This morning I woke up feeling like a loser

again, which is not such a strange occurrence in my life. I know I don’t really have reason to feel this way but nonetheless I do. So, I did what I always do when I feel like a jerk. I sat down by the sunny window and did a few more rows of a granny square. My latest crochet project is a granny square afghan, which I feel is a memorial to the best needle worker I have ever known, and sewed one of the finished six-row granny squares to the other five that I completed earlier this week.

But at 9:30 a.m. I had to get back to my computer because that’s when the market opens; yesterday I put three trades in after the market closed and I had to cancel some former orders so that they didn’t sell or buy two times. Anyway, after I was done that I decided to take a break and think about a blog I may want to write.

So, it was somewhat thought provoking to see jj’s comment wherein she asked me to post more about my knitting and crochet projects. She has carpal tunnel and likes to read about needlework and that makes sense to me, particularly because this afghan I am making is from odd lots of yarn that Jack’s mom gave me and Jack’s mom has used needlework her entire life to keep her hands working. But now more than 60 years of knitting and crochet, and at 80-something-years old, her arthritic hands are a challenge and she is now doing less needlework.


I’ll call Jack’s mom Andrea for the purposes of this blog. Jack’s mom is an inspiration to me. When Andrea was in her teens, she learned she had arthritis. Her hands have been crippled for numerous decades and she swears that knitting and crocheting saved her hands. That woman makes the most beautiful hats, mittens and Irish knit sweaters. Her sweaters must be worth a thousand dollars. I have never seen such beautiful Irish knit. She has treasure chests full of the finest work I’ve ever seen and she gives it all away to people in her life and to charity.

The detail and creative patterns always evoke compliments when I wear them and I wear them as often as I can. She tried to teach me Irish knit but I learned to knit and crochet through books and only know how to follow the coded directions. I couldn’t understand what she meant as she would describe that I had to think about the way the yarn was going to come back around. I so wish I could have learned from her but this woman has needlework in her bones, the bones she describes as “dying while she’s still living.”

She once asked Jack and I if we understood how archeologists can find bones thousands of years later that are intact but while she lives, her hands (and feet) can die, continuously becoming smaller and smaller and smaller. She’s seen doctors all her life and engaged in some experimental medicine, some of which she regrets and other medicinal remedies that she is ever so grateful for, but still her hands get smaller and smaller as the years advance. Andrea describes why she started needlework. After needing to quit her job years ago she took up needlework, precisely to save her hands. It has worked and she is otherwise a healthy woman, and smart!

Regarding learning styles, it was interesting that last week after someone on a woman’s forum gave me a website for granny squares, I printed out the instructions and got started with my new idea for what to do with Andrea’s yarn. (I would love to give it to her for birthday but I worry it will make her sad that she can’t do needlework so much anymore.) The instructions were on the coffee table near the first granny square. Jack picked up the pattern and said: how can you read this?

I told him that in my late 30s (we weren’t together then) I decided to teach myself to crochet. I bought a simple book and sat there day in and day out learning what all those symbols and strange lowercase acronyms meant. After telling him how I taught myself I realized that I’m doing that again but now it’s different acronyms and different symbols and it’s in a different skill. In the early days I spent so many hours doing needlework, later teaching myself to knit, and I found needlework to be an absolutely wonderful form of meditation.

It encouraged me also because I can so easily read needlework patterns now and it is somewhat analogous to my nature. Maybe I always need to be learning new symbols and terminology. Maybe I’m just so much like my mother. It’s like when I taught myself to bake for my children and then ended up working as a paid baker for nearly a decade to support them. So, as I write this I am reminding myself that once again, I am in a new place and learning something new and maybe someday I will actually be able to create a retirement income for myself when I am an old lady, which was my original objective to begin with when I started stock trading.

And if I can do that then maybe I will have the time to learn some of that Irish knit like Jack’s mom. I am sure I could never become as good as she is because needlework is truly in her bones and I know I could never get that good. And, if I learn this stock-trading gobbledygook, maybe by then I can also commit myself to learning to photograph my projects and post them on my blog. (Or maybe I can convince jj to blog a post about how to do it! *wink*)

Ok, and so now my dearest friend just called me and asked me to come over to visit (in my jammies) and so I’m going to today just screw the rest of being a stock trader for now. I’m going to go and be lazy. (No, I’m not going to edit this 10 ten times before I post it either.)

But! I will leave you with this, just because. Have a lovely day all...I'm off to play hookie:)



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Update 5:30 p.m.: Wow, home now and looking back over what I posted all I can say is that that was one serious random freewriting but it's all good. Anyway, I wore Andrea's Irish knit sweater today and my friend loved it (I'll call her Caren). She's a needleworker too. She told me to bring my granny squares to show her and I did. She showed me her works too. Caren has been crocheting for years and years. Her work is exquisite (sp). We often talk about our projects. Caren tells me that my lack of need to be "perfect" in needlework inspire her. I don't know why I can let a stich drop in needlework but in the rest of my life I am hard-pressed to let myself skip a stitch or step. But as I said, needlework is my meditation and maybe I ought to let myself skip a stitch in the rest of my life too. (And so again, I will not edit my update, just for practice:)