Sunday, January 25, 2009

Third Time's The Charm

All hail the most merciful and beneficent Crochet Goddess, who granted me the impossible.




(And that's good, because the toxic smell of big, plastic knitting needles doing a slow melt takes awhile to get out of one's home.)


Meet Terry Derosier, the lady I blogged about last week. (Well, last week in the Land Of My Time. More like yesterday in terms of when the actual blog got posted.)


She was there. I had my camera. She didn't slam her window closed when the crazed, gerbil-chasing lady (yes, Virginia, they can fit between the bars) asked her for a photo for the blog. In fact, she let me take two.


One of her with the large size bag she makes




And one of her with the smaller size.





(She also had a smaller white with black accents bag, which I totally loved. And which, I just noticed, you can see a bit of in this picture.)


I think one of the things that charms me the most about Terry's bags, aside from the actual creations themselves, is that she takes all that is wrong with our throw-away culture and turns it into something wonderfully reusable and way more attractive than those bags were in their original states.


She's doing what everyone on the planet should have been doing all along, making something that will last, rather than pass.


I would have loved to talk to her about this aspect of it, and to discover what had prompted her to make these bags. This time, alas, there was another driver heading up behind us, so we didn't get to talk as long as the night of much snow just after Thanksgiving. And even then, we had talked about the technical aspects, the different bags she people gave her rather than throwing them out, and how she got the colored patterns. (The Thanksgiving bags were one color with subtle variegations of the accent color throughout.)


I know that she was ready to talk about these things again with us, until the other car appeared, and I doubt she remembered us from before, as 1) she sees so many people and 2) last time we were driving the paint-chipped, bravely struggling bread van and this time we were in the swank, made-in-this-millennium baby van I now drive.


But Terry? I remember our last conversation. It was great.


And you know what? Next time, I'm gonna ask where you sell those...

1 comment:

Catherine Todd said...

After reading your "confessions" blog, I found a lot of ideas to crochet and recycle plastic bags, which could be a great idea for Guatemala.
Here's a number of interesting links:

Free Recycled Valentine's Bag Pattern
http://www.myrecycledbags.com/

Joining & Crocheting Recycled Plastic Shopping Bags
A quick video on how to join recycled plastic shopping bags and crochet them.
www.instructables.com/id/Joining--Crocheting-Recycled-Plastic-Shopping-Bag/

Recycle Plastic Shopping Bags into 'Yarn'
Recycling plastic grocery bags and plastic shopping bags is nothing really new, but I like to do my recycling without smelling up my environment. If you merely return your bags to your local grocer for recycling, they will melt them down to make new bags. This emits more pollution into the air. I also discovered that fusing plastic bags releases noxious fumes into the air and I don't think that's any better either. So, in comes the scissors. (more)
http://www.instructables.com/id/Recycle-Plastic-Shopping-Bags-into-Yarn/

Thanks for posting! You really got me going here! CT