A Hookin' We Will Go

I do things, I do a lot of crafty things and I do a lot of crazy things. I’m not one for taking classes. Written instructions are like a trapeze act for my brain without a safety net, things just make sense to me if I sit and examine a finished product. That is how I learned to knit a couple years ago, how I learned to do loom beadwork when I was 9, and how I learned to make dreamcatchers when I was 11. It’s the way I work. My parents used to say it was like a butterfly going through its metamorphosis. I would disappear for a time and reappear with a new skill, a new skill that I would be completely obsessed with and do nothing else until the novelty wore off. Hence the Horrible Skipping Incident of ’84 where I didn’t eat for a day (cuz you can’t eat and skip at the same time, duh) and woke up with what I assumed were (in my all-knowing 6 year old brain) broken legs the next morning. I’m all about going to extremes.

Yes this story is going somewhere…because I learned how to do something new – Crochet! So it’s been all about the hooking and very little about the knitting lately. Why did I learn to crochet, you ask?

Well, like most new knitters I had acquired a horrendous amount of the acrylic-y evilness of doom. I bought yarn anywhere and everywhere I could find it- you don’t want to know. (Images of me roaming the dark streets trying to score some plast-ick are making me giggle.) I didn’t know any better! Anyway, it had been sitting in my closet, taunting and berating me with its annoyingly squeaky voice every time I opened the door, which I had to do daily because, well, every day can’t be naked Ri day.

At first I tried to quell the noise coming from my closet by shoving the whole lot of it into a suitcase….a very big suitcase, the kind that fit bodies (yes plural). It was muffled, but I still knew it was there, egging me on. It became a challenge to me to get rid of this stuff and giving it away was not an option. Yeah, craziness, I give away tons of the stuff that I make, but just giving away the yarn in its raw form just seems like I am admitting defeat. I screamed at the closet and shook my fist, ‘I will be the master of my domain and no amount of processed plastic string is going to get the best of me!’ Hmm…maybe I had more than enough coffee that day…

Anyway, back to the crochet. I learned how to make granny squares, well not squares cuz I was feeling all superior and decided I could make two more corners to make granny hexes. I yanked open my closet door, ripped open that suitcase, pulled some acrylic out of it’s comfy quiet resting place, it shrieked in the sunlight and I laughed the evil maniacal laugh reserved for the criminally insane and I hunkered down to master the hex.

I have made 67 of these little buggers so far.

I hate them.

I love them.