My life in Crochet IV: ADD and the Sensitive Wife.

Although I always claim that my ADD is hypOactive, the fact is that I fidget constantly, even if you don't count the tremor.  And it drives wife3 crazy, though she only says something about one time in ten.  And that mounts up fast.  I tried for a while always having a deck of cards on hand to play solitaire whenever I was going to be sitting but not typing or eating (which interfere with my fidgets).  But the sound of the shuffling cards and even the the slap of cards was only a minor improvement over tapping pencils and fingers and feet.

Then Martha Stewart published an article on granny squares.  I read it and, since I had never gotten over my aversion to granny squares, wondered if I could modify the pattern into something else, say hexagons.  A few tries showed I could, and so I was off.  Whenever (within reason, of course -- not in church or at an entertainment) I was just sitting, I whipped out a ball of crochet thread (#10) and a 2 hook and ran a few more rounds on the hex of the day.  I could do it almost mindlessly (if you don't mind a few mistakes and strange corrections) and soon I was watching tv or riding a tour bus or sitting through a meeting hooking away (well, it's better than sleeping).

For the most part, my color selection was determined by what the few shop I knew of had in the way of thread.  Within that selection, I pretty much picked my colors for a particular hex at random or with some thought of "what goes together" (but I am somewhat red-green color blind).  I did, when I had the material, do all the holidays I actually celebrate somewhat: Christmas, Valentine's Day, St Patrick's, Independence, Hallowe'en, and Thanksgiving,  I did the school colors of all the schools I'd been or taught at (when I could remember what the colors, or look them -- a school so small that I was on the basketball team probably didn't have colors). I did the colors of the liturgical year.  I tried some variations on the usual stitches (which didn't work out too well -- especially the round spiral center that never did get  back to a true hex).  Anyhow, I just kept quietly (the important part) hooking away.

As a result, I discovered one day that I had a bag of well over 200 hexes.  So, someone said, maybe I should make something out of them, an afghan, say.  I'd long since lost the Stewart article, which gave instructions on binding the pieces together, so I tried a few things that seemed right and finally found one that I could do almost as mindlessly as making the hexes.  But then there was the problem of how to arrange them.  I started by working outward from a central hex to the six adjoining hexes but quickly lost the over all pattern for the individual block, so that even though I knew I needed to work on one corner, I could not find that corner again.  So I gave it up and made more hexes.