My mother, Marjorie Alice, tried to teach me to crochet in the early 1970's but I didn't master the left hand position before frustration turned me away. Sticky pinky syndrome.
I picked up knitting in 2005 and finally learned crochet in 2013. I weep for the loss of ALL that might have been between 1981 and 2007 had I been able to spend the thousands of hours working in theater waiting for someone else to get ready instead knitting scarves and finger-less gloves and crocheting shawls and kitty comforters for the casts and crews. That would have been awesome.
Mom would have loved and been tickled that my target market for twisted yarn was cats and that they had, all to the last of them, understood as soon as they saw their afghan that it wastheirs and they each showed it with some flamboyant gesture of ownership.
Marge made and gave away many many dozens of afghans to family, friends, neighbors and charities over the years. With the death of her son John she found a way to transform the pain by putting it into her work, making in the process gifts of beauty and practicality that remain family heirlooms to this day.
Below is the one Marge made for me out of scraps. I told her I wanted a rainbow afghan with samples of the colors she used making all of her others, a sampler of all her other work. The little guy is Nuggan, named after a small god in the Terry Pratchett Discworld pantheon, chosen by me to love to the end of time along with his brother Loki.
San Francisco, CA
01/2014 My first afghan in development
No two squares alike, every possible variation of color combination. I haven't made the same mistakes since.
02/2014 Ian Larkin
Kurt, the inspiration to make a blanket for a cat and the first to show me he owned it as soon as he saw it.
03/2014 Mary Jane Amato
L'Autre is about to get her own. Thurber no longer wants to share.