A Gift for Sampson



I've crochet a lot of creatures, but this is the first time I've made something specifically for a creature...

Are you a "dog person" or a "cat person?" I am neither one..
When I grew up, we usually had a dog and a couple of cats running around. I love both, but since members of my family have allergies to pet dander, we can have neither. I am, however, slowly becoming a "reptile person."

The "gateway pets" to becoming a reptile person are beta fish and the hermit crab.
I think around the time my oldest son was three and we moved to Colorado Springs, we got our first beta fish. He was a beautiful shade of blue, and since this was the era in which my son was naming our vehicles based on their color (beginning with our Chevy Blazer "Purpley"), he of course named the fish Scott. Scott was with us for a little while, and I'm sure we had a hermit crab or two during this era, but the first major pet experience came at the very end of kindergarten.

On the last day of school, my wife and I both went to pick him up. We wanted to make sure we got everything and to thank the teachers for taking such good care of him. Since we were moving to Ohio a couple of months later, this would be the last time we saw them. I made the HUGE mistake of commenting how cute the class pet was, and before I knew what was happening, I was leaving with three fiddler crabs and three newts!

We kept the six of them in the same cage, and likely due to my lack of animal husbandry skills, by the time we moved, only one newt remained. I don't know what went on in that cage, but what I imagine it playing out like a tiny Highlander sequel! Somehow that newt survived the 4 years in Ohio only to perish shortly after we moved to Albuquerque.

For a couple wonderful months we were petless again, but my son wanted to get more hermit crabs. Like any good parents, we said we would look into it. We were at a garage sale one Saturday in September and came across fish tank that would be perfect for our future crabs. We asked, "How much?" and they said, "$20, but it comes with a turtle."

A turtle? My boy was ecstatic! It turns out, he had only been settling for hermit crabs, and what he really wanted - in his heart of hearts - was a turtle. Any resistance I might have offered melted away when saw him. About the size of a silver dollar pancake, Nelson quickly became the newest and the only cold-blooded member of our family. My wife took Nelson to the vet for a check-up and a shot of vitamins (who knew turtles could yelp?), and came back with Nellie, the ornate desert box tortise. When animals are that young, it's difficult to tell the gender. The vet ran the "television test," and when the turtle kept changing the channel back to Oprah, we knew that a name change was in order. Note: we still refer to her a turtle; it's just easier than saying "ornate deserb box tortise."





Nellie (top, center) getting ready to chow down on some escargot in Albuquerque!


Nellie has been with us ever since, surviving the rest of the 4 years in Albuquerque and the 4 years in Virginia and is now living with us in Hawaii, but before we left New Mexico, my son had started high school and needed a new pet for an experiment in his biology class. I was finishing my year in Saudi Arabia at the time, so I'm not exactly sure if he HAD to have a snake... All I know is that by the time I got home, we DID have a snake - Sampson. (Note: Sampson is very shy, so I don't have a picture of him... yet).



Older son with snake (not Sampson).

Younger son with snake (still not Sampson).

About the size of a number two pencil, Sampson was a beautiful red, orange, yellow, and white albino corn snake. I had long ago assumed primary caretaker status for Nellie, and since I was the only one not nervous about holding him or feeding him frozen mice, I took over Sampson's care and feeding as well. They both bring me a lot of joy, as does Roger, a red-eared slider who rounds out our reptilian trio - we picked him up about a year before we left Virginia.


Roger doing his daily yoga in Virginia.

Moving to Hawaii presented a bit of a problem because, although Nellie is on the list of reptiles that are permitted to live here, Hawaii does not allow ANY snakes because there are none indiginous. Roger probably could have come, but he's a little too high maintenance to take over the ocean. Thankfully my parents have taken Roger, and my sister has taken Sampson. When we move back to the continental US, I plan to take both of them back.

The project I just finished crocheting served a couple of purposes:
- I had a ton of yarn that I got for next to nothing in Saudi Arabia. It's very thick and coarse and riddled with imperfections, and I've spent years trying to come up with something to do with it.
- I have been wanting to experiment with large-scale hyperbolic sculpture.
- Sampson, who I have been missing a lot lately, is now about four feet long (thanks to years of "power feeding"), and I wanted to make him something versatile that would fit in his cage and be strong enough for climbing, large enough for hiding, and flat enough for basking.

Here's what I came up with.

I started with a chain of 5 stitches, and to make the project go faster, I decided to use double vice single crochet. I followed the same patter I do for Travel Mercies, putting two stitches in each stitch from the previous row. The math adds up very quickly: row 1 - 10; row 2 - 20; row 3 - 40 ... 80, 160, 320, 640, 1280...

It was at this point that the sculpture was getting fairly large and starting to tax my attention span. I like the way it was turning out, but I wanted to give it some additional height, but I didn't want to do the next row of 2560 stitches, so instead of increasing, I did 3 additional rows of 1280, making it one of each color.

I finished the project by starting to close the form, placing one double crochet in every other stitch from the previous row. I did a row of 640 and a final row of 320. I decided against closing it completely because I really like the way it is able to fold back on itself, giving Sampson lots of different nooks and crannies to explore and making his habitat more interesting with a variety of shapes to climb on. I hope he likes it, and if my sister will take some pictures of it in his cage (hopefully with Sampson using it), I'll share them in a future post. Until then, thanks for reading!

God bless,
Matt