So the fantastic first package of yarn arrived yesterday, bursting with Stylecraft and the Janie Crow colors to make her design for The Fruit Garden CAL. I joined Ravelry a few days ago, am Adrienne101 there. It amazes me that all the designers from around the world that I had been looking at in Youtube are in there. Crocheting sort of saved me during the last two years. I’m not sure how that worked exactly, but it did.
Anyway, it had been years and years and years since I picked up any yarn or thread to do anything. I practiced and practiced by watching videos of all kinds of women and people around the world in all of their different languages.
This morning I thought, wow, you know? I did this instead of writing. But writers do many things if the words aren’t there. They will be again. Walter’s death really was heavy for me at last year’s conference. I learned much from him about writing scenes. It’s not that much different from crochet. So my best friend and I at 13. That is in my memoir. We started off crocheting to escape in those years. We were escaping everything, I expect. You are on such a cusp at 13, you know? So this is a chapter called “Strings” https://valentinebonnaire.com/2010/12/29/strings-from-memoir-whitegirrrl-short-chapter/ that I was working on in 2010 – that whole book needs an edit, ooof. Some of the chapters make me cry they are so hard to look back on.
Anyway, the two of us would go downtown to a place called The Yarn Mart in those years. We would wander through, after school. It’s long gone now. But I love to get lost with yarn and fabrics. It takes me so far back I’m practically in childhood, as in “FUN” so this morning I finished off a little heart by a South African designer called Jen Tyler.
So, one of the boxes of the new yarn arrived, yesterday!
OMG. It puts the Big Box yarn I had to shame. I think this yarn and I are going to be beloved friends.
Check it out!
That’s the little Forget-Me-Not flower from the Fruit Garden CAL. My best friend Pam at 13 grew up loving the Pre-Raphaelites. Funny, this pattern – the colors.
Her grandmother had made her a classic blanket, that was in her room when we were so little. I started one of those blankets where you keep going around and around the square, you know?
Well, who knew that I was going to grow up and attempt something as gorgeous as what Janie Crow has designed. Neither my mother or my grandmother did anything like this. I did hear that my Irish great grandmother used to make lace, but I have never seen it.
Forget me not.
xxoo!
from Adrienne
(who will be back on the writing jag soon enough)
I am so over politics, and this virus.
Adrienne Wilson 