Saturday 2 Jan 2010 - a blank canvas........

I just KNEW Keith had something up his sleeve, little wotsit!  He's decided I need a new project for this year.

I did a little shopping list this morning and off he went to the supermarket to get it all.  It's always a mistake to do this because he always comes back with everything BUT what was on the list, mainly because he leaves the list at home or in the car.  It's an even bigger mistake to send my bank card with him (yes, I know you're not supposed to do that but I do) because he does the shopping using my card then gets cashback.  I'll be bankrupt one of these days!  I'm getting sidetracked now:  he came back today with Project 2010  -  The Art of Crochet!!!!!

At the start of every year a whole crop of various kinds of week-by-week magazines come out which "build into your very own encyclopaedia".  You know the sort of thing I mean?  Crochet.  I have to learn - correction, I have to teach myself - how to crochet.  And there's worse:  Keith intends to do it as well!  Picture the scene, himself sitting by the fireside crocheting his own...........I don't know......what DO you crochet?

Seriously, what IS crochet good for?  Specially to blokes?  The father of one of my Godmothers, who dutifully turned up at my baptism in 1951 and has never been seen since (the Godmother I mean), used to do beautiful embroidery and was a superb knitter, made beautiful things.  My mum never knitted anything when she was expecting me because this chap could do it better and quicker than she could so I was the best dressed baby in the village.

I knew a woman - a midwife - who was ALWAYS crocheting.   You would see her at it any-old-where.  She would crochet in the supermarket queue or while she waited for a bus.  For all I know she probably whiled away the hours while her victim patients produced by twiddling away.  I remember once on a trip in Germany in the days when east was east and west was west we visited a customs post and our group was all agog listening as a west German customs officer gave us the spiel.  All except Dierdre.  Dierdre was perched on a rock on the western bank of the Elbe gazing out across the river at the east German cows on the other side.........and crocheting as if her life depended on it!  But did we ever see the results of her labours?  Did we heck.

So now he's been and got the first issue but - hey - it's not all bad:  there's free DVD with it and 2 balls of wool.  That Crocheting hook looks a bit lethal, a bit like something the dentist might use!  So that is what 'we' are up to this New Year. 

Something to aspire to?

I seem to remember New Year 1971 before we married, he thought I could perhaps learn how to make dresses.  Huh??  Moi??  He went out and bought a dress pattern, the simplest looking thing he could find, and a length of fabric and a reel of cotton.  He painstakingly laid the fabric out on the floor and pinned the pattern on it.  Producing his dad's wallpapering scissors I was exhorted to "Go on, you cut it out".   Moi??  It sat there in his mum's house a few days and then he cut it out himself and brought all the bits round to my house.  I don't know what  happened to it after that.  He never mentioned it again!

If anybody asks me what they should give him for next Christmas I'm going to say a Cross-stitch kit!

HAVE A CHOCCY!!

........oh, and a HAPPY NEW YEAR.

Love

 
xxx