Field Trip: Tender Buttons, NYC

We almost went right by it, my sisters and I, as we walked along 62nd Street in Manhattan on a humid morning in July. Luckily, the golden button hanging above the storefront caught our attention and we found ourselves on the doorstep of Tender Buttons, a shop that's been beloved by button collectors and needle artists of all sorts for more than five decades. 
I first learned about Tender Buttons in the 1980s when I was working as an assistant copy editor at McCall's Needlework & Crafts magazine. Before each issue's photo shoot, the fashion editor would make the short trip from our office on 53rd Street to Tender Buttons to select the perfect buttons for the knit and crochet sweaters that would be featured. Back in the copy editing office, we made sure Tender Buttons, along with the yarn companies, was credited in the captions. After the issue was published, I was responsible for sending tear sheets to each credited vendor. Although I found the buttons that came out of…

Crocheted Bookworm Bookmarks


Summertime has always been reading time for me. When I was young, I spent most of my long, hot afternoons curled up in a chair, in a tree, or on the porch with my Nancy Drew mysteries. I also read a lot of H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and  Reader's Digest Condensed Books. I was a weird kid. Of course these were paper books, so if I didn't finish in one sitting (which I sometimes did), I would need a bookmark to guide me back to whatever perilous situation I had left plucky Nancy in.

Luckily my grandmother made crocheted "bookworms" in the 1970s. She kept a yellow one in her TV Guide at all times. I tried to make some of my own back then (weird kid, remember?), but I couldn't get the spirals to curl like my grandmother's. Well, I'm happy to tell you that my crochet skills have improved over the past few decades, and I've figured out how to make the bookworm bookmarks of my youth.  I'm not sure if my grandmother used pompoms on her bookworms, but I couldn't resist!



This project is perfect for using up scraps from your yarn stash. (As you can see, I'm down to my last yards of magenta.) The instructions are simple--I can't really call it a pattern--and each bookworm takes just minutes to make. I used worst-weight yarn and a size G hook, but you can experiment with whatever supplies you have on hand. Here's how to make them:

Crocheted Bookworm 
  • Chain 60, place a marker, and then chain 43 more stitches.
  • Make 3 double crochets in the third chain from the hook and in each stitch across until you reach the marker. Remove the marker, make 1 half-double crochet in the chain stitch that was marked, make 1 single crochet in the next chain, slip-stitch in the next chain, and fasten off.


When you adjust the double crochets so they spiral, your bookworm should look like the one in the photo above.


Make a pompom for each bookworm and tie it to the tail, then weave in any loose strands of yarn. Done! I bet it's adorable--and I bet you can't make just one. I made three for the blog post, but I could have kept stitching. (FYI: the books in the photo belong to my now-grown daughters, but weird kid me would have loved Harry Potter too.)