Do you remember grade-school crafts such as making pot holders on a metal loom? This is the earliest craft I remember learning, way before paint-by-numbers and other such activities.

I think the flat, squarish pot holders imprinted themselves on my brain. I say that because years later, when I learned how to crochet, I got stuck in the granny-square phase. It gave me immense pleasure to crochet those flat squares and eventually stitch them together to make something else. (You can read ab...