Not exactly sure how it started, but she remembered her grandmother always watching her “soaps,” never without a crochet hook in hand, the girl with the red hair became infatuated with making the cutesy stuff most people no longer took the time to learn.
It started out with simple things like a scarf made out of one color of yarn or if she was feeling daring, she might even try doing something with stripes. As her confidence grew she began making so many, they were being given away as gifts. There were scarves with tassels and scarves that were furry. Some made out of velvety spun threads and others fit for the holidays.
Eventually she became rather bored with the simplicity of it all and moved on to other things, but some downtime in the spring of 2010 led her to the crochet hook again.
She’d moved on from her first job after college, exploring avenues to figure out the next chapter of her life. Then she got the call that her grandmother had passed away. The grandmother that inspired it all.
While her passing wasn’t truly that unexpected, it did send a shock to the girl’s system that she should have done more, said more, visited more in those final days. Her guilt fueled the need to keep the memory of this woman alive in any way she knew how, perhaps, if only, in this somewhat vintage tradition.
She bought books with patterns like she’d never done before, along with every color of yarn she could afford. She made stuffed animals and beanies, purses and more scarves. She learned how to do new stitches and taught herself to read the complicated patterns even her mother didn’t understand. Through the years that followed she had tables at craft fairs and sold her items out of hair salons.
Almost a decade later and the little red-haired girl is still weaving memories into the yarn twisting around her fingertips. Her latest love is making baby blankets for friends and family. How can a price possibly be put on something she hopes will become an heirloom? It’s easier to give her items away. Sometimes she knows them well, other times not as much, but always giving with the hope it will show how much she cares.
She’s almost always got two or three projects going at a time, and a million other ideas floating around in her head. There are the obvious baskets of yarn in the living room, along with the decorative chests that are filled to the brim around the house, chests that visitors merely see as a aesthetically placed decoration. Perhaps one day she’ll pass the art of her technique on to another, or perhaps it will merely inspire another little girl to carry on the tradition.
The White Hat Journal 