How to crochet like Daddy rae rae.

Single crochet beanie.

You'll need 1 skein of yarn, scissors and a Size G (US) hook.

KEY: SC-(1, 2 or 3, ect, all the same stitch)Single crochet

SL- Slip stitch

CH1- Chain one

The first thing you'll need to know is how to make a magic circle. This step replaces the chain 3 and join technique, and I believe it works a lot better. 

 http://youtu.be/FHYVutk2iYY 

The link above will take you to a video that also explain visually how to make the magic circle. 

Once You have the magic circle made, crochet 6 single crochets inside of it. 

A single crochet (SC) is done by yarning over once and pulling through. 

http://youtu.be/8hwHtyJFMf0

Pull the tail of your magic circle to tighten it. 

In each single crochet stitch you'll want to make two single crochet stitches. This is called an increase. Do this all the way around for round one. (You might want to tie a piece of yarn in your first stitch to mark it, so you know where your rounds start and end.) When you are done with round one, slip stitch into the first stitch and chain one to start round two. 

You slip stitch by putting your hook into the stitch as you would for a single crochet but instead of yarning over just pull the string through. 

http://youtu.be/OJE1UTuUjxM

2. CH 1, make 2 SC in each SC around, join with SL ST to top of first SC in round

3. CH 1, make 1 SC in each SC around, join with SL sT to top of first SC in round

4. Repeat round 3

5. CH1, make 1 SC in first SC, 2 SC in next. Make (1 SC in next SC, 2 SC in next), around. Join with SL ST to top of first SC in round

6. CH 1, make 1 SC in each of first 2 SC, 2 SC in next. Make (1 SC in each of next 2 SC, 2 SC in next) around. Join with SL ST to top of first SC in round

7. Repeat round 3

8. CH 1, make 1 SC in each of first 3 SC, 2 SC in next. Make (1 SC in each of next 3 SC, 2 SC in next) around. Join with SL ST to top of first SC in round

9. CH 1, make 1 SC in each of first 4 SC, 2 SC in next. Make (1 SC in each of next 4 SC, 2 SC in next) around. Join with SL ST to top of first SC in round

10 & 11. Repeat round 3

12. CH 1, make 1 SC in each of next 5 SC, 2 SC in next. Make (1 SC in each of next 5 SC, 2 SC in next) around. Join with SL ST to top of first SC in round

13 to 40(or to desired length). Repeat round 3

Your greatest joy.

A lesson about great sorrows and great joys. 

 By Myranda N.

For my mother, Sherri Giannelli.

My mother was the oldest out of four children. There are a plethora of pictures of her, taken all through out her child hood due to the fact that my grandfather was fighting in Nam while she was growing up.  Its hard to say where exactly she spent her years as a child since her family moved around a lot. Where ever grandpa was stationed they would go. 
She once told me a story about how she was five or six and living in Germany. She shared a bed with her brother, Curtis and often times could not fall asleep. She occupied her time with picking her nose and wiping it on the wall above her head. That was all she seemed to recall about living in Germany.
In 1979 the family settled in St. Augustine, Florida. They did not have a lot of money, just enough for two acres of land and a trailer to put on it. when my brothers and I would refuse to eat our vegetables my mother would go off on a tangent about how she would have to eat friend yellow squash for weeks because that’s all they had out of my great grandmothers garden and we should be thankful for some meat with our potatoes. Apparently the only thing they did have money for on a regular basis was beer for my grandfathers unquenchable thirst. 
Growing up with my grandfather around left a lasting impression on my mother. He played a big role in the speeches I received growing up about how men are no good, bastards, not to be trusted, ever. She tried very hard to make me as strong and mature as she should have been. 
As soon as my mom turned 18 she quit school and ran despite only having two months left of high school. Where she stayed for the six years before my birth I do not really know. She had my oldest sibling, Kerri, a year after her 18th birthday. Ben followed a few years after, but with a different father. 
Often times through out my life my father was referred to by my mother as the worst thing that ever happened to her. I would think she would have figured this out sooner since the first year they met he ended up getting her arrested. 
The story has been told to me a couple times, the jest of it is basically that my dad robbed a bunch of homes in the neighbor hood she was staying in at the time. He brought the stuff to her house as gifts, making her an accessory to the robbery when the cops showed up to retrieve the stolen merchandise. Ah, romance!
Despite this she married him, and then divorced him a year later a few weeks before my birth. They stayed together for a long time after the divorce though for various reasons. She needed a place to live and someone to watch her children while she worked are the most obvious ones. 
My brother Jacob was born a year after myself. We are actually Irish twins, meaning that from Sept 21st until Oct 6th we are the same age. Until I was about 6 we lived with my dad and grandmother. The house was chaotic, filled with violence and drug use. After our mother moved us out we often cried all night to go back, it was the only place we knew. We felt safe in the most unsafe environment possible. Instead of consoling us she let us know the truth, that we were being used there for food stamps and government money, that she was beat on a regular basis by our aunts, and that nobody there really loved us. She never beat around the bush.
We started a new life in Palatka, Florida. We went with out Kerri and Ben because they were safer with their grandparents. I learned later that our father was a very aggressive man who slapped down anyone weaker than himself. Instead of taking her two older children with her she let them go. In a way she set them free, allowing them to have a life they would not have while with my father.
The street we lived on was right next to the river, lined with beautiful homes and old trees. Our “home” was an sagging old trailer. Rats could be heard in the cupboards all night, their nails tick, tick, ticking across the cracked linoleum tiles on the kitchen floor. The place reeked of damp cardboard, roach spray, and mold. We were safe though, and together. I would live the rest of my life in that place if it meant we could be together again, listening to the mystery stories on cassette tapes and telling each others fortunes with tarot cards.
The price my mother paid for keeping us safe was being lonely. As a rule I hated any man she tried to bring home, my brothers followed suit. We were horrible, vulgar children. No man would put up with us for very long, leaving my mother to have no company but her children.  
Jumping from trailer parks, to the projects, my mother was my best friend for a very long time. She was all we had. She worked a lot, but at night we stayed up together. Huddled under blankets or open windows, gazing over her glossy tarot cards. Deep in the artful images I could see what was before us, I saw only the very best. 
Around the age of 32 my mother moved us to the projects in Palatka, aka Sugar hill. We lived there for about a year, things were not the best, but not the worst either. It was July when a man pushed aside the flimsy plastic fan perched in our living room window. We were all laying out on the living room floor trying to catch a breeze during the hot, humid night. He seeped into our home and lives like an oil spill, staining us an ugly black color.  Her muffled scream woke me in the early hours of the morning. The grey light filtering in might as well have been headlights, I froze. 
When he left, slipping back out of the open window, she snapped. Snapped like the sound of the switch blade opening; like the sound of the phone crashing into its cradle when the Putnam police told her they could not find the man who stained our family. 
About eight years ago my mother was baker acted. She never talked about it, I did not know where she had went until she came back to us a year later. While she was gone I was left to my own imagination to figure out why she left us. In my mind she hated me for not helping the person I loved the most in this world.
When she did return she was a different person. She was not the beautiful, exotic mother I wondered at. She morphed into Sherri Brown, the sickly woman who was always tired. Sherri did not have the energy to stay up late with me to read my fortune. Sherri curled into herself like a burnt page, I did not dare try to reach out and touch her for fear of her crumbling into ashes. 
Sherri gathered her three children around her and headed towards Palatka again. For years we resided in a run down trailer park next to the St. Johns river. She became a mother and I became a daughter, we were no longer best friends. 
When she lost the job she had been working at for the last 8 years she was forced to move back to St. Augustine and into her mothers home. The four of us shoved ourselves into the cramped 3 bed room trailer on the two acres with my grandma and uncle Bill. We practically lived on top of one another, sleeping, eating and hanging out in the living room at all times. Resentment grew inside of me like cancer. We became bitter together, constantly slapping at each others wounds.
Sherri fought so hard to get away, but life ended up pinning her back where she came from. She was a butterfly fastened down for display, wings spread but never able to take flight. 
Sickness was her companion, instead of a man to hold her hand she had diabetes, asthma, heel splinters, and a herniated disk in her back. Every night was spent in pain, years of working hard caught up with her fast. 
A year ago she met a man, an odd man but a man none the less. She latched on to him like a life vest, floating her way to a stable life. Nothing would get in her way. She married him a few months before her death. 
In the hospital he sat beside her all night long. Every time she was in the hospital he was there. When she took her last breath she was not alone. There was no machine to wake him up when she stopped breathing in her sleep but he was there. The years spent watching her breath in her sleep, the gentle rise and fall of her stomach in the night, were all in vain. When it really counted I was gone, wrapped up in my own life. The quivering of her heart as it faulted shook loose the pin holding her down to her plaque. Finally, Sherri Brown, my exotic mother, took flight. I hope she never looked back.


"Your greatest joy will never last forever but neither will your greatest sorrow."
-Sherri Brown.

Falling in love with you.

Falling in love with you was like putting glasses on for the first time.

I peered up to the trees and realized the leaves had definition; it was not just one big mass of green.

We fell like leaves from that free and tumbled together until we landed at the roots of our creation.

In the soil and dirt we wallowed, the blades of grass the softest thing we had ever known.

As soft as the other leaves falling, gentle as a bird song we were covered and pressed to the earth.

Pressed down until the sun was blotted out and all we knew was the rotting stench of one another.

The worms ate our bodies blindly, moving through us like dancers.

Falling in love with you was like putting glasses on for the first time.

I thought I could see everything, that my path was now clear before me.