It was my paternal grandmother who taught us all how to crochet. She taught my mom and two of my aunts, one of my cousins and me. A third aunt was forever destined to be a non-crocheter because the poor thing is left-handed and attempting to teach her how to crochet would have resulted in a murder-suicide.
Granny would pick up a lot of her crochet patterns from the Bingo ladies and whatever she learned how to make was produced by the dozens, there was never one or two made of anything! We saved bottle caps, we saved the plastic rings from soda and beer six-packs. If it had a natural hole or you could poke a hole IN it, it got crocheted around. My dad used to joke that if you had a beard and got too close to any of the women in the family you'd end up with a little afghan on your chin.
I remember hot pads that looked like bunches of grapes, made by crocheting over bottlecaps with Knit-Cro-Sheen. I remember Christmas wreath ornaments made by crocheting around the plastic rings that originally held together six-packs of soda or beer. We had crocheted decorations for every holiday and every season with little strips of magnet on them stuck to our refrigerators. We had crocheted Christmas stockings, tree skirts, candles (with empty toilet paper rolls inside), BIG candles (with empty paper towel rolls inside), Christmas carolers whose body was a styrofoam cone, a crocheted turkey centerpiece, ARMIES of clown finger puppets, and these finger puppets that consisted of a baby in the center whose arms and legs moved because that's where you put your fingers with a baby blanket around them so that it looked like they were all wrapped up. These were actually a little disturbing when you studied them. LOL! We had poodles on the toilet tank and little dolls with giant skirts that also held spare rolls of toilet paper.
Granny was an old-fashioned housewife. She had a part-time job working as a waitress at a restaurant that one of my uncles' mother-and-father-in-law owned and after she retired, she lived with my aunt and uncle and two cousins, surviving on a very small pension. So money for gifts wasn't too plentiful for her. She would work all year making our Christmas gifts, and whatever one got, we ALL got. the men (her sons) would get boxes of candy and socks. The women (my mother and aunts) would get kitchen towel rings and fridgies and other small ornaments, we girls would usually get a poncho. We pretty much knew what we were going to get but it came from Granny and we loved it! Just the fact that she made sure that everyone got a gift and she would work her fingers to the bone crocheting them all made them worth their weight in gold to us.
The women in our family would use crochet as an excuse to get together, and we got together at LEAST once a week, some weeks more. I remember my mom saying to my dad, "Johnnie, as soon as we get finished with dinner I want to ride down to see Zetta. She learned a new stitch" or "we're meeting Bob and Zetta at Rose and Andy's so I can show them how to make the clowns." Sometimes I'd crochet with them, sometimes I'd play with my cousins, but we LOVED getting together.
Mom and Dad are both gone now, as is Uncle Andy. I haven't seen Aunt Rose in about 20 years because she ended up gravitating toward her own family after Uncle Andy died. Aunt Zetta and Uncle Bob live in Arkansas now, about 10 hours from me down here in S. Texas. At the time, though, we all lived within 5 or 6 miles of each other in New Jersey. I haven't seen my Aunt and Uncle in about 10 years but thanks to the Internet my aunt and I keep in touch at least once a week and we post together on a daily basis on a couple of crochet forums. I keep trying to get her to join this one and hopefully one day she will. I really wish we lived closer so that we could get together like we used to. I was thinking about it the other day, and, at 55, I am the age my grandmother was when she first taught us all how to crochet. Life is funny, innit?
Edited by Elle, 10 February 2013 - 05:46 PM.
