Memories and dreams too

Several years ago I received a big box with yarns and some unfinished projects. The box was sent to me by a caretaker of 92 year old Latvian woman who came to US at the end of WWII. All her life she had worked as a nurse, often taking night shifts since she didn't have a family of her own. During those long nights at the hospital she was knitting and crocheting. As many of us know - we dream up of the project, buy yarns, start it, then something interrupts us, and we put our handiwork aside to finish later. At the old age the woman was losing her eyesight and realizing that she is never going to finish to go through that box. She asked it to be sent to me. I found a beautiful soft white yarn in the box, and the first thing I did was to knit a shawl for her. She loved it. And when she passed away few years later her wish was to take that shawl with her. I have used yarns from the box over the years. And what was left now were six neatly crocheted strips. I put them all together - her dreams, my memories...
Let me know how you are doing with your projects...

This is description of the project (instructions are in the previous blog post)

Dreams and Memories

If we have a dream it can’t get lost. Could be that some dream just turns into a memory but nonetheless had made us more secure and stronger in order to move forward. What was a dream yesterday may turn into a reality tomorrow. As Albert Einstein once said: “A person with big dreams is stronger than that who has only facts.”

And it’s okay if some dreams are not fulfilled but instead are turned into memories. Memories are the collection of our life experience. They hold our successes and losses, joy and sorrow. They, like glue, hold our lifeline together. With years passing by, our memories might fade but they never age.
We cannot always express our dreams to others with words. It may be easier to give our dream or memory some tactile form through crochet - to re-purpose a scarf that still keeps the loving memory of a beautiful moment or some hidden tears; from old tape we used to listen when we were happy or sad, some T-shirt, plastic bag, or whatever.

We will join this all together – each piece in a single color. In the spring I will sort them by color, then we will see which is the most popular. But for sure they will all make one big collective blooming work at Riga Biennale of Contemporary Art.