This Year, I Will Learn to Crochet

Adding to the legacy made by family members.

There are currently two skeins of yarn in my house.

Two.

And three crochet hooks in total.

As you can tell, I am wildly unprepared for my new hobby. And I am OK with that. Because I don’t know if I will be sticking with it for very long.

Once upon a time- that is, around 20 years ago- I knew how to crochet a very basic stitch. Strictly, just the chain stitch.

One type of stitch. That’s it.

My mom had this big book on crocheting she had bought at the library and my sister and I would eagerly pour over the pages, oohing over every pretty pattern or yarn color our young eyes landed on.

Crocheting, to our minds, was a difficult hobby- but so pretty!

Growing up, I was surrounded by homemade blankets.

Crocheted, fleece, patchwork quilts- so many homemade blankets!

To my young mind, this was perfectly normal. Didn’t everyone’s mom make fleece blankets when a bolt was radically on sale? Wasn’t that how you learned your first basic sewing stitches?

Didn’t everyone have multiple crotched blankets from their grandmother- so warm and comfortable?

My grandmother passed away a year before I was born, so the closest I ever got to receiving a hug from her was the warmth of the blankets she had made long, long before I entered the world.

The reality of that used to frustrate me. I never got to spend time with my grandmother- this master of crafts and a legendary person, who existed only in stories by the time I was old enough to understand what I was being told. It wasn’t fair!

But, those blankets told me that she had loved my mom.

And that helped me to realize that, without even knowing me, she loved me too.

I was homeschooled until I started college, and my mom was my educator.

The same woman who told me how to walk and talk also taught me how to multiply fractions, write essays, play the organ, and dribble a ball.

Honestly, she’s Super Mom.

However, crocheting was just never her thing.

I can’t fault her for that- look, playing a musical instrument has never been my…