Chez Spud

Hurrah hurrah and thrice hurrah! Thanks to the patience of Kristina, a few million views of truly excellent videos from Meet Me At Mike’s and a healthy slug of awe/inspiration/jealousy from Lucy at Attic24 ….I can finally crochet a granny square! I can’t begin to express how proud of myself I am for doing this. The phrase ‘all fingers and thumbs’ was invented for me, I am the least crafty person on the planet and yet I have managed to turn out a couple of grannies and, ahem, even managed to change colour. Preens preens…

I even went a little bit fancy and quickly eschewed yer common granny for Lucy’s Summer Garden Grannies which are a far classier affair. For the Granny Unaware amongst us, the Garden Grannies have a circle at their middle, like a flower. Just …that…little..bit…fancier?  Emboldened by my success I sauntered off to our local wool shop and, having stepped back to the Days of Yore, I truffled for yarn for my First Project. I think I chose badly actually….but I’m a learner so cut me some slack. The wool is chunky and thus the Grannies are looking a bit industrial. Ah well.

Anyway, I bundled up my chosen yarn and paid the rather flustered looking owner of the shop. Normally this place is pretty empty, but yesterday it was BUZZING and he could hardly keep up. “There’s a 15% discount today” he said, gasping for breath from the exertion of more than one customer in the shop at a time. “Oh great!”, quoth I, “Why is that?”…”Erm, because it’s January and it’s very quiet so it’s 15% off everything”, he shouted over the noise of more customers in the shop than he normally gets in a month.

I asked the woman next to me why she thought it was busy. She thought for a bit. “Well, because it’s cold so we’re all, like…LET’S GO AND BUY STUFF TO MAKE SOMETHING!! No, I’m wrong…it’s January and finally it’s not Christmas so we’re all, like…LET’S MAKE SOMETHING!! AT LEAST WE CAN’T EAT IT!” Riiiiiiight, OK….

Edging quietly away from the shouty one, I paid. And the man handed over the goodies in a brown paper bag. And, in that instant, I was 7 again and standing in the shop attached to our local post office, buying wool with my mother.  My mother was a very taleneted knitter and crocheter until arthritis, which set in during her early 20s, finally got the better of her fingers. She bought her wool at the post office shop and, like everyone then, would reserve however many balls she needed for her next project so that all the balls were from the same batch (for colour matching). But she, like most people, couldn’t afford to buy more than one or two balls at a time. So the shop put all the balls on reserve, and would let her buy one or two as and when she needed them. I can’t imagine shops do that now?

I had completely forgotten about this until yesterday, not ever having bought wool myself. But, in that moment as I clutched my brown paper bag, I was transported back to the post office shop…staring up at the shelves behind the counter, packed with brown paper bags which were stuffed with wool, each neatly marked ‘Reserved for Mrs Smith’, or whoever.

I was never remotely interested in knitting, crochet or sewing while my mother was alive. Shame on me. When she died, I slung her sewing machine on the skip with all the other stuff of her life that I threw away. What a waste! Here I am wondering how I can justify the purchase of a sewing machine to MrSpud, when I could be using the one my mother used. And, whilst I’m so grateful to Kristina for teaching me how to crochet, I feel a deep sadness that I didn’t let my mother teach me. There’s a missing ‘link’ in my work, as it were.

I’m sure she’d be very pleased and astonished, in equal parts, to know that I’m crocheting. Yesterday I got out my Christening shawl, a beautiful white circular one which she crocheted for me. All of a sudden it felt like something so precious…not least because I finally appreciate not just the love but the WORK that went in to making it. I feel very connected with my Mum again, ‘hooked’ back in to her…one stitch at a time…one paper bag at a time.

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