Book reviews on the Marly Bird site are written by team member Kathryn unless otherwise noted. Kathryn is the author of Crochet Saved My Life, so of course she was immediately drawn to Sutton Foster’s book: Hooked: How Crafting Saved My Life. This is her review.
Sutton Foster is a Tony-award winning actress known on Broadway for many performances including key roles in “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” “Anything Goes,” “Shrek,” “Violet,” and “The Music Man.” She’s also acted in a number of TV shows, known best for starring in “Bunheads” and “Younger.” She’s written a memoir about her performance work that also tells the story of how crafting steadied her throughout her life. Hooked: How Crafting Saved My Life is that story.
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Acting, Moms, and Crafting
Just so we’re clear, Hooked: How Crafting Saved My Life is not a book about crochet, per se. It’s Sutton’s story of her career as an actress, first and foremost, with all of the ups and downs that came along with that. It’s also a story of her personal life, primarily her challenging relationship with her mother, which changes over time. Other key relationships are with her first and second husbands and her daughter.
Crafting, in a sense, is secondary to the story. However, it also serves as the through-line of the story. Many of the chapters begin with a very specific craft project, go into other details, then circle back to the craft project, telling a full story within the chapter. Sometimes obviously and sometimes subtly, she draws parallels between crafting and life. She writes about her journey with many different crafts – cross-stitch, baking, collage – but lands on crochet as her favorite. Crochet makes cameo appearances early in the book but becomes more critical to the storytelling in the last half of the book.
Sutton On “How Crafting Saved My Life”
I don’t think that there’s a part in the book, aside from the title, where Sutton Foster specifically says that crafting was life-saving. She does, at one point, say that it kept her sane, which arguably could mean the same thing. More than that, though, she uses the “show, don’t tell” method of storytelling. She shows how crafting appears in her life in critical ways throughout the years. Here are some of the ways we see it helping her over time:
- It’s a safe space that she can always come back to, in good times and in bad.
- She struggles with anxiety and finds that crafting soothes the symptoms.
- She’s able to turn to crafting as a friend, helping her through loneliness when humans aren’t there for her.
- She’s also able to make human friends through a shared love of crafting. She’s also able to show her love for people by gifting them items she makes by hand.
- Moreover, she’s able to connect to her family through generations of crafting, even when the actual relationships sometimes pose challenges.
- She uses crochet to work through grief – during the loss of a relationship, as well as when coping with her mother’s death.
- Crochet is a place where she has control. She can choose a pattern and the colors and stitch it to be exactly what she wants. Therefore, when all other areas of life feel out of control, crochet grounds and focuses her.
4 Things That Might Surprise You About Sutton Foster’s Crochet
Here are four things that I learned from reading “Hooked: How Crafting Saved My Life”:
1. She Crochets Toilet Paper Roll Covers For Famous Friends
Early in the book, she mentions that she is really proud of the items that she’s created to give to other people. She specifically mentions a “handmade albino octopus toilet-paper-roll cover (with rainbow button suckers on its cream tentacles” that she made as a wedding present for Hilary Duff (“because what else do you get Hilary Duff?”
From one of her Instagram posts, it also looks like she’s given a toilet paper roll cover (a sheep this time) to Jennifer Garner, who she also taught to crochet.
2. Lots of Celebrities Have Learned to Crochet Because of Sutton Foster
At first, she found other friends on set through a shared love of crafting. She mentions several experiences of crafting quietly on set with someone else, bonding through art-making. Later, though, she also mentions the people that she inspired to learn to crochet because they always saw her doing it on set. In particular, lots of folks from the “Younger” cast seemed to have learned.
There’s a touching story about how Peter Hermann (husband of Law and Order SVU’s Mariska Hargitay, role of Charles on “Younger”) learned how to crochet in secret so that he could gift a THANK YOU banner to Sutton Foster at the end of the “Younger” series.
You can watch a video of her teaching Jennifer Garner how to crochet.
3. Sutton Foster Has Designed Her Own Crochet Blankets
Over time, she discovered that she loves corner-to-corner crochet. She gives props to Sarah of Repeat Crafter Me whose blog taught her the technique. Once she got the hang of it, she started designing her own C2C crochet blankets. She loves to draw (she’s had several gallery shows) so she draws a design, then transfers it to graph paper, then makes the blanket.
You will find a crochet blanket pattern in “Hooked: How Crafting Saved My Life.” It’s for a baby blanket that reads “Badass.” There’s a whole story about the original art piece that she made that eventually became this blanket. You can read it all in the book.
4. Sutton Foster Has a Working Relationship With Lion Brand Yarn
She mentions this just briefly towards the end of her book. She emphasizes how awesome she thinks it is that Vanna White crochets and has her own yarn line. If you look up Sutton Foster and crochet online, you’ll quickly learn more about this working relationship. You can find her adult and child crochet sweater patterns on their site. She also does crochet tutorials for their YouTube channel.
Get The Book
Sutton Foster’s craft memoir is available in hardcover, as an ebook, and as an audiobook.
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