printed; no length in yards or metres appears anywhere in the book.
• Modernisation note: Check: no measurement, bust size or finished depth is printed for this yoke — the shaping is given entirely as “increasing by 1 sp on every row of sps until you have made 14 rows”, and the fit is left to the worker and the armhole hem.
• Modernisation note: Check: the fan is defined inside Row 1 in the book's own words — “until you have 4 d c all into the same st, forming 1 fan” — and is not defined anywhere else in the design.
• Modernisation note: Check: the OCR prints the beading heading as “Eeading”; the page image (images/p-11.jpg) reads “Beading”, which is the reading used above.
• Modernisation note: Check: every tall stitch in this design is the book's d c, the modern US double crochet. Row 1's “1 d c into the 4th st” is one of the nine places in the book that fix that reading.
• Modernisation note: The line about running the cord through the beading is ours; the book prints the cord, the drop and the beading separately and does not say to join them, though that is what the photograph shows.