While I was pregnant, I had a desire to make special items for my baby. When he arrived, he would have booties, a hat and a blanket that his mum made just for him (never mind that I knew he was arriving in the middle of a very hot summer). I managed to make the hat and booties by watching YouTube videos, but struggled with the blanket, so I knitted it instead. My gran taught me the basics of knitting when I was just 5 years old. My initial masterpieces used to have holes where I dropped stitches and didn’t know how to pick them up. I would also forget to slip off stitches from the needles and ended up with very skew pieces. My gran was an awesome teacher and I persevered and learnt and have made more jerseys than I can remember (back in the day when you didn’t take photos and post them on social media).
For me crochet was reserved for chair-backs and doilies and I didn’t want either of those, so I never bothered to learn. Whilst on maternity leave, I mastered the granny square. When I became aware of the charity drive to collect blankets for breaking the World Record, I churned out granny squares, but started to get really bored and wanted to do something a little more challenging. All of a sudden I became aware of the many designs and designers and suddenly crochet was the “hot and happening” hobby, where previously it was considered old fashioned. I joined every CAL I could find, religiously saving all the patterns, buying loads of yarn without really knowing what I was going to do with it, I just knew I wanted to be part of this crochet movement. I wanted to make not just functional but unique and beautiful blankets for charity, as this could very well be the only beautiful item that a vulnerable person may have. My hope was that they would feel very special knowing that someone out there took the time to create something very special for them.
I decided it would be so much fun if I could crochet along and learn with other people. Of course there must be loads of people just like me wanting to learn and share ideas. Embracing social media, I created a Facebook Group called: A Square a Week Challenge. It initially started with about 27 members, mainly friends and family whom I added on without them even agreeing to be part of the group. A few days later I was overjoyed when we reached 100 members. In June 2017, we celebrated 3000 members and the group is still growing. The reason behind the creation of the group was to make beautiful charity blankets, but I’ve fast realised that not everyone has the resources to donate everything they make to charity, so I’ve asked that just one creation be given to charity. It is very important for me to also promote the love of crochet and use this group as a platform for teaching and inspiring others.
As my confidence in crochet grew, and as I learnt more stitches and stitch combinations, the next step was to create my own squares and hence began my very own crochet journey.
So come along and join me on this journey, but before you do, please let me get some of the legal jargon out of the way. Please read my Terms and Conditions for the use of my patterns.