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.)