Which Came First?

Dear Jesus,

Thank you for creating tea.

And bamboo knitting needles.

Amen.

Do you ever find yourself surprised when world history doesn't match how you thought it went in your head?

I had a "series of unfortunate events" known as history teachers.  I don't think I ever had an inspiring one.  Not a one in the whole bunch, until a humanities teacher my senior year.  In any case, this post isn't about history teachers.  It's about how I had something reversed in my head.

I thought crocheting came before knitting in history.

It didn't. 

Did you know this?

I began crocheting around age 5 or 6.  I had a Norwegian grandma (actually step-great grandma, if you're getting technical) who crocheted everything.    

I mean, not everything.  Not like this crocheted hamburger dress.  

But my Norwegian grandma crocheted a lot.  Enough that either she thought it would be fun to teach me, or I thought it would be fun to learn.  I'm not quite sure how that went. 

We used to have crocheting lessons while The Wheel of Fortune was on.  We'd sit on her couch and watch and try to guess the phrases before the contestants.  She usually won. I'd tell her that she should go on the show.  She'd look at me and then down at my pathetic attempt at crocheting, and she'd say "Focus on your work, Heather."  or "What a terrible hold you have on that crochet hook.  It's just not proper, but it produces consistent work, at least."

I think because I learned crocheting before I learned knitting (teaching myself knitting was one of my New Year's goal for 2010, and teach myself with YouTube's help, I did...), I thought that all of the world's history followed the same example.  Crocheting simply must have come before knitting.  It just had to be so.

During some research today, I found that not to be true.

From my research on wikipedia in scholarly tomes, I discovered that knitting did in fact come before crocheting.  

And my worldview has been rocked.  

Look, even the Virgin Mother knitted.  

While Baby Jesus practiced his cheesy senior portrait pose.

For future reference knitting in its earliest form was found in the 3rd to 5th century but began to use "modern" techniques in the 11th to 14th centuries.  Crochet appeared to have begun in the early 19th century.

There are no pictures of The Virgin Mary found crocheting that I'm aware of.  

And since this is the result of about 15 minutes of googling hours of exhaustive research, it must be true.