I learned to sew and quilt as a teenager but began knitting as a young mother to have something portable, easy to stop and start, and something for the long car rides to visit the grandparents after we moved. I kept it up (learned 22 years ago!) I am always listening to podcasts or sports when I knit so it turns that leisure time into something vaguely productive.
I am happy to be part of FiberKind where we can gather around crafts and not worry about politics or whatever. No one here calls my family or my coworkers names because of how they vote or if they work for the United States, nor would anyone expect me to affirm or join in such intolerance. Thanks for creating and sustaining it.
my March goals:
I do four crafts and I want to do a little work on each this month.
@Nyssareen the only thing I know for sure is SLC. I’ll be in the truck with my son and his company is in SLC so he is in and out of there a lot. He seems to roll East across 80 a lot but there is really no telling. If you’re not anywhere near a major highway then chances are slim.
I have been getting back into crochet more lately and my craft month goal is to improve my skills with the mandala type squares that have become popular while I wasn’t really into crochet. Tunisian and mandalas and some of @TexasPurl 's beautiful lace are the things that drew me back.
I was crocheting yesterday and I looked down at my hands and was struck by how like my mom’s hands they were as I performed the movements. My actual hands are nothing like my mom’s. I have big, thick hands with square nails. My grandma called them farm girl hands and I’m okay with that. But mom was tiny. Barely over 5 ft and had small hands with oval nails. But the movements of crochet somehow turned my hands into hers. It’s hard to explain. The way I hold the yarn and the hook, the angles and the movements. It was really special. That doesn’t happen when I knit but there is something about the crochet.
Thanks for sharing. Hope your crochet improvement goes as planned and you can make something special soon.
btw…I don’t have dainty or petite feminine hands either. (My bio mom’s family is from Ok. …maybe that has something to do with it? )
It only bothers me when I am trying to do something small and delicate. Lol…funny but true story. My adopted mom just couldn’t get over the size of my hands and feet. She is very petite and I have never been. Anyway…once, she sent me a magazine clipping of a famous singer holding microphone while singing. With a note attached saying this famous ladies hands looked like mine. lol.
Now the joke is I need to do one of those online genetics tests to figure out who and what I am.
I was actually born in Cali. San Luis Obispo. And my tiny little mom was born in Texas. Lol I haven’t ever done a DNA test as I have so much genealogy info already but it would still be interesting. Migration has been happening forever so just because, for example, all of grandma Kaufman’s forebears were from Germany or thereabouts, who knows who might have originated elsewhere. My brother, who was given in adoption at birth, was a big, burly, red haired guy so he was fascinated to see Native American in his DNA. We were so happy we were able to spend a few years with him and tell him his story before he passed.
Fiberkind National Craft Month Day 1
I met my goal of making 20 squares for Warm Up America! Foundation in 21 days of 02/22, so I started a new spin with an “old” fiber stash. This is the third bobbin of my (1 skein) Malabrigo Nube that everyone says is difficult to spin. I would argue, but it’s just that it takes a lot of prep due to the compactness. The colors are glorious. I plan to do a 3-ply hoping to get a WW. No projects planned. I’ve also ordered a bit of fiber to start spinning for some natural handspun socks. My goal for March is to do a little something every day and not be listening to the news while I’m doing it, but try to make it a meditative/reflective time. I have a baby gift in the planning stage and want to get some yarn and fiber dyed because I’m running out of bright colors to spin, so it looks to be an exciting month!
If you do have the opportunity to do the genetic testing, I HIGHLY recommend you do it! We have tons of family history done, so I didn’t think that the genetic tracking stuff would tell me anything new, but it really did! I’ve mentioned before that it confirmed the family oral history of having Native American in my ancestry but it also told me other interesting things that I didn’t know about. Not to mention all the genetic disease marker stuff, but I find the genetic history stuff far more interesting.
Since there have been a few conversations that have involved genealogy, I figured I would share this. Roots Tech is an online genealogy seminar that runs from March 3-5. It is free to watch for everyone and you can register for it at Family Search. If you have a Family Search account, you can also see if you are related to any of your friends using their system. I think you can also use it if you have an Ancestry.com account, but I’m not positive about that. If you do have an account with either, click on My Link and we can see if we are related!
Side note, if you are a member of the LDS church and want an account on Family Search, you should be able to sign up for free with your member number, which you can get from your bishop or ward clerk, or if you have an account on LDS.org it is also in your Account - Membership info there.
I live the idea of not having news on while crafting. There’s so much that is stressful right now. I like the idea of keeping the crafting and creative time separate from that.
I learned something new about how I learned to crochet. My mother came to visit and help me last week (surgery and post-op), and an online homework assignment brought up how I learned to crochet. I started to write down that my mother taught me, and mom mentioned that I first started learning at my paternal grandmother’s house. My paternal grandmother actually gave me my first crochet lesson, which I have completely forgotten, and my mother continued the instruction. We had an interesting discussion trying to figure out how old I was when I learned. We finally narrowed it down to between 10-13 based on a memory of my first very long chain and when we moved from the house in that memory.
My paternal grandmother crocheted, and my mother knits and crochets. My mother tried to teach me to knit, as well as crochet, but the right-handed teacher/left-handed student barrier proved to be too big for that. I just could not follow what mom’s hands were doing. I learned to knit through a knook book with left-handed instructions and YouTube videos. Now, I can discuss knitting with my mother. I showed my mother how to knit backwards during her visit after she asked about a note I had written on a knitting pattern. She had never encountered or learned that skill.
Thank you for supporting FiberKind by turning off your ad blocker on this forum! We hand-pick all advertisements to be relevant to our shared love of crafting.
FiberKind LLC uses affiliate links and advertisements to fund FiberKind.com. When clicking on ads or links from FiberKind.com before shopping you are helping with the costs of running FiberKind.
Did you know Amazon is an affiliate? By clicking through our affiliate link you are helping support FiberKind at no cost to you. If you have questions about the Amazon or other affiliate advertising, please let @Char know.
