My hobby du jour is crocheting. I actually started crocheting originally as a kid. My grandma and mom taught me the basics. Chains, single crochets, double crochets, and granny squares. I remember making cute little butterfly magnets, potholders, and once I even made a decorative pillow cover that got a red ribbon at the county fair (red is just okay, it wasn’t good enough to deserve a blue ribbon).
During my freshman year of college, in the great frozen tundra that is Minnesota, I realized I was bored in my dorm room because it was too cold to go outside. So in ~2003 I started my first afghan. It’s a ripple afghan with stripes in sage green, navy, and white. (Red Heart brand Super Saver yarn in White, Light Sage, and Soft Navy.)
I didn’t finish it that year. Or the next. Or for the next decade. I took it out periodically to add a few rows, a few inches, then put it aside and forgot about it until the next winter (or two or three). In December (2019) I graduated college for a second time (master’s degree) and have been job hunting, which means I had more free time at home than I was used to. I was cleaning out a closet during one of my long, boring job-hunting days and stumbled across the blanket of forever. I’d completely forgotten it existed.
I started working on it again. This time I realized that it was the monotony of a huge project of the same thing repeated, with very little visible progress, that had me giving up time after time. So instead of working for a while and dropping it, I decided to go all in! I bought a book on basic technique and stitches with some projects to try. I bought a Chinese-cheap set of tools off Amazon to try out. I bought some new yarn to try those projects. And I let myself do a new project between each set of 8-16 rows of the afghan.
And I somehow managed to get a blanket that’s full size! It’s about 62 inches wide and 74 inches long. Sadly, I wasn’t smart enough to weave my ends in as I went over the years, so 2 months later I’m still only about half way done with getting the ends woven in. Rookie mistake. Won’t happen again 😊.
I also found the other projects very enjoyable and decided that crocheting was my new all-in hobby. I’m now crocheting almost every evening while self-isolating at home with my husband, as we watch TV or movies before bed. It’s keeping me sane and productive while the job market crashes around me due to global pandemic.
fingers crossed