It was a very long time ago… I was a toddler and my maternal grandmother, Mamie, was a keen crochetteuse. Nothing particularly fancy: she would unpick old jumpers and make granny squares blankets. Like me, she had trouble finishing anything so there were lots of bright squares laying around in the work basket. A single square was enough for a whole blanket for my teddy dog Patapouf. I was allowed to swap blanket on each visit until one day my grandmother taught me how to crochet my own granny square. I took to it straight away and have been crocheting ever since. (Unlike knitting, which my mum taught me but never really took on). I have always liked the laciness of crochet. It also appeared to me to build up more quickly than knitting, or perhaps it was just the illusion created by the fact that I could make a scarf out of small squares, so I had a feeling of “finished!” after each square rather than at the end of a long, long knitting marathon.

I still have the last of Mamie’s squares. The wool is scratchy compared to the yarns we use today. The colours are also completely different. Nothing soft and muted. It’s all garish and flat colours. Pretty awful yarn really. But Patapouf still likes them…