When I get into something, I get into it pretty hardcore. This has proved true with many things I’ve done - Legos, coffee, toe socks, converses, geocaching, and as I’ll talk about in this story, crocheting. I love things that are rhythmic. Repeated and rhythmic tend to be soothing for me. Crochet became a love of mine pretty quickly once I was introduced to it. A wonderful volunteer named Donna bought me my first skein of yarn and needle. In my head, she was going to sit and teach me, and I was oh so excited. Turns out that she handed me the tools and referred me to YouTube, the great teacher of all. Ha!The wild world of single and double crochets enraptured my mind. I started looking for patterns and easy projects to tackle. I didn’t want to think too much, but just enough. I decided that I wanted to make a big blanket. And of all the things I wanted to make it out of, I chose old T-shirts. I spent hours cutting about 15-20 of my old shirts into 1” strips, then sewing them together. I started crocheting the strip yarn with my finger. I made a long chain, then kept going, building my blanket row by row. The next morning, I realized I needed to make a change. I could barely bend my index finger that I had used for hooking! But don’t worry. Hobby Lobby had a hook to match my needs. Way to go, Hobby Lobby.As I began to run out of shirt yarn, I panicked. I was all the shirts and many hours in, but the blanket wasn’t even wide enough to fully cover my legs. Graciously, Uncle Tom offered some of his shirts that needed to be retired, and the process began again, but this time with a different color scheme. After a few weeks, my masterpiece was complete. The one thing I didn’t take into account - how heavy it would be. The combined weight of crocheting maybe 30-40 shirts together landed me with a (no joke) 10lb blanket. Which I ended up turning into a rug...because why not. So this crocheting phase went on for about a month before I realized something was wrong. A lump had appeared on top of my left wrist. I came home and tentatively told Aunt Sharon about it. Through the power of google, we figured out that I had crocheted my way to having a ganglion cyst on my left wrist. But the story gets better. I went to lead my small group at Willow Huntley’s Student Impact that week, and of course, the topic of my wrist came up. We played the game “signs,” where everyone has a hand motion, someone stands in the middle, and the game participants pass the invisible ball around the circle using each other’s signs. What did mine end up being? Crocheting. But then it got even a little worse. At the end of that month, I was the tech director for a large student camp. It’s usually more guys than gals on the tech team. I wasn’t sure what was going on with my wrist, so I decided to put it in a brace for the setup portion of camp. My worst-case-scenario brain kicked into gear...what if? What if I have to admit to these techie dudes that I have...I have…A crocheting injury. But thankfully, all hope wasn’t lost. No one asked that I can recall. I still have the cyst on my left wrist. I named it Frank. I haven’t crocheted much since that time. But I can say with confidence that I have sustained a crocheting injury. (Interesting side story - Aunt Sharon was talking with some women at a retreat and found out that there are crocheting cruises...where people go on cruises to crochet with each other. And apparently ganglion cysts are aplenty. So there’s that.)

my crochet injury.

spsbs.

oh the places parm shouldn't go.