For Nanna, with love

I reach for the small metal scissors, cold to the touch and listen to the laughter surrounding me. As I clip the small individual threads hanging from the back of the blanket, I make a mental note to remember the simplicity of this moment. The warm sweet musty smell of my grandparents’ home, the steaming English breakfast tea with powdered milk, the fresh crisp feel of the cotton entwined through my fingers and the laughter of four generations of women around the dining room table. Each sense now captured in this memory so strongly that I feel the mere thought, smell or touch of each will bring it all back so strongly that at any time in my life if I close my eyes I would be carried back in an instant.

As I sit there half-listening to the chattering around me and the gentle laughter of women sharing a private joke, I carefully stitch each piece together to form a colourful crocheted patchwork blanket full of colour, colours that one would never put together, but somehow it is the most beautiful blanket I have ever seen.

The blanket, our blanket, is created from a box full of balls of wool and cotton discarded after the creation of a keepsake, every ball with almost no life left each one too little to create something on its own and cast away to be forgotten. They are now being brought back to life with a new piece made by us both and each one an echo of the keepsake it was once a part of, every stitch that brings those pieces together feels that I am stitching an unbreakable bond between us made of love, laughter and the reminiscing scents of this memory I am creating that will be there forever.

For evermore every time that I pick up my hook, a ball of wool and my little pouch with those sharp, cold scissors along with all the bits a crafter collects I am reminded of those days, those seemingly simpler days. Days of crafting and creating, of love and laughter, though only now I understand creating so much more than just a simple blanket.

Years have passed and I pull out the small metal scissors to snip the threads of my latest creation with our blanket draped across my knees. In a moment a single thought or a familiar smell and I am suddenly carried away back to those simple crafting days, a memory that sends a chill to my very core. As though the coldness of those scissors is a reminder of all that I lost, I pull the blanket we made together tighter around me to let the love and the memories of each stitch bring me comfort and warm my heart.

The memories will never fade, they will live on in each of the keepsakes I create and then through the keepsakes created by my children and their children and as we sit now around the table, crafting and chatting with the next generation of crafters we talk of those simpler times, we laugh at our private jokes and the powdered milk.

My memory of her will always remain, in each strand of thread woven into a new keepsake that will become a memory for someone else, a blanket to hold a new life or a beanie to warm a friend whose hair has been lost, taken. It is not just a selection of woven pieces that I create now, it is her hands, her memory, her love that passes through me, from those memories with each carefully woven loop.

For Nanna, with love