While I was in Adelaide, messing about with my hostess’s yarn, I decided to make a simple granny square in one of the magazines I’d bought. Halfway through it began to look like a mutant, four-legged starfish, and a cog in my brain did a creaky, reluctant turn.

Oh yeah, I thought, crochet is different in other parts of the world.

Of course, it’s not the only fibre terminology difference. I reckon, though, that it’s the most confusing. The whole different names for different yarn weights is vaguely annoying, for instance. While it’s much easier to remember the 2ply/4ply/8ply/12ply system, it is rather silly calling the weights ‘ply’ when it has nothing to do with the actual ply of they yarn. Still, manufactuerers here do tend to get pretty close to the actual expected thickness for the ‘ply’, so as a standard it works very well.

The overseas method of naming the weights ‘fingering’, ‘double knitting’, ‘worsted’, etc., is harder to remember, and adding to that frustration is the fact that it’s an unreliable guide to the actual thickness of the yarn. I’ve knit yarn called ‘dk’ that was the thickness of fingering, for example, and another that was more like aran.

Since most os yarns aren’t available here, substituting is an essential skill for Aussie knitters. You eventually learn to guess at the required yarn thickness as much by the stated weight (if it does state one) as by noting the needle size, gauge, and the drape and stitch definition in the garment photo.

Fortunately, knitting stitches have pretty much the same names wherever you come from. Unfortunately this isn’t true for crochet. And to make it even more confusing, we use the same names for different stitches. A treble in Australia is a double crochet in the US. This results in mutant starfish granny squares, if you’re not careful.

Yesterday I found this old instruction leaflet from way back when I learned crochet as a child:

There’s even a stitch name correction in my mother’s handwriting, for a stitch name that Aussie patterns couldn’t even agree on at the time.

Curious, I decided to compare this leaflet to crochet instructions in a US and UK book from my collection. For the US I chose Debbie Stoller’s The Happy Hooker; for the UK I looked in my new Harmony Guide 300 Crochet Stitches book. The instructions in these books matched. That was interesting, because usually Aussies inherit UK customs. Had the UK taken on US terms, and if so what had Australia done?

The answer would be in local magazines, I guessed. Opening Yarn magazine, I discovered a lovely little table at the back of the issue explaining which Aussie stitches matched which North American ones. Looks like we’re sticking to our own terminology.

It then occured to me that maybe the Harmony Guide, while printed in the UK, may be aimed at the North American market, and that UK general usage may still be the same as Australian. I don’t have a UK magazine to check, however. (If anyone reading this post has, and cares to check, see if a double crochet involves winding the yarn around the hook first, or hooking straight into the chain.)

As for my granny square, I frogged it, checked the magazine’s instructions, then started again and it worked fine. I’m sure, once I get the differences memorised, I’ll be able to work US patterns without contantly checking instructions. But it’s not something I’ve ever had to do with knitting.