Hooked for Life by Mary Beth Temple Read Free Book Online

into shape and let air-dry.

    prefelted

Greetings from Mount Yarn
    T here is an area in my living room where I like to sit and crochet, or knit, or spin, or sketch. My daughter calls this area Mount Yarn. If I am looking for something and stomping around the house with my searching face on, she will often call out, “Hey, have you looked in Mount Yarn?” She thinks she is funny … although sometimes she is right.
    Yes, I have an office, but I find I don’t always want to sit in there when I am working out a design. And I certainly don’t want to sit in there when I could be watching bad television programs guilt-free because hey, the TV might be rotting my brain cells, but I am actually accomplishing something by crocheting, so I award myself a free pass to watch whatever goofy stuff I like. I couldn’t watch anything serious or educational anyway—it would distract me from my crochet work. So bring on the sitcoms, I am working here.
    Anyway, I have a light with a natural bulb, a small round end table, and a basket underneath it that is for whatever project I am working on at the moment. A large red leather armchair is my perch of choice, and there is a tapestry-covered ottoman in front of it. That is, I am pretty sure all of those things are there, but I haven’t seen several of them in years. I believe there is an odd sort of magnetic force emanating from that corner of the living room that attracts fiber, paper, colored pencils, and crochet tools. No, not a magnet—a tractor beam. Okay, I don’t exactly know what it is, but I know it’s there because, at any given moment, there are twenty or thirty skeins of yarn, four or five stitch dictionaries, a stack of graph paper, two or three sketchbooks, a bunch of recent magazines, half the world’s supply of Post-It notes (I like to play with Post-It notes!), and so many crochet hooks and knitting needles that the table top often looks like a porcupine.
    Of course, when I am working on something new, or something with a deadline (like an imminent birth or major gift-giving holiday), or just something that excites me, the yarn, hook, needle, stitch marker, sketch pad, or pencil I need at the moment is nowhere to be found. It was in the pile yesterday. It might be in the pile yet, but I have no stinking idea where it is. After a cursory glance through the topmost layers of detritus, I usually give up and run to the store for backup supplies or move on to a different project.
    About twice a year I get a burning desire to have that corner of the house look less like a dump site for homeless crochet projects and more like a place where a normal person would sit for an evening. After all, you can see that area from the entry hall, and I have on more than one occasion prayed that the mother dropping off or picking up a child is too busy to come all the way in the door, because if she turned her head ever so slightly to the right, she would see into the depths of fiber hell.
    So then I clean it all up, relocate the “no chance of being worked on this month in my wildest dreams” projects back to the stash closet, file the magazines on the shelf where they belong, and throw out approximately two thousand yarn ends from finishing projects. Then I put all the hooks and needles back into their respective cases and discover that I have run to the store so many times since the last time I cleaned that I now own eight identical size H hooks. And so many tapestry needles (because I am
always
losing those) that I am afraid to count them all. But hey, I will never run out again, right? And look how pretty Mount Yarn looks! Hardly a mount at all, it’s more like a gently swelling hillock.
    This lasts for approximately forty-eight hours, by which time the invisible fiber/tool/paper tractor beam has kicked in, and the pile has started to inexorably rise toward the ceiling again. I swear that I am not putting more things over there, yet there they are. Do they breed? I actually think