Hooking the colors of the rainbow

During  my school days, my mom and her friends  would  spend their leisure time  by knitting, stitching, canning jams, squashes, pickles etc., Crochet was also one of their leisure time activity.   My mom, a seasoned crocheter has hooked lovely ponchos, mufflers, tops,  baby booties,  table  mats,  etc.,. They would exchange ideas and designs from various magazines. And, also the nearby City central library had a good stock of international design books.  Seeing her work with those yarn, hooks  and needles, i too have dabbled with it during my younger days.   

Not just my mom,  I have even  observed my grand mom  make lovely crochet bags whenever I visited her during vacation.  She would make them out of  discarded packing material. My mama worked with a  pharmaceutical company and so they had lots of  drug cartons stocked at home.  The cartons were packaged with a  broad  cream colored stiff  fiber.  My grand mom would immerse the discarded fiber  in water and soak them for a while. The yarn would then turn into strands that  were pliable. She  hooked  them along with little colored embellishments like beads and tubes to make beautiful bags. To make colored bags, she would even dye the yarn.   Readymade wooden handles would be fixed to it to make  a beautiful shopping bag. These were then distributed to all her daughters and relatives.

So, I was familiar with this craft but never perfected or  practiced it.  But, in the summer  vacation gone by, i picked up the basics again from my mom and improvised on it. Now this is my new hobby that I am trying to perfect.  My daughter too learnt it from my mom and has crafted some beautiful gifts for her friends as key chains,Cell phone pouches, lovely flowers as an  embellishment for their dresses. 

  

These days when I see the balls of colored yarns in the basket or even while during my evening walks, my mind is always working on what permutation and combination of  colors to use with the limited stock that I have.  Now, I am on a crochet overdrive:)  I don’t know how far I will travel, but for the moment I am enjoying the colors and my creations. 

These are some of the things that I hooked in the past months. 

Flowers in my yarn garden. 

were stringed  into a garland(unable to rotate the pic)

                                                             to  adorn  the lord's feet

                               The colored granny squares can be hooked into a  little(baby) blanket, shawl or cushion cover( project in progress)

                                              The big granny square in the above picture was made bigger with the rainbow colors...

                                 ....  to add color and warmth  to the bedside table in the children's room

                                               which combination to work with?

                      This owl keychain  and the flower below were hooked by my daughter for her friend on her birthday.  Her friends want more now. In  the first pic, do you see a hair band?  a button can be sewed to the white hairband and the below flower can be plugged onto the button. It will make a beautiful  Navrathri gift for little girls who visit home. we can change the color of flowers to match the dress.  Many more simple gift ideas can be made with crochet what with navrathri round the corner.

                       I will let you know what i did with this  stack of colors in my next post.