CROCHETHERAPY

There is not just one reason why I keep myself busy again with crochet, after quite a long time. It’s not just that I want to create, which of course is one of the reasons (I always need to do something creative). Crochet is a way to keep my mind busy in a way that, depending on what I crochet and which pattern I follow, I end up fully concentrating my mind on counting stitches and rows, on the shape of what I do, on the coming ideas. Nothing else exists. I use crochet as some kind of meditation. Suddenly the mind and the self fade. Everything around and the world itself can vanish. Just the action of crocheting and what it implies, and creating. Even the crocheted thing seems to fade from reality and becomes just a cluster of geometrical shapes dancing in harmony. I got a strange feeling yesterday, when I was crocheting a winter hat (obviously in green) while I watched a chapter of “el laberinto del Tíbet” on TV and I saw monks making a mandala. I felt abducted by the geometry and symmetry of the mandala and of the future hat.

Another reason is the need to see colours, for they have a positive effect on the mood and thus on the mind and body. It’s also pleasant to be surrounded by the softness and other textures of yarns and wools. And suddenly, the shine of the metallic crochet hooks.

Knowing how to crochet is something my mother taught me when I was rather little. I used to see her knitting or crocheting and seeing how yarn or wool suffered some metamorphoses and became something beautiful and/or useful fascinated me. Several years ago I made handbags, coin purses, some scarves, a hat...but there was a period afterwards with few or inexistent creations. Now I happened to have more time (until classes and so on begin) and I needed to create but also to keep this crochet knowledge alive. It’s one of the things I inherited from my mother and I want to keep crocheting, not to forget it, so as to be able to transfer such knowledge to the future generations, since my mother is no longer here. To her memory do I also keep crocheting. Now I won’t have her really good advice and I’ll have to find by myself the way to perform certain patterns or stitches. But I have some intuition which I also inherited from her, and many musters of stitches to remember stitches I know and to decode those I don’t know.