Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Tears in Baby Hats



There was an ancient practice of catching your tears of grief in a vessel when someone died. When it was time to bury or cremate that person your vessel of tears would go with that person. This past year I cried all of my tears in to baby hats.


In February of last year my husband and I found out we were expecting. We had only been trying for a couple of weeks and I was pregnant. We were excited about having our dreams come so soon, and at the same time frightened at expanding our family and change. Within a week of finding out I started having complications. It came about that our precious little one was an ectopic pregnancy.  The doctors were never able to locate were my baby decided to grow, but it was not where it should have been, so it was only growing at 5 % instead of 100 %. My husband and I had to make the decision to end my pregnancy. At 11 weeks into making dreams and a new family I took a shot that would end all those dreams.  Then for another 11 weeks I had to go to the doctor and get my blood taken to watch my pregnancy numbers go back down to 0.

During all of this time I was crocheting. I was so excited to start making things for my new little one. I started making hats, sweaters, little booties. When we found out we would not be able to keep the baby I could not bring myself to stop. When the grief became overwhelming I would get out my hook and I would make a hat, some days that hat would turn into three hats. Often times I could not even see what I was making for the tears that were dropping on to the hat. After three months I had two under the bed totes full of baby hats, diaper covers, booties, and sweaters. After that time I found I did not have to go to my hook so often to shed my tears.



Now that a year has passed I am down to just one tote. Some of the hats have been given to friends. Some have gone to a local hospital. And I have even sold some.  

I wanted to tell you dear friends how much those hats mean to me. I have poured my dreams and prayers into those hats and I pray that the baby that fills them will grow big and strong and that they will be cherished and loved. When I give you a hat or other crochet items, I’m not just giving you something to keep you warm I am giving you something that has been saturated in prayer and thought for you and even sometimes tears.

Sunday, August 18, 2013

Railway Ties Scarf and other things

I still exist I promise. This month has been crazy. My husband and I were having really bad luck finding a place to move in to in Toronto, so on the forth we packed a U haul truck and moved all of our stuff to Toronto, and put it into storage. On our way across the Border we picked up our visas. We stayed at different friends houses for  the next four days while we ran around the city looking for a place to live in our budget, and without needing a cosigner. It was crazy. It seemed like all the places we could look at my husband was to tall to live in them. He is only 6 ft.

We did find a place. It is a basement apartment with 7 ft ceilings. The land lords are an older lady and her daughter. It took seven hours all together to get the contract all together, because of translation and different customs. It is in North York.

During this time my Grandma passed away so we then had to go back to the states for the funeral. We also had to wait for the different banks to transfer our money to pay for the rent. But now we are finally moved. Boxes are every where, but we will get there.



Also during this time I had a new pattern published with Crochetvolution. It is a very simple scarf pattern. Rail way Ties Scarf . It is a free pattern so go take a look.

Sunday, July 21, 2013

The things we do for yarn.


I had to go to Wal-mart the other day. My family and I were helping at summer camp and we needed to pick up a couple of things. We needed new toothbrushes, extra toothpaste (since we would be separated), hand sanitizer, and some pens. We got the dental items and the next item on our list was pens.

If your wal-mart is like ours you know that the pen aisle is right next to the yarn aisle. I told my husband, "I'm just going to look." And look I did. Only to find that they had their cotton yarn on sale for a DOLLAR A SKEIN. I can't pass that up. I should tell you now that I did not have a cart with me. We were just going in for 3 things. Also as usual all the yarn was mixed up and the colors were all in the wrong spots so the ones that were only a dollar were actually sitting somewhere else. So I had to go through all of them and readjust them into their right spots to read the bar codes, so that I could get the right ones on sale.

I was able to find seven skeins that were on sale for a dollar each. I grabbed them up, only to have half of them fall, because I did not have a cart. One of the skeins fell and landed under the aisle. I couldn't reach it! I had to have that skein! I remembered the toothbrush in my hand. I got on my hands and knees and swiped the toothbrush under the aisle and the skein came up. At this point I finally thought to myself, "I really hope I don't end up on the Wal-mart People page."

So if you ever see a video surveillance tape of a crazy lady wielding a toothbrush to claim her cotton skein...it's just me.