WHAT do you do when you have one beautifully handcrafted item to pass on and you have three children?
If you are Elizabeth Walker, then you spend the next three months handcrafting two more.
The impetus for Elizabeth to blithely decide “to make two more” was a comment made at during a craft group gathering.
“Someone mentioned that they’d bought a crocheted Lord’s Prayer at an Op Shop for $2,” Elizabeth explained.
“I thought that’s what’s going to happen to the one I made – there’s three children and only one crocheted Lord’s Prayer.”
Elizabeth’s filet crochet masterpiece was begun when she and her husband moved from Killarney to Rosewood.
“We only had two children then and my husband’s cousin owned the butcher shop in Rosewood and my husband was to work for him as a slaughterman.”
Elizabeth, now 75, took up crocheting when she was 10-years-old.
“My grandmother and mother did it, so my sister and I learned to do it, too.”
Elizabeth graduated to other crafts including filet crochet.
“Filet crochet goes from crosses and squares on a graph to the finished item – it’s fascinating to do.”
But back to the masterpieces she hopes her children will hand on to the next generation.
“I finished it about 40 years ago, when the children were growing up, and put it away in a chest. It was only that comment made at a craft morning that got me thinking about it.”
That thinking led to Elizabeth taking it out of the chest and deciding to make two more.
The two are slightly larger than the original as she wasn’t able to buy the same size thread.
“The thread I had to use was thicker and so the newer ones had to be larger,” Elizabeth explained.
After the three were professionally framed, she asked her children to call in without telling them why she wanted them on a particular day at a particular time.
And she contacted the Moreton Border News to see if we’d be interested in the story … and of course, we were.
