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Tuesday, December 9, 2014

A Very Large Project

A year or so ago I was at a church rummage sale, the kind of sale I love. The sale is run by some very elderly ladies and they price the stuff to move! Most of the stuff donated to the sale are things that people have owned for decades, someone has cleaned out their craft room and donated patterns that they intended to use one day and never did, odd ball assortments of pyrex dishes, old coffee urns, and lots of books, you know the type of stuff. At a cursory glance you may just see junk, so you have to proceed slowly, pick through the items and at some point you may hit gold.
So on a fine spring morning my husband and I stopped into the church rummage sale, we went our separate ways seeking gold. After going through several tables of books I found a wonderful Betty Crocker cookbook, Cooking for Two, from the 1960's, there are some fabulous pictures in it. Then I came to the craft table, the sweet spot of the sale, for there were tons of patterns for crochet, sewing, quilting, all kinds of dribs and drabs of left over ribbon, yarn, fabric, odd little tools, knitting needles, crochet hooks, and everything was a quarter or less, what a deal. I started going through the patterns and picked a fair number of crochet booklets and quilting booklets and was pleased with my finds. Satisfied I had found my treasures I went off to find my husband, he was at his dream table, the mans corner where all the tools and bits and bobs from cleared out garages were put, he found a very cool spot light still in the original packaging, probably dating back to the seventies. We went to pay for our treasures and the ladies told us we owed three dollars, we rounded up and made a small donation to their cause and left pleased with our findings.
Well the crochet pattern books disappeared into my sewing room and there they waited. In fact I forgot all about them until one afternoon in August when looking for something else I came across one of the pattern books for making throws with flower motifs. I liked all of the patterns but the marigold pattern stole my heart, and I had a bunch of left over yarn that could be used to get started. So a mammoth project was started, the throw was not big enough for me, I wanted the blanket to be a bedspread for our queen size bed. I ended up making one hundred and forty-four squares, each approximately six inches across, and now have a thick, heavy, super warm, colorful, one of a kind, bedspread for our bed.
So the moral of this story is be careful what you buy for a quarter because you may end up crocheting your arm off for 8 weeks making a very large project!










2 comments:

Rebecca said...

What fascinating finds - and I kind of know what you mean....just not crochet-related for me!

Michelle-ozark crafter said...

That is beautiful! I am saving my dibs and dobs of yarn, making yo yo's and someday it will be a summer bedspread.