Need help with a crochet term (+)?

[mairajuice]

Hello! It's my first time posting here and I'm still a bit new to crocheting.

I've recently started with a nightcap from an 1855 pattern book (this one, specifically: https://books.google.de/books?id=IzkCAAAAQAAJ&hl=de&pg=PA279#v=onepage&q&f=false). The terms for stitches are relatively the same so I thought it would be easy to make but I got stuck on this line: "2 sc, + 4 ch". There's no guide for the crochet terms so I'm a bit stuck at Row 1.

Thanks in advance for your help! <3

[Granny Square]

Welcome to the 'ville!  You are very brave, patterns that old are not for the faint of heart.  I am rather amazed at the terms versus the look of that nightcap, the nightcap looks mid 1800s, but the terms are modern.  I've worked a couple of 1840s patterns where current terms didn't exist, it was more like 'plain stitch', 'long stitch' (or similar, I'd have to dig up the patterns, but fortunately I found a guide that translated the terms).  Like this example, the patterns had a drawing rather than a photo of the end piece. 

I'm REALLY surprised to see SC in there, I have worked several pattern from the WW1 era that were printed in the US, and discovered that back then, US terms were the same as current UK terms.  They morphed sometime in the 1920s to current US terms--meaning that if you saw DC, it meant US SC, TR was DC, and so on.

OK, you have a foundation chain of 73. 

It says "miss 1 (foundation chain), 2 SC+4 CH, miss 3 (foundation chains), 1 DC, 4 CH, miss 3 (foundation chains), 3 SC, + 6 times

I added that the stitches to miss were foundation chains (a modern pattern would have said 'miss (or skip) 1 chain' for example), just to be clear.

Chains are never made into stitches, they end up strung like a laundry line, in the air, between stitches--just to be clear, because some beginners with questions here have not realized this.  So, your line has 4 chains, and skip 3 foundation stitches - which is perfectly fine, as they are not connected, and the count doesn't necessarily need to match.  Sometimes in a lace pattern a chain loop (as these are often called), gets 'grabbed' and incorporated into 'something' in the following row, so you'd need some slack to do this.

The + 6 times that I've put in red, I'm assuming means to repeat the contents of this line, from beginning to end, 6 times.  

In modern patterns, and I assume this one, when a pattern says '2SC' for example and doesn't say where to put them, it's (in this case) 1 chain into the following 2 stitches.  If a pattern wants you to put multiple stitches into 1 stitch, it will specify so, and which stitch to put them in.

In other words, I believe this line in modern pattern syntax of this line would be : *miss 1 chain, 2 SC, 4 CH, miss 3 chains, 1 DC, 4 CH, miss 3 chains, 3 SC; repeat from * 6 times

Edited November 3, 2022 by Granny Square