Card Table Cover Diamond (1926): vintage crochet pattern

Materials

• Cotton or linen crochet thread — the book prints no thread number for the card table cover
• Steel crochet hook to suit the thread
• Tapestry needle for the ends
• Hook: Check: the book prints no thread number and no needle number for the card table cover, so no modern hook can be read across from a thread size. Match the hook to whatever thread is chosen.

Abbreviations (US terms)

ch

chain

dc

double crochet

sp

space

ch-sp

chain space

st

stitch

sts

stitches

rep

repeat

row

row

sk

skip

sl st

slip stitch

Notes before you start

• Source: "Card Table Cover (No. 5) — Diamond" (No. 5), Variety: Italian Cut Work and Filet Lace, Book No. 2, Carmela Testa & Co., Inc., Boston, Mass., 1926. Public domain in the USA.
• As printed — materials: No thread number printed for the card table cover; No crochet needle number printed for the card table cover. Gauge: Not given.
• Modernisation note: Stitches are converted by this book's own key (book page 29, image p-31.jpg), not by the look of the abbreviation. The key lists: ch.—chain; sl. st.—slip stitch; s.c.—single crochet; d.c.—double crochet; tr.c.—treble crochet; d.sl.st.—double slipstitch; p.—picot; o.m.—open mesh; s.m.—solid mesh. The same page defines the mesh: “Open mesh: 1 d.c.—ch. 2—skip 2 stitches of previous row—1 d.c.—repeat. Solid mesh: 1 d.c. into d.c. of previous row—1 d.c. into each chain—1 d.c. into next d.c. of previous row. One solid mesh is made up of 4 d.c. Two solid mesh are made up of 7 d.c.” A one-stitch-plus-two-chain space and a four-stitch block is the ordinary modern filet mesh, which is what settles the naming: this book's d.c. IS the modern US double crochet and its s.c. IS the modern US single crochet. That is a finding, not an assumption — a 1923 book already in this collection uses the older naming, where the same abbreviations mean stitches one step taller, and reading this book by that key would have made every design wrong.
• Modernisation note: The book's wording is written in modern US form: “needle” means the hook and is written hook; “the goods” means the linen the edge is worked onto and is written linen; “skip” = sk; “Repeat” = rep; st(s) = st(s). The scan's OCR garbles some of the printed ordinals and fractions; the excerpts keep what the page image actually prints.
• Modernisation note: The printed paragraphs are split into one row, round or step per line; stitch order and counts are unchanged. Section headings added for navigation. Ordinal row names (“1st row”, “2nd row”) are written Row 1, Row 2.
• Modernisation note: No gauge is printed for this design — the book prints no gauge, tension or mesh-per-inch count anywhere. Work a sample and change hook size until the piece lies flat.
• Modernisation note: Check: no colour is printed for this design. The plates photograph as a plain light thread on light linen, and the book names no shade for any of its crochet.
• Modernisation note: Open mesh and solid mesh are the book's filet units and its words are kept rather than renamed. In modern terms an open mesh is 1 dc, ch 2, skip 2, and a solid mesh is 4 dc — counting 3 dc for each further adjoining solid mesh, since neighbouring blocks share a stitch, which is what the book means by “Two solid mesh are made up of 7 d.c.”
• Modernisation note: No yardage is printed for this design. The book prints no ball counts or thread quantities anywhere, so none is given here.
• Modernisation note: Check: the four suit motifs are worked on one shared frame — rows 1 to 5 and rows 27 to 31 are identical in all four, and row 26 mirrors row 6. That is how the scan was checked: each of the four was read independently and the frame rows had to agree across all four, which they do.
• Modernisation note: Check: every row of this motif was totted up and comes to 31 mesh, the width set by the foundation chain of 97 (31 open mesh across). That arithmetic is what verifies the transcription of the mesh counts against the scan, row by row; any row that failed the total was read again off the page image at full resolution before being written down.
• Modernisation note: Check: the book prints the four suit squares as four separate strips of directions under one heading, “DIRECTIONS FOR CARD TABLE COVER (No. 5)”, and prints nothing at all about how they are set into the cover — no linen size, no placement, no seaming, no border. The photograph on book page 29 (illustration No. 5) shows the four squares set one into each corner of a square cloth. No assembly is given here, because none is printed.
• Modernisation note: Check: Row 21 is a misprint in the original. Every other row of this square counts 31 mesh, and the foundation chain of 97 sets that width, but Row 21 as printed counts only 30 — “1 o.m., 1 s.m., 6 o.m., 2 s.m., 4 o.m., 6 s.m., 1 o.m., 2 s.m., 5 o.m., 1 s.m., 1 o.m.” The reading was taken twice off the page image at full resolution, so it is the book that is one mesh short, not the scan. The missing mesh is not supplied here, because the book does not say where it belongs; comparing with Row 11, which mirrors it, suggests the “5 o.m.” near the end should be 6 o.m., but that is a guess and is left as a guess.
• Modernisation note: Check: the book prints the foundation as “Chain 97” beside the suit name, and Row 1 as “1 d.c. in the 8th st., counting back from hook, forming 1 o.m. Repeat 31 o.m.” The 97 chains give the 31 open mesh of Row 1: three chains for each mesh after the first, plus the turning chain the book counts back over.
• Modernisation note: Check: the book prints no thread number, no needle number and no finished size for the card table cover, though it prints all of those for the Tumbler Doily and the Chair-Back on the pages either side. Nothing is invented here to fill the gap.