How would I describe my first year of life with Covid, from March 2020 to March 2021? As a time of finishing all the bigger creative projects I'd been dreaming of. Men, forgive me, but today’s post might not be interesting to you. But, ladies, I have beaten my nemesis.

Every year, I visit the creative fair KreativWelt in Frankfurt, Germany. Sometimes I go to Creativa in Dortmund, and here and there, I visit small events in Berlin or Hamburg. There are creative people there and companies selling or performing at the fair, showing new techniques or even reviving old ones. It's a great time. I basically go to these fairs with a suitcase on wheels and throw all my purchases in it.

It was 2018, and I was walking around KreativWelt, strongly encouraged by the creative mood everywhere; I walked through the hall and suddenly came across this "beautifully colour-matched shawl" hanging on the "ceiling". I fell in love. Like, I can get excited easily, but this was something else. I really wanted that shawl. Now. Yesterday was too late.

I go—well, I run—towards the stand and ask, "How much does it cost? The price doesn't matter; I have to have this". It turns out that I speak fluent German when I want to. But the owner didn't want to sell it to me; she was only selling yarn and the instructions. This shawl was just a sample.

For the next few hours, I wandered in those big halls, unable to stop thinking about the shawl. I really wanted it, but the owner seemed quite relentless—and, to be honest, something like hundreds of thousands of euros, that's too much :)

So, after a while, I partially surrendered. I returned to the stand and looked at the yarn (1400m Bobbel Einhorn from Bobbel-scheune.de) and looked at instructions (the book Bobbelicious in German). I asked the exhibitor, “If I combine these two things, will that shawl come out of it?” She said yes. So I bought it.

The technique turned out to be crocheting. I had never crocheted; I didn't know how to do it, how it worked, what I needed, nothing at all.

For two years, the yarn stared at me in my study; I didn't even know how to hold the hook or decipher the hieroglyphs in the German manual. The book contained a long description of how to make the scarf in some strange German. The text was entirely unreadable to me. There was a scheme that seemed to be more comprehensible, but I knew nada about what the hundreds of those symbols meant.

Then Covid came along and the yarn was staring at me even more than before. Suddenly, I had a lot of free time, and I couldn't just buy a plane ticket to somewhere and run away from that yarn. I made a sand wall. I bought the first 3D printer. And I also checked YouTube and watched videos about crocheting.

A few tutorials on YouTube, one Covid wave, and several thousand swear words in seven languages later, a two-and-a-half-meter shawl was born to the world. And it started my crochet career, which probably won't even pay for my monthly water bill :)

It turned out that it was not rocket science. It was about repeating the same movements for many hours—and even the symbols weren't as scary as they seemed at first glance.

I crocheted where I could, and when the borders opened again and I went to Berlin, I took my crocheting with me :)

I knew it would take a while to crochet the scarf, but I had no idea it would go this slowly. I expected a few days, maybe a few weeks, but not months. And it took months.

On a different occasion, I would probably share the schema, but because the schema is from the book, I can only say that the book can be bought in the Czech Republic.