Card Table Cover Spade (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) — Spade" (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: the book misprints the number of Row 28 as “58th row”. It is the 28th, both by its place between Rows 27 and 29 and by its counts, which are the frame row shared with the other three suits. The printed number is recorded here and the row is numbered 28.
• Modernisation note: Check: Row 10 is where the scan is least legible — one OCR pass of it reads “27 s.m.” in the middle of the row, which would make the row 56 mesh wide. The page image at full resolution prints “2 s.m.”, and with that reading the row totals 31 like every other. The page image is what is followed here.
• Modernisation note: Check: the book prints no thread number, no needle number and no finished size for the card table cover. Nothing is invented here to fill the gap.