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Creating and Remembering
by Amy Marchwick

I love buying yarn. Going through the piles of skeins, comparing textures and weights is always fun. I always pick up a few different colors and hold them together, picturing a project with these hues. Fabric stores, with walls full of yarn in every weight and shade, are dangerous places for me. I already own more yarn than I could crochet in a year, but I can rarely resist buying more.

I learned to crochet when I was seven years old. My grandmother taught me. My Grandma Marion’s star quilts were local legends, intricately designed, they were gorgeously colored artwork that you could cuddle under, and with hand stitching so minute it was practically invisible. The quilts were big projects, taking weeks to plan and complete in her big sewing room in the basement. Crocheting was what she did as a time filler, what she did upstairs. She was so experienced she never even had to look down. Her hands knew the motions and her fingers could sense the slightest mistake. So when the grandkids would come and visit, with everyone flopped on the floor in the living room, Grandma Marion would crochet. She crocheted everything from afghans to new clothes for my Barbies. Marion even crocheted an entire set of stuffed characters from nursery rhymes. There was a Bo-Peep and two sheep, Miss Muffet and her tuffet, and even the spider.

One summer vacation, having exhausted the possibilities of Grandma’s attic, I wanted to make something. So my grandmother sat down with me and taught me how to crochet. I struggled with the careful looping of yarn between my fingers, but the concept of the basic stitch motion, pulling a loop through a loop I mastered almost at once. Since my left hand was too clumsy to properly control the flow of yarn, I double looped my strand around my ring finger. That double loop occasionally tightened up like a slip knot, which made it impossible for me to keep a steady tension on my yarn. So the many feet of single crochet chain I made that day were uneven, varying wildly—from tiny, tight stitches I could barely squeeze my hook through, to big, sloppily loose stitches.

Eventually I managed to achieve a small degree of uniformity, and Grandma taught me the next heady step. I could make rows, single, double, and triple stitching through the loops of my chain. I made a lot of pot holders that summer. After a while the novelty of crocheting began to wear off and I moved on.

But I spent the next summer with Grandma Marion too. And she was in the middle of an afghan, a really gorgeous pattern called Apache Tears. So I asked if I could make one too. She said yes, and the two of us and my mother spent an enjoyable afternoon in her basement choosing yarn from her overflowing shelves. Then, because my chaining was too tight, my mother chained two hundred and fifty stitches for me, and with that as a base I was off and crocheting. I finished thirteen rows that week, making my afghan nearly five inches wide. It had gone from looking like an oddly colored worm to an extremely long scarf. I was very proud of my progress and I figured I’d be done by the end of the summer.

I’ve been working on that same Apache Tears afghan for fifteen years now. It’s quite a bit bigger, nearly three feet now, but still nowhere close to being finished. The quality of the stitches, uneven and sloppy in the lower rows, perfectly sized and perfectly spaced in the more recent rows, can be used to chart the growth of my skill over those years. And the uneven edges can testify to the fact that I still lose count of my stitches and just guess when it’s time to tie a row off and start the next one.

I’ve been working on this afghan for so long that I don’t even like the colors anymore. Of course, I haven’t been working on it continuously for fifteen years. I’ve finished other projects in the meantime. And I always have boxes of yarn just waiting, already picked out for my next creations. But my Grandma Marion is gone now, and I’ve still got this project we started together. Every so often, I pull out that afghan and crochet a few rows, remembering.

I learned a lot from my Grandma. Crafting and creating are only two of the skills and lessons she taught me. And eventually I will finish that afghan.

Amy recently received her bachelor's degree in English Literature. She is currently living in Montana with her four cats, where she works at a small public library.

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