The Hugging Blanket

Spinning is an unusual hobby because you do not produce a final product. As beautiful and fascinating skeins of yarn can be to look at, they represent an in-between stage waiting to be crocheted, knit, woven or otherwise used to make something out of them. I suspect most people who get introduced to spinning already knowing how to crochet, knit or weave, but that wasn’t the case for me. I only accepted the old spinning wheel I was offered because I might know someone else who would be interested in it. In the meantime I would keep it in my atelier, and maybe give spinning a try because I had all this wool laying around anyway. Long story short: I discovered I absolutely love spinning and pretty soon I had a big pile of skeins of yarn that just kept getting bigger because I didn’t know what to do with them.

I figured crochet was the easiest of the yarn crafts to get into so I decided to crochet my yarns into simple ‘granny squares’ and see if eventually I could make a whole bunch of them into a big blanket. All this time this project had been a pleasant on-the-side project, a fun way to finally do something with the yarns I was spinning. That changed suddenly as I was one third into crocheting the squares together. As I sat on the ground arranging the next row, I thought of a friend who was going through a rough time and instantly knew this was her blanket. It felt like discovering I had been making it for her all this time. The blanket was becoming pretty heavy because of its size and the relatively think, heavy yarn used to make it, and it reminded me of a hug. This giant rainbow was how I could give her a hug and wrap her in love, from a distance. Making things, anything, means you can make meaningful things. Making meaningful things for people who are dear to me is one of the greatest joys in my life.