Crocheted Rugs

I was never really one for jigsaw puzzles when I was younger. Oh don’t get me wrong, I did them, but I always had this feeling that it was a pointless exercise. Once they were done, you tipped them over, messed up the pieces and started all over again to get to the same point.

I was more a crocheted rug sort of child. Give me a whole box full of scraps of wool and let me weave them into patterns and join them with borders and fit them all together until a beautiful and useful article evolves and warms someone through the winter nights. The first crocheted rug I made was started for me by my grandmother who taught me the craft. I spent years making it,right throughout my childhood and into my teenage years. I carried it on the train with me when I started work and kept all my travelling companions warm, each of them holding a side and turning it for me when I turned a corner. When the time came for me to say, enough is enough and it’s time to start a new one, I felt a little sad putting the final border on. My youngest daughter, Kristy, has that rug now and I hope that eventually her children will have it. It wasn’t the end of that rug, it will go on now and evolve as it is used for other purposes throughout it’s life. Since then I’ve made countless other rugs.

Doing genealogy satisfies that same need in me that crocheting rugs out of scraps of wool does. It creates a whole colourful picture from fragments of differing shades of a persons life. Scraps of information, padded out with other scraps of information, woven into a portion of a whole story, gathered together with the other portions to finally create a story that can be used by generations to come. It may stay the same or it may get added to if someone else takes up the craft. It may slightly change it’s use, but it’s there, as an entity, and it is useful.

And that’s why I enjoy it so much.