Feel the Wuv and Let your Loved One Keep Your Heart Warm (with a Cup of Tea)

Courtesy of Michele at Inspired Crochet

I needed to make a quick and inexpensive gift for my honey in time for Valentine's Day, since we won't be together (he lives too far away for me to visit with him this weekend). We have a tradition of inexpensive gifts for the holiday, as we think it's gotten a bit too commercial.

Very often I make gifts for my sweetheart. He loves getting little somethings in the mail that were made by my own hand. So, after counting my pennies and realizing money was tight this year, I looked through a bag of some scrap worsted weight yarn and found a relatively long piece of red acrylic yarn that was left over from earlier projects. I don't remember the brand name; I don't even think it had one. If I remember properly, it was some yarn I picked up one night in the Garment District when I was going to a lecture and was bored out of my mind. The shop had tons of anonymous Chinese-made yarn in the back and I bought a giant bag of it. I think I still have a few skeins left somewhere.

At any rate, I also had a ball of thin red yarn that had paillettes woven into it, and I'd been wanting to use it for a while. It's some of the first yarn I ever bought, back when I had no idea of what I was doing. I wanted to mix it with some other yarn but I never got around to it, and it proved too difficult for me to work with it well at the time. Looking at the two yarns made me think of hearts and a desire for a quick crochet project was born.

Widdershins Crochet: or, How Handedness (and Difference) Affects Everything

Fig. 1.

I was recently at work and had a free moment, during which I pulled out crochet project I was working on. As I worked, one of my co-workers watched me and commented on my being left-handed. Then she asked me a question. She said her grandson, who was 4, was also left-handed and she was worried about him because he didn't write properly, as she put it. She said he did things like writing a 3 and then a 1 when writing '13'; he would put the numbers in the right order, but she found it upsetting. He would also write the round part of the letter 'b' before drawing the line connecting it, and so on. His handwriting slanted the wrong way too, according to her; it leaned rightward and downward. There were no left-handed people in her family so she wasn't sure what to do about it. She was thinking of forcing him to write with his right hand so that when he went to school he would sen normal to the other students.