Crafting Madness

The weather has been perfectly dreadful. It has rained and been cold and dark for three solid days now: nearly non-stop cold rain. And I have become Crochet Mad in consequence.

Seriously, the worse thing I can be is BORED. And I feel like I get bored really easily. Even when I find something to entertain myself (obsess over), it doesn't last. I was all about painting for months, and then I put all my paints away and haven't touched them for months. 

Here's one of the last paintings I did before I packed it in:  Kobi giving me the stink-eye from under the coffee table. With the real Kobi giving me the eye from under my easel. 

Then for a few weeks I was obsessively making a big mosaic to go over the stove in the kitchen.  It was the biggest mosaic project I've ever done, but I got it finished in record time. 

Then I put my tiles away and started casting about for some new obsession. What did I find?  

Crochet. 

My mother crocheted when I was living at home. She always had an afghan in progress in her lap through the cold months... and she crocheted a host of other things, including some beautiful lacework tablecloths.  But it didn't really appeal to me so much. I learned to do it as a kid, but never really did much with it.  I took up knitting after my divorce, looking for something to do to occupy my mind and my hands and hopefully keep me a bit more sober than I would otherwise be. But I found I didn't really have the patience. I actually literally wadded up a knitted scarf one time and threw it across the room. 

But I must be entering my dotage, because this time around, crochet has gripped me.  It's much more forgiving:  meaning that when I inevitably make a mistake, I can easily unravel it back to the error and redo it, which is much more challenging with knitting.  Nobody with patience like mine should be asked to put knitting back on the needles after having unraveled ten rows. 

So, I'm stitching away like a madwoman. I've made a "handkerchief" scarf (which is slightly wonky, as I was just learning to read a pattern and got my stitch count all out of whack. So, instead of pointing straight down like a proper bandana, it pokes off to the side a bit, like its nose is bent), a puff-stitch cowl (which came out looking okay, but I hadn't perfected turning at the ends of the rows yet, so one end looks like a mountain range. Plus I made it out of wool yarn, which means it's so scratchy that I can't actually wear it, though it looks really pretty). Now I'm feeling overconfident, so this afternoon I bought nine skeins of yarn to make a big, colorful stitch sampler afghan.  That should provide hours of entertainment and/or frustration.  

It will hopefully keep me relatively sober and fend off boredom and depression--which, in the present global and national environment, is nothing to sneeze at.