A thrifted crochet blanket

This crochet blanket was not made by me, but I felt it deserved a post here in the community, because to me it is a true work of art. I recently thrifted this blanket at a bazaar, and I was very surprised because, in fact, it was thrown in a dusty corner, with many stains and its decorative potential completely underestimated. I immediately fell in love with it, especially because of the color. I knew it would look beautiful in my bedroom, and I bought it for only R$30.

This price is incredibly low; it probably doesn’t even cover the cost of the yarn and materials used. Finding this thrift treasure stirred mixed feelings in me. On the one hand, I was happy to have found such a wonderful piece at a low price, after all, who doesn’t like that? On the other hand, it made me think about how undervalued crochet is here where I live.

If you go to bazaars, thrift stores, or second-hand shops, you will find many of these pieces, blankets, tablecloths, and other handmade crochet items, sold for ridiculously low prices, completely devalued. People who make crochet struggle to survive solely from their craft because it is not valued, especially when we see crochet pieces being sold on websites like Shein or AliExpress for absurdly cheap prices. I recently saw a piece for 15 reais; if I tried to make something like that myself, it wouldn’t even pay for the skein of yarn I would use.

So this made me reflect on how much we undervalue the work of crocheters. A piece like this blanket, for example, probably took many months, maybe even more than a year, to be completed. It is extremely heavy, delicate, made with fine thread and dense stitches. It is a wonderful piece, probably from the 1970s, when these patterns and motifs were very popular here in Brazil.

I’m posting these photos, even though it’s not a piece I made, as a manifesto for valuing this beautiful art. I hope I can somehow influence people to look at crochet with a more attentive and caring eye, because the hands that weave crochet carry many stories, and there is a lot of love in every stitch.

So that’s it. I like to think that this blanket ended up in a bazaar precisely so that I could find it, and that the person who made it, in some way, made it for me, without having the slightest idea of that.