I’ve tried and tried to quit hooking but something always draws me back to it. It’s like an addiction that can’t be fixed. It’s like an itch that can’t be scratched. And when I get the idea to hook again nothing , and I mean nothing, can stop me. And, it goes on for ages and ages and I can’t seem to pull myself out of it. Thankfully I can be easily distracted by bigger, shinier things, but, don’t kid yourself…I will be back to hooking in no time at all.

No, this is not the confession of a secret sex worker. This is the admission of a highly skilled and addicted crocheter. As many of you may know, I am the founder and creator of the Otown Bombers, a yarnbombing group that took the city by storm way back in 2012, when we covered a bus in crochet. Since then we have created our own projects, almost been arrested twice, and have been hired to yarnbomb places such as the National Arts Centre and shops like A Curious Thing. We’ve all been pretty scattered for the past few years but we are still avid hookers and bombers. We annually yarnbomb Dundonald Park because it is where we did most of our hooking as a group on sunny Sunday afternoons.

I had an itch to bomb in January so I began a private endeavor in my apartment building. Our building has been through so much in the past year but the icing on top of it all happened in December when we were subjected to daily false fire alarms and mostly very early in the morning, 3 am to 7 am. They finally caught the person pulling the alarm as an act of revenge on an ex who lives in the building, but the moral and energy levels of tenants was evidently depleted.

So, I hooked. I crocheted 110 different appliques with magnets, attached them and instructions to a game I invented called, Doorsy, and just launched the game yesterday, February 26th, 2021. So far, I have had a lot of positive feedback. The goal of this game is to boost the moral of my neighbors and collectively bring us closer together in trust and love of play!

I guess I should clarify, that the relationship between hooking and crochet is the crochet hook itself as the implement for the creation of such vibrant and delectable yarn projects. You know, just in case you’re still scratching your head about the opening paragraph.

Here are some of the various magnets I made.