Do you remember when......

Do you remember when there was only one TV in the house, one phone in the hall and one car in the garage?

I do.  The TV was in the only living room in the house and my little brother was the remote control - he always sat 3 feet from the screen anyway.

The phone was in the cold and drafty hallway and attached by a cord to the wall.  You sat on the special telephone table/seat and shivered through a call or tried to dial a number on the rotary dialer with frozen fingers.  The first innovation I recall, in OUR house anyway, was when they made that plug in, retractable phone extension so you could pull the phone into one of the 3 bedrooms around you and hear the cussing when someone tripped over the cord on their way to the only bathroom in the house.

The family also only had one car which my father drove.  My mother didn't get her licence till she was nearly 40.  We would stuff 2 families into that car and take trips to the beach in summer - not a seatbelt in sight.

Life was simple.  Women did crafts. Men built things.

I was in my first year of school and only 4 1/2 years old when I did my first piece of knitting. I remember sitting on a little stool next to my mother.  It was hard stuff holding 2 needles in my little hands but it is one of the few times I recall where I was happy next to my mother.  She was patient, she was gentle.  I knitted a jumper for my teddy bear. I can't even remember what happened to it but I do remember it had about 10 holes in it from dropped stitches.  No one cared - it was my first project and aunts and cousins alike were full of praise.

A few years later when I was 9 I graduated from knitting and crochet to needlework.  Here is the first thing I ever made.....

It is a cross stitch rose - it was a vanity trio - 3 pieces, 2 square and one rectangle.  They adorned my dressing table until I got married.  30 years later I can only find this one piece.



From this I graduated to other types of needlepoint but my favourite always was and still is tapestry.  I have several of them in my house now.


As the years rolled on the craft skills improved.  I have made hundreds of doilies in my time too.

As I got better the patterns got more intricate.  I still have some but not many.  Most have been gifted.

I have knitted dozens of sweaters, blankets (baby blankets and lap blankets), scarves, hats, tea cosies and toys.  Hundreds of items over the years.


I have made tapestries, big and little. Lots of them.  This one on the right of Vermeer's Milkmaid hangs above my left shoulder as I sit here typing.






Craft represents so much to me and I can signpost my life by the pieces I have around the house alone.

I have slowed down now.  A lot. But not because I am older. Not because I have arthritis either.

I have slowed down because life has become so different in the past decade.

No longer do we settle down at the end of the day in front of the sole Television set to be entertained or bored by the 3 only program options available as in the past.

These days we sit down to the TV and we Twitter and Facebook and Email at the same time.  We chatter and we pause the TV to take a call. We restart the TV and continue to chat online.  We watch the TV and we watch Youtube.  Somewhere in there we speak to our families and friends all over the world and even to those warm bodies that are sitting right next to us.

There are 3 of us left here in this house.  3 people sitting in 3 Lay-z-boy recliners with 3 laptops, 3 iPhones and one iPad between us. I actually have 2 mobile phones (one for work because I am on-call when I am working.)

There are 5 TVs in this house.  The landline has 5 handsets dotted around the place, one in each significant room.  We each have a car and I have a work car too - so 4 cars garaged here.  If my daughter moved back in those numbers would increase accordingly.

What happened to the world when a mere 12 years ago I did not have a home computer and had no clue as to how to trawl the internet.  I had no mobile phone but it was on the horizon.  I had time on my hands to knit, sew, read and garden.  I had time.


Now, I have to remember to stop 
tweeting, facebooking, texting and emailing so I can do a bit of craft work.  Now, I don't even have to carry around a book, I have the kindle. I don't need a diary, my phone has it.  My phone has a calendar, a camera, a video, games, my shopping list.  My phone can recognise my handwriting and it dials a phone number for me when I say a name.


What happened to that little girl on the stool with the green wool? I remember the colour because it came out of the scraps bag and was ugly to me at first.  I also remember and still have the little yellow plastic needles, the only ones short enough for me to manage with at the time.  What ever happened to those idle hands kept busy with craft work?  

Well, they are even busier multi-tasking on all the technology on my little desk here.  The basket of craft work sits dutifully at my feet crying for attention. So I will stop tap tapping and start clack clacking in honour of all those years of joy and satisfaction craft has given me. I will find a place for it in my busy life and I will finish the two projects sitting in that basket - a scarf and a cross stitch.  Then I will get to work on the cupboard full of projects upstairs.


To prove my faithfulness I will show you the half completed cross- stitch now and when it is finished I will show you again.

I think it is time we made life simple again.........