Day 1,455

Today I am so blessed to have unstudied talent from God.  As a younger child I read books & learned how to knit doilies using a wee steel crochet hook & thread.  Never had anyone who could teach me.  Our mum did do some embroidery; but she didn't do any of the home crafts.  No knitting, crocheting, quilting, spinning, or canning.  I always wanted to learn these things; they seemed to be a part of who I was. So I would get books & study how to do them.  I remember being very young & sitting with the hook & crochet thread while practicing.  I even learned, early on, to keep a close eye on the location of my steel crochet hook, the hard way.  It didn't remove from my young thigh easily either.

From another book I taught myself to knit, another I learned traditional quilting.  I have since become a designer in all three, though in quilting my God given talent leans toward the unconventional art quilts.  I also like to do what others tell me 'cannot' be done.  One advantage of not having had an instructor is that no one has ever told me what is & isn't possible to do, so I try everything & often find a way to accomplish what I would like to do.

It was about 20 years ago, before the process was commercialized, I did a cross-stitched photo of our grand-daughter, Jessica.  Now you can buy kits for such a project.  Little did I know, back then, it would be something that would become popular.  I just thought it was neat.  I would still love to learn to tat, this is one craft I have not yet succeeded in tackling; but I also have not given up.  I am teaching myself to spin & have been doing well with the drop-spindle.  Next level is a spinning wheel.  I already have a couple beautiful fleeces & some rough buffalo wool that will make warm rugs for the floor.

Though I think the best & most fun memory in a book learned home craft will always be butchering chickens.  We moved to the Northwoodz in May of 1989.  A lifelong city kid, with a heart for the olden days; my opportunity came when my 2nd hubby purchased 60 acres of hunting land.  My eldest son, grandson & I came up North for the summer.  We were going to raise a couple pigs & chickens, live in the trailers & then go back to our semi-rural home for the winter.  So we were doing grand & the time came to butcher chickens.  Dev was holding the book, I wielded the birds & the knife.  As he turned the pages, I would read what had to be done & follow the instructions.  We succeeded, had butchered chickens & dinner.  Though we later went to visit a family to see the actual procedure in action, we did a pretty good job.  Now catching our first free range chickens, that is a story that still brings tear of laughter to all our eyes.  I am smiling to the point of tears just thinking about it.  We became quite adept at not only raising & butchering chickens, we had eggs (for home & sale to market), cows (that we raised for calves, meat, milk, butter, ice cream, stinky cheese), pigs (we bred for sale & meat) & a veggie garden that we canned from that was 100 x 100 feet big.  That is one big garden.  Such wonderful & happy memories.  Due to a freak trucking accident in October of the same year, we never moved back down to our home in SE WI & haven't regretted a day.  The Northwoodz & God have both been so good to us up here.

I am so blessed that God saw fit to give me the raw talent & the intelligence and drive to be able to develop it into a useful craft.  Thank you Lord, I pray that I will honor You & make a difference in the lives of others with Your gift to me.