This past Friday shortly after sunset, I made my way to Stevens books– a used book store were everything old is made new again. Tucked away from the usual hurly burly, I had made sure to schedule enough time for the stop before I went to a First Friday crochet meetup at my LYS, Yarn Tree Studio.

Weeks earlier at another crochet meetup at the same store, a fellow crocheteuse had arrived with a complete 22 volume set of Greystone’s Creative Hands: The complete knitting, dressmaking, and needlecraft guide.

I was in awe.

My first encounter with the Greystone series came a my son’s trumpet lesson. Consigned to”the trumpet mom “corner during his lessons, over the years I had spent many hours looking over the three or four slim volumes that had belonged to my son’s trumpet teacher’s mother.

I read the available volumes multiple times, over the course of several years, and each time I gleaned some bit of information I had overlooked in a previous reading.

I knew there were other volumes, and sometimes after we got home from his lessons I would troll the internet in search of a complete set.

So I experienced a mixture of admiration and envy when my friend waltzed into that Friday night crochet club with a complete set. As it happened, they had another complete set.

I had meant to into the store the very next day, but I had a friend from California visiting, and then when she left, my son had multiple school obligations, and then when the relative calm of the weekend arrived, there were myriad holiday performances to attend.

I had both forgotten the books and pined for them.

Then, this past Friday, I had time to go to the bookstore.

Not wanting to spend time driving in rush hour traffic at the start of a weekend, I called ahead. They still had the remaining set of the books, and they would hold it for me until they closed that evening.

Here is a group photo:

and here is the all important Volume 22 which not only contains directions for a child’s crochet tank top and a crochet brushed wool afghan, but a complete index to the other 21 volumes:

Divided into two broad categories, Crochet Know-how:

and Home Crochet:

One design that caught my eye while I was thumbing through the pages of what turned out to be Volume 3 was this stunningly simple motif:

There are any number of amazing projects contained within the pages of this compendium of crafting, and I am looking forward to exploring all of them, from the proto-amigurumi “matchstick” people to the scarf with hyperbolic curlicues.

What I am learning as I sort through the various crochet projects is that really good ideas often reveal themselves more than once before we catch on to just how good they are.