Yarn Yarn

How to Crochet a Toy Storage Hammock

It's Wikipedia's How to for today, and you're probably thinking I don't have enough to do, which isn't true, and I'm not really dying to get out the old crochet hook again. But, I thought, I have grandchildren, and they're moving into a "new" house this weekend. They might like such a toy storage hammock. Then I looked at the picture--a skinny piece of crocheted yarn stretched from one wall to another across a corner of a room. It had a few tiny stuffed toys resting on it. And I mean tiny. Get it?

It didn't match what I'd thought it would look like, my mind having created something with substance. If anyone in this world needed such a thing, I'd say buy a piece of net and stick it up in a corner, because I just can't see anyone really needing or wanting this piece of homemade nothing.

But it reminded me of when I had only two children--a long time ago. Two little boys just two years apart. I knitted each of them a toy dog with floppy ears. I don't remember if these were their first stuffed toys, but they were favorites, although I wonder now if they would even remember hauling those dogs around or sleeping with them, which they both did. One dog was brown and light blue, the other brown and olive green. Brown I had left over from the cardigan sweater I knitted for Paul, the younger of the two boys.

I guess I was into knitting then, perhaps because we lived in Caldwell, Idaho, and I had no friends. Yet. I also knitted a vest for their dad, charcoal gray, different kind of yarn, different size needles, cable stitch down the two fronts, blocking required--a bit more complicated than the dogs.

Before we were married I knitted him a sweater and argyle socks with a yellow angora line running through the argyles. It was the thing to do for your boyfriend back in the late 1950s, when I was a teenager: knit him a pair of socks. That or angora dice to hang from the rear view mirror of his car. I chose socks, much more practical than angora dice.

I thought they were pretty good, although his mother told me I had done them wrong. But he wore them. And the sweater. I wonder if he really liked them or if he just liked me. Either way, I'll take it.

It occurs to me this post should be on The Widow's Chronicle. Oh well.