Simply by being a child of mine, my daughter spends a fair amount of time surrounded by yarn. It’s here in the house (as in everywhere in the house), turns up in the car, and I am rarely without a project stuffed in a tote bag when we are out and about. But she always had a take-it-or-leave-it attitude with yarny crafts—yarn was fine, but other things were equally fine.
I started dragging her to sheep and wool festivals because I wanted to go to them. I didn’t have much arm-twisting to do after the first one because there were animals to pet, and she has always loved animals. Then she was drawn to the colors and textures of the different yarns and she always, always wanted to try every craft she saw. Which is why we have a kumihimo braider, a spinning wheel, a rigid heddle loom, and a box of acid dye colors stuffed in the various niches in my home that are not already full of yarn. I just knew that something, sometime, would awaken the yarny goddess within her. But no luck.
I taught her to knit; she could take it or leave it. Ditto the crocheting, the braiding, the spinning, the weaving (the soap making, the scrapbooking—you get the idea). It isn’t that she couldn’t do any of these crafts on her own. Her desire to do any one craft long enough to get fast at it just wasn’t strong enough. And I always wondered if she would turn sort of anticrafty so as to establish her own hobby identity as separate from mine.
I tried to encourage her but only a little bit, so I wouldn’t turn into the yarny equivalent of a stage mother. As she got a little older she would point out patterns in the books or magazines or pull a particular favorite yarn out of my stash and ask me to make her a garment to wear to school.
“You could do that yourself,” I pointed out.
“Yes, but you are faster,” she replied.
“You would get faster if you practiced more.”
(long dramatic sigh)
And then I would make her the garment anyway. I love making things for her, and as the teenage years approach like an oncoming freight train, some part of me treasures the fact that she will still be seen in public in something that came from my own two hands.
One day at Mecca (the Sheep and Wool Festival in Rhinebeck, New York, for those of you who are misguided enough to think that yarn heaven is elsewhere), we were tooling around the booth of a wonderfully talented dyer and choosing roving to go with our just-purchased drop spindles. A gray-haired woman with an armload of color looked at me and shook her head with a slight smile on her face. “You know you are taking a real chance bringing her in here,” she said. I must have looked puzzled, because my daughter has always had excellent shop manners (she definitely got the shopping gene from me), and I thought the woman was implying that children shouldn’t be shopping in this setting. Then she smiled more broadly and said, “You are setting that poor child on the path to a lifelong fiber addiction!” “Well,” I said with a laugh, “it’s too late for me; she might as well come along for the ride.” Everyone nearby smiled and we bought our roving and moved on.
It was easy for me to laugh. I already knew about my own fiber addiction and the kid had always been more interested in the shopping than the crafting. I am sure if I had some other type of lifestyle, I mean hobby, and if there were weekend-long festivals with cool things to buy, she would have been equally interested (or not interested, as the case may be). Plus being little and cute has its advantages. Some wonderful vendors at Mecca gave her gifts of fiber and tools because she was polite and interested—and free stuff is almost better than shopping. I guess in the back of my mind I figured the fiber gene had skipped a generation—she was interested enough because it surrounds her, but the attraction to the needle arts was not rampant on a molecular level.
But this summer, everything changed. We were at yet another yarn and fiber event, and in the interest of having something to do while I schmoozed (or more likely, because she heard that the attendees of this particular class, Crochet for Kids, were getting a really awesome goody bag), she took a crochet class. The instructor was great (and not me, a definite advantage), her friend was sitting next to her (and has a preexisting interest in crochet), the goody bag was in fact awesome and full of yarn sure to warm the cockles of an almost-twelve-year-old heart (it was brightly colored! And fuzzy! And sparkly! And all three at once!!!), and she learned how to make a really fast project (instant gratification). She had a great time and was smiling ear to ear when I collected her from class.
She crocheted all that afternoon and into the evening, presenting some of her friends with her very first handmade flowers. She crocheted in the car on the way home during a fairly long drive. She crocheted after we got home—making flowers for her friends and bags for every electronic item she ever owned (a not inconsiderable number). She pulled out the stash she had been given over the years, unearthed a wicker basket in which to store it, and started poring over crochet books. The next time we had to go out on an errand that we knew would involve some tedious waiting time, I reached out for my tote bag full of yarn and saw that she already had hers on her arm. The fiber gene, hiding all this time, had kicked in with a vengeance. My child was hooked!
And I was delighted. Does that make me a bad mother?