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...

The Goddess of Crochet Hates Me

Way back around Thanksgiving, Thing One had been up for a visit. We had a great time and reluctantly drove him back down to school when the break was up, holding our breath while we did, because it had started to snow heavily.



On our return trip, we discovered a toll booth attendant who crochets her own shopping bags out of recycled plastic bags. We stopped to pay and ended up ogling her work, as she had two bags in progress, one tan and red, and the other white with blue and red accents. The pattern she said, was one that she created, “from here.” (Insert tapping of head.)



People might think that bags made from grocery store bags would be ugly and frumpy, but they weren’t. The coiled bottoms recalled my Great-Aunt Mary’s rag rugs, and the sides resembled a woven straw summer beach bag. They were unique, original things and easily as pretty as beach bags for which you plonk down cash.



We couldn’t talk long, alas. There was no line at the toll booth, but the weather had definitely gotten worse (our 40 minute drive from that point took us two hours) so we rolled on. And immediately after I hit the interstate, I realized that I had my camera in my car and I hadn’t asked her if I could take a picture of her work.



Over the past month and a half or so, I have had countless occasions, both Thing and non-Thing related, to pass through that toll booth. No sign of the lady or her work.



Until last night. We rolled up and there she was again, this time with a creamy white concoction on her hook.



Finally! It had happened! She was there! She was imminently bloggable!



And I had just given up keeping a camera in the car the week before.



I wonder if the Crochet Goddess wants me to sacrifice some knitting needles to her for return of my catching crocheters in the wild on film luck? Hmmm, there are those huge plastic needles the ex got me….