My mom is a crocheter, as were both of her parents. I used to like going to my grandparents’ house and seeing the newest blankets and pillow covers and whatnot. You could always tell which things my granny had made because they were soft, flowing, and cuddly. You knew which things my grandpa had made because they were stiff, rigid, and made exactly to specifications. My grandpa crocheted in the winter when it was too cold for woodworking out in his workshop, but he never left the “measure twice cut once” mentality behind. My granny crocheted like she cooked, a pinch of this and a dash of that, nothing came out the same twice in a row but it was always good.
The “dirty” secret of my granny’s house is that there was one room stuffed to the ceiling with projects that got started but never got finished. Sewing and craft projects, mostly. We were never allowed in that room. It was a product of my grandmother’s mind, I guess, where she would lay out a pattern on fabric, carefully pin and cut it out, then add it to the stack in the corner. This was a pile of shirts that would never be made and slacks that might only need a few buttons or a hem, but somehow she never got back to them. I don’t know what my grandpa thought of that overwhelming mess of a room, but as long as the door could be shut I can’t recall hearing him mention it. Suffice to say once he started a project, even the complicated red plaid afghan, he saw it through to the very end.
It has been many years now since they left us but my grandmother’s enthusiastic trait for starting a project lives on in my mom. I have at times felt the same drive, the urge to drop a project mid-row and start something new, but keeping in mind the lessons of history I have tried to curb the tendency in myself and say “Whoa, that’s four projects on the go already, time to finish something up before you lust after that cute lace pattern!” I guess I am a work in progress.
So that is the back story of the half-ghan my mom handed over to me. It was made of many colors of baby yarn, held together two strands at a time and single crocheted into a piece of fabric that was about three feet wide (with another six inches of fringe on either end) and maybe two feet long. That is to say, she got two feet into this blanket before her enthusiasm waned. I received a mat of afghan and a couple of cat litter buckets (mom’s storage idea) full of baby yarn. I think her notion was that I would finish the blanket and hand it off to some deserving baby, but I just couldn’t.
Not to say that I was unable, because single crochet is the easiest thing in the world. The fact is that the fabric was coming out thick and heavy, something better suited for a pot holder than a baby blanket. It also had tons of this fringe on the edges…and what new mom wants to worry about laundering a blanket with a thousand loose threads that are going to get caught in everything and sweep up random bits of dirt? No, I thought, this afghan was ill-conceived and I had no desire to finish it. This afghan should be disassembled and it’s component parts turned into something more useful.
I had a notion that, since it looked like a scarf on steroids anyway, that maybe I could just separate the two foot length of it into three or four scarves. I managed to get off a strip of fabric about five inches wide by sacrificing one row and snipping it out. Because of the fringes that were already there it looked like it wanted to be a scarf, and I had plans to maybe put it into my annual Christmas donation bag for the homeless. Sadly it was not to be, because even at three feet by five inches the fabric was too dense to cling to the neck and stubbornly refused to knot and be stuffed into a coat. The yarn was going to have to come out.
So a couple of night’s work while watching TV saw me breaking this afghan down into piles of yarn. Because the yarn had been worked double, and at random, each row pulled out individually and I was left surrounded by multicolored piles of pastel acrylic. I took time to separate each row and wind up the colors individually. By the time I was finished, I had quite the nice collection of pink and purple and blue and green golf balls!
Now, what to do with all these little balls? I could try a fair isle project, since the yarn was fingering weight and it would probably work…that’s an idea. These little balls might be good to practice entrelac, which I have been meaning to learn. I could make some striped hats and mittens for kids, I bet that would be quick and they would love the colors. I also thought of the mitered square afghan which some of my friends tried when they wanted to use up sock yarn. All good ideas…
Then I read about something called the “magic ball”, where you join up a bunch of scraps and then wind them up in a giant ball and use it as one yarn. The color changes are random and that’s the beauty of it. I decided on that, but I also had to do some research on the “Russian join” technique to get all these yarn ends joined up. Lucky for me there are plenty of videos on YouTube for knitting skills! I took about half of the yarn and used the Russian join to make a couple of magic balls, but I kept some of it out in its original mini-ball format for now.
I have been sitting with these magic balls on my craft table for a couple months now and I still haven’t found “just the right” project for them, but I completely believe that in their current state they represent knit potential that just wasn’t there when they were part of a failed half-ghan. Yarn…rescued!
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