Before I had crochet, I did not make gifts for people. While my baking was serviceable, I had no particular skill or talent that could be wrapped up and given as a gift, and then enjoyed on a regular basis, and without the empowering nature of craft,

There were no scarves:

no bags:

and no green eggs and hamigurumis:

I did my best to give gifts that had meaning — things that conveyed to the giftees that I the giftor knew them well enough to know there was something that they wanted, but which they had not thought to get themselves.

However, the truth is most of those gifts were not all that memorable.

But learning to crochet changed all that, and honestly, the most valuable gift I have given to a few of the people who have crossed my path since I learned to crochet is the gift of crochet itself.

A few weeks ago, someone who works at a dance studio where I take tap lessons was commenting on one of my crochet bags. She had, at some point in her past, learned to crochet, but she had not done so in quite awhile. She had a few hooks, but no stash.

Moved by her plight (which I’m not entirely certain she experienced as a plight) I told her that the next time I came to class I would bring her some yarn. The day before my next lesson, I tracked down an extra stash bag and filled it with some of my extra stash.

When I got to my lesson, she seemed delighted to once again have some yarn, and while I was in class she got to work and had nearly finished crocheting this amazing bunny hat you can see modeled here by Snoop the bunny:

I would not have known to make a bunny hat for her bunny, but the yarn allowed her to meet a need. She did not need to go out to a store in a desperate search for a bunny hat that did not exist, she was able to use the time that she had with the hook and yarn that she had and meet a need that was there in the universe, but not yet expressed.

All of which brings me back to my current rendition of Zooty Owl’s Road Trip Scarf. While it is so named because she devised the design when she was on a road trip, it also seems to me to be the perfect accompaniment for a road trip.

Something to keep the chill off when the air-conditioning is too cold for my taste (this happens to be most of the time), or to keep me sufficiently warm when the heat is not set “melts pavement” (my favorite setting).

While I had finished all the crochet, I still had eight crochet flowers to appliqué (which I did). Here is an overview of the nearly completed scarf:

As well as a detail of one corner:

and a detail of the other corner:

Which means that all I need to do before this is ta-done is to turn these strands of yarn into decorative twisty tassels:

I never know when I start a crochet project exactly where it is going to take me, but when I am done, I am always glad I made the journey

Related: The empowering nature of craft

Green Eggs and Hamigurumi