I love crochet.

My one regret in life, is that I did not learn my craft when I was younger.

I read with envy the personal profiles at Ravelry of people my age and younger who, when filling out the section that reads “Years crocheting,” have answers like, “My grandmother taught me when she came to see me at the hospital the day after my birth, and I made my own layette before being discharged.”

I exaggerate, but not much.

Clearly any grandmother that bent on teaching a newborn grandchild to crochet would have completed several layettes for said grandchild to choose from, but still, I sometimes wonder where I would be with my craft if I had learned it when I was in grade school, or high school, or college.

But since I hit the half-century mark, I also find I have less time for regrets, so even though I wish I could put on my Ravelry profile that I have been crocheting for 40+ years, I haven’t, and I don’t have the time to stew about it, I need to stay busy to make up for it, and that is exactly what I tried to do today.

Using three of the sugar cookie icings seen here:

along with the two oatmeal cookie icings seen here and another I found in my bag of crochet cookies, crochet cookie parts, and yarn for this cookie project:

I completed three  sugar cookies and three iced oatmeal cookies:

Then, because I am eager to begin putting this project together, I rounded up all of the cookies I could find and took this picture as a sort of quick reference visual inventory:

I then tried arranging them to get an idea of how they will look when they are finally pieced together:

So why do I love crochet?

Since I have learned to crochet, a world of opportunities I did not existed has opened up to me. I can make my own hats, scarves, bags, and ponchos. I can take the world I see around me and explore it through the simple act of making one loop and then another. The stitches are finite, but the possibilities are limitless.

I love what I can do with crochet and have no regrets that it is not knitting; further I have absolutely no desire to learn how to use a crochet hook to make stitches that are “just like knitting.”

While some crocheters chase the perfect drape and feel an overwhelming need to assert that crochet is just as good as knitting, I feel that crochet needs no defense.

With crochet, I am the mistress of my destiny. I can make just about anything I can think of, including dozens of colorful calorie-free cookies…. That is the magic of crochet.