What's Left Over

Years ago, when my grandmother first started getting rid of stuff she no longer needed, she gave me a bag of cream-colored fine cotton thread, a bedspread pattern, and several completed squares of the pattern. This material, she said, had belonged to her sister Lila. Before she died, my great-aunt Lila had given this uncompleted project to my grandmother, hoping that her sister might finish what she had not had time to complete. Grandma completed many handcraft projects, but she never got around to crocheting the bedspread her sister had started. So she passed the project on to me.

For years that bag of crochet thread and crocheted squares sat in several closets in different houses. Finally, I gave some of the thread to Benton, who wanted to learn to crochet. (Hey, it's a family tradition. Some of my uncles learned to crochet, too!) And I began using the crocheted squares as fancy coasters.

Before she died, my mother-in-law gave me needlepoint canvases on which she had drawn designs she had hoped to needlepoint. For years, those canvases sat in closets as I tried to think what to do with them, unwilling to throw them away. Finally, when I began creating my art car, I glued the canvases to the ceiling of the car, along with other left-overs from projects: buttons, quilt scraps, felt, spare crocheted flowers from a small afghan I once made a friend.

It's the dilemma every person faces who does hand crafts of any kind: what to do with the left-overs. People who do hand crafts probably tend to be pack rats, anyway; we hesitate to throw anything away that might be resurrected in a different project.

This weekend, I took out some skeins of yarn M-M and I had bought to make hair for the craft dolls she and I made two years ago to raise money for CARE. The yarn isn't the only item left over from that project, but I thought I would begin with it--transforming the left-overs. The end result can be seen in the photos below. I began with the designs at the end of the scarf; they look like crocheted pot holders. I attached them to the scarf and then crocheted a matching hat. I'm thinking maybe I could begin a line of designs inspired by kitchen items! In the second photo, M-M has turned the ends of the scarf around to expose the "pockets" I crocheted for hands.

Pot-holder scarves--dual use!