I’ve always…well as long as I can remember…been a crafter.  My mom kept a box filled with all sorts of supplies in our family room and I remember turning paper towel rolls into spaceships for my fisher price little people, gluing leaves onto cardboard, and many hours painting at the easel my dad made for us kids probably before I was born. Until a few years ago, I never had to worry about yarn.

My mom was a knitter, and I still have a pair of argyle socks she made me when I was in high school. The harvest-colored ripple afghan was on the back of the sofa, and my dad still has a sweater she made him when they were first married back in 1956–and yes, it still fits him.

I do not knit. and for the longest time, I did not crochet.  The yarn section was always the ‘safe zone’ for me at the craft stores. My grandmother tried to teach me, many friends tried as well, but it never clicked.

Several years ago, I decided to take a crochet class during the local public school’s adult learning evening sessions.  It was there I met the one person who got me to understand the process.  I have taken classes with her for the past 4 years or so, two sessions a year. There are a core group of us who would take the class even if she didn’t bother to try to teach anything because those Monday nights have become a sort of therapy. support group for us.

Can I say that the women in this core group–my friends–surprise me. They are not people I would have known or sought out in real life. We are all at different places: retired, unemployed, unhappily employed, single, widowed, married, but I treasure them.

So we have decided, sort of as a group although there was no formal discussion, to create squares for “The world’s biggest stocking”.   It is to be made up of 36″x 36″ squares, and once assembled, and documented for Guinness, each of the squares will be given to military family in need.

I started mine today. It helped that Miss Blondie Cat decided it was a perfect, cold day to find a lap and hunker down for the afternoon.

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