My grandmother is extremely talented – she can knit, sew, crochet, embroider, cross-stitch and create very beautiful and useful things. My mother also can do most of that too. But these sorts of skills don’t seem to be as common in my generation. I can knit a little, but nothing fancy, just a scarf or something equally simple. I used to sew a little back in high school, but again, just simple things like book bags and a pair of shorts. I can cross stitch, but frankly, that’s probably about the easiest craft to master – the stitches are simple and all you need is the patience and focus to follow the pattern correctly, neatly and consistently. I recently decided it was time to add a new skill to my repertoire – crochet!

At the end of my last post, I mentioned that my first task was to find a source of wool/yarn here in Hyderabad. That took a couple of weeks. We trekked to several different bazaars in search of wool, with mixed success. We found a couple of places that had small amounts of very thin wool, but that wasn’t what I was looking for. We decided to keep looking, but in the meantime we bought some heavy nylon cord to make a new laundry basket. I’ll post about that later, but here’s a sneak preview of the early stages:

My crochet skills have now progressed beyond coasters and dishcloths. Here are some of the crochet projects I finished last year: