Another Lockdown Stash

Sarah was engrossed in her latest detective novel when the doorbell rang. Startled, she dropped the book and hurried across the hallway to the front door. She opened it in time to see a figure retreating briskly down her driveway but she could not tell if it was a man or a woman. Looking down at her feet she noticed a large grey plastic bag, no doubt containing her most recent online purchase.

“Thank you,” she yelled to the figure, who acknowledged her by waving an arm.

“Lockdown restrictions,” Sarah thought. “They aren’t even allowed to wait until someone answers the door. I wonder how many parcels are stolen each day?”

She took a tissue out of her pocket and laid it over the parcel before picking it up. Once inside, she sprayed the package with an anti-virus solution and then left it on the hall floor. It would remain there, unloved and unwanted for the next three days, just to be on the safe side. Who knows what it might have picked up on the way to her house?

However, Sarah knew exactly what it contained: a calligraphy set and a selection of different types of papers and inks. She sighed. Would this be yet another fad that led nowhere? Her spare bedroom had already been converted into a studio of sorts, with shelving along one side, a worktable by the window, with a comfortable chair and an angle-poise lamp to help on dull days. The floor was littered with boxes containing half-finished projects and stashes of raw materials. She kept telling herself she would finish every one of them one day, but somehow that particular day never dawned.

This recent burst of activity or inactivity depending on which way you looked at it, had begun with the first corona virus lockdown in April 2020. The initial attraction of being outside doing the gardening had palled and Sarah had sought something creative to try as a hobby. She had trawled through the internet looking for free courses and initially had fancied the idea of crochet. Her grandmother had tried to teach her the basics when she was a child, but as a six-year-old she had been cack-handed and could never manage to find the right tension for the thread. Things that were meant to be flat came out crinkly and vice versa.

“Well, I’ve got plenty of time on my hands at the moment, so I may as well have another go,” she thought to herself, as she added crochet hooks and wool to her online shopping basket and then placed the order. Almost as an afterthought, Sarah realised she needed a pattern, so she spent another hour searching for one. Eventually she discovered a summer top, with no shaping that used an easy stitch and it was free. She downloaded it and waited for her purchases to arrive.

A few days later, she started work. For the first hour or so, she had to keep referring to the glossary at the end of the pattern to understand what she was meant to be doing. The constant abbreviations simply bamboozled her. Gradually the crochet work began to emerge from the end of the hook, the ball of wool became smaller and Sarah began to feel a sense of achievement. She was so encouraged that she photographed the inch or so of the garment that she had finished and posted it on social media with the message “Look! My first attempt and I’ve got this far already! I’ll keep you posted.”

Sarah was feeling stressed the following morning and decided her crochet work would calm her down. It didn’t. In fact, it had the opposite effect. The tension of her stiches was completely different and the width of the garment shrank. She threw it on the floor in disgust.

The next day she unpicked the offending rows and tried again. It was better this time and she felt she was making progress again.  By the end of the week, she had almost finished the front.

Then she spotted an advert for a felting kit online and decided to try her hand at that. The crocheted top was forgotten, as she struggled with trying to make felt out of a bundle of wool using only a long needle. Instead of the fluffy little bird she had hoped to produce, she had a ball of tangled threads covered in spots of blood where she had pricked her finger. It was placed in the cardboard box it had arrived in and put on one of her shelves. Maybe she would finish it for Christmas: robins are always associated with winter, so it would be appropriate.

Next, she tried pyrography, but found that the smell of the burning wood turned her stomach. Perhaps one of her friends might like to take that particular project over: after all, she knew plenty of people who were creative.

When the lockdown restrictions were eased to allow people to meet one other person outside for socially distanced exercise, Sarah arranged to meet her friend Cathy. A socially distanced walk along the beach would burn away some of those extra calories they had both consumed over the preceding month and talking on the phone did not feel the same as a face-to-face conversation.

“So, what are you making now?” Cathy asked, after they had finished discussing the Government’s response to the pandemic and how bored they were being at home for so long.

“I’m in between things at the moment. I’ve just bought some calligraphy things, but I haven’t started using them yet. What about you?”

“I’ve nearly finished that skirt. Hopefully once it’s finished, we’ll be able to get out more and I can wear it. Didn’t you start crocheting a top a while back?”

“I did, but I couldn’t get on with it. I’ll probably just undo it and use the yarn for knitting,” Sarah admitted.

“Do you ever actually complete anything?” Cathy asked, with a laugh.

“Not very often. I just get distracted too easily. I find something else I fancy having a go at, I buy everything I need and then lose interest.”

“Maybe there’s self-help group for people like you. “Crafters Anonymous,” for addicts who keep purchasing wool, needles, cloth, clay, paints and whatever and then stash them round the house when they are half-used. If it doesn’t exist, you could create it: a self-help group on the internet, where people can encourage each other to get on with things.”

It was an intriguing thought and it bounced round inside Sarah’s head for a few days. Then she finally searched the internet but could not find any groups that seemed to fit the bill.

“OK,” she thought. “I’ll create one myself.”

That evening she sat at her craft table in front of her laptop, a glass of wine by her side and launched her own self-help group called “Another Lockdown Stash.”

“There can’t be much work involved in being the administrator,” she thought as she tapped on the key that unleashed the group onto the web.

Feeling pleased with herself, she shut her computer down, poured herself another glass of wine and began reading a book.

The following morning when she logged on, she was amazed to find that fifty or so people already wanted to join her little gang. By that afternoon there were over seventy, all eager to explain what they were working on and asking for help to finish. Some just needed a bit of encouragement but others were asking for technical help on a myriad of different crafts. Just what had Sarah created?

Over the following week she noticed that people had begun contacting each other to offer advice and information. They all seemed an incredibly happy bunch, glad to contact other crafters with the same predicament. It did not matter that they came from all round the world. Somehow they managed to communicate with each other.

Then something dawned on Sarah. If she simply posted pictures of her unfinished attempts, it would act as a talking point for all the other members of the group. For once in her life, she would be creating something that she did not actually ever need to complete. In a strange and convoluted way, she had solved her problem!