My First Love . . . speaking crafts, that is.

Yup . . . Stampin' Up! is what I do.  But some of you may not know that my first love (or addiction . . . but then it's all semantics, right?!) was crochet.  I still try to crochet at least a little bit every day.  This year I will really need to stay focused on getting in at least one hour of crochet each evening because I've committed myself to doing a BIG craft sale in early October and there's nothing worse than struggling at the last minute to find enough stuff to stock your booth!

When I was younger, I crocheted many afghans, sweaters, jackets, and other large projects.  These days I'm more into instant gratification, and as a result my projects tend to be on the smaller side -- cup cozies, hats, scarves, mitts, bags, and kitchen things (scrubbies, potholders, dishcloths, etc.).

Some of you have seen this photo of my "yarn wall"; a few of you have actually seen it in person.  Fact is, I believe I have more yarn stashed here than The Craft Box, a thrift store for crafters where I sometimes teach card making classes.  This wall is in my bedroom and is the first thing I see each morning when I wake up.  Sometimes I asked myself if I'll ever make it through all of this yarn before I die!  But now I'm convinced the answer is YES!  My resolution for 2019 is to use at least the front layer of this wall before the end of the year (yes, incredible as it may seem, most of these cubbies hide another layer of yarn behind the ones you see pictured).

So the question remains . . . addiction?  Or therapy?  I'll go with the latter.  I believe it keeps me calm and more or less sane.  The following is a true story about something that happened several years ago.  I arrived at my doctor's office for an appointment -- I had been rushing to get there because (as many of you know) I'm always late for everything, and when the nurse took my blood pressure, it was slightly elevated.  I went back to the waiting room and started crocheting while I waited for my doctor to be ready for me.  When I went into her office several minutes later she commented that my blood pressure was slightly elevated and said she wanted to take it again.  Low and behold, my blood pressure had returned to normal!  She asked, "How did you do that?!"  I replied, "Tying knots!"  (That's what my sweet hubby calls it -- he also, by the way, does a hilarious impression of me crocheting . . . it goes something like "ch, ch, ch, ch, ch, ch" while I'm stitching along smoothly, then changes to, "Sh_t! Sh_t! Sh_t!" as I find a mistake and pull out all the stitches.)

BTW . . . thanks to my friend Chris for sending the following link to me.  Maybe it will make you giggle as much as it did me.  (But it's kind of true . . . .)

http://shopilovesports.com/155486948-1368379830.html

Thanks for listening to me ramble on this afternoon.  Promise we'll get back to paper in the next post.

In the meantime, keep playing with paper! . . . and yarn!

Cath  ;D