Crocheting: More on Your Hands Than Just Time

I spent a good deal of time Sunday sitting on the couch, a cat-abused ball of increasingly kinked yarn on the floor, a J crochet hook clutched in my right hand.

You know, there was a time when I sat on the couch without such accoutrement, naked in my lack of time-occupying detritus.  Why, in my youth I was capable of sitting, for absolute hours, with nothing but a blank look on my face and the willingness to do nothing at all.

You shoulda seed me. 

If only it were still so.

But no.  No.  As has so many times been pointed out by folks wiser than I, we are not a do-nothing people.  Raised by a mother who cut our hair, made her own candles, canned our food, and regularly constructed Halloween costumes with nothing but her wits and an old bed sheet, I find myself increasingly astounded by my own sloth-like tendencies.

And so I decided to do something about it.

Hence the clutching.

My mother taught me to crochet as a child.  Having last made an afghan – not an Afghani, no matter what you’ve heard! – in the early 90s, I was surprised by my ability to recall the various stitches.

I should learn some more, thought I. 

And this is where the blank look comes in.  Because try as I might, and as much as “ch 5 sl st foll rd dbl ch in next 5” seems like a perfectly rsnbl req to mk on a Sund aft, I cannot complete a square.

Considering that I will need, oh, a hundred or so, to complete what I want to complete, this is a roadblock.

I rip it out, read the directions, and start from the beginning.

And like a springy, home-spun lesson in life, I get just one step ahead of the last tear-out only to find myself cross-eyed and fumbling again. 

Wt the hl? 

How do some people make it all look so easy?