Arts and Crafts

I have long been fond of making things. Mom was stay-at-home (she later went back to college when I was about eight years old) and into lots of folky-hippie stuff (I was born in 1967) so she taught me how to play folk guitar and how to macrame and crochet and do small-loom weaving and bake bread and so on, starting from when I was about five years old. I crocheted my first finished piece, a blue baby-doll blanket with pink bias tape sewed around the edges for decoration, when I was five or six years old. It came out shaped like a trapezoid (I didn't understand counting stitches or where to end a row yet) and, in retrospect, looked absolutely awful! But it was my very own design and entirely created by me, so I was immensely proud of myself.

The other crafts came later. I taught myself to knit when I was about twenty. My first project was a pair of socks. A (male) friend saw me knitting my socks and asked me if I were pregnant. "You don't have to be pregnant to knit!" I laughed. So then he asked me what I was making and I told him a pair of socks. He was astounded. "You can make socks? I didn't know people could make their own socks at home!" My response:"Tom, where did you think socks came from?" Tom: "Well, don't machines make them?" Me: "Yeah . . . using the designs that people used for years. Where do you think people got socks from before the industrial revolution?"