Something Fishy

Two days ahead of a road trip to meet our 14-month-old granddaughter for the first time, I got this wild idea to make a mermaid tail for her. Her mom, my adopted daughter, had hinted to me a few months earlier she'd really like a mermaid tail. For herself. She never said anything about one for the baby!

When my adopted kids were still young, I'd tell people I didn't have kids. I had fish. My kids would pedal 50 miles in a day, as long as I'd let them play in the river along the way whenever they got hot.

I wondered if my granddaughter will be a water baby. I'd just learned she'd not yet been in a pool or a fountain, and a swimsuit was on my list of potential gifts for her.

So with less than 48 hours but with a ten-hour drive looming, I decided to race the clock and see if I could finish a properly sized fish tail for my little grand merbaby. Actually, she's not that small. She was a big baby, and the first several dresses I made for her when she was born were too small. A couple she was able to wear only once before outgrowing them.

To help me with the sizing, I bought a cute little pink cupcake outfit for her in size 24 months. I wanted her mermaid tail to double as a warm sleeping bag come winter. Her mom doesn't really care for the frigid winters where they live, and I suspected baby would be just like mama.


I began the first round, the waistband, on the train two days before the road trip. I didn't get to work on it during my lunch hour, and I did a lot of frogging and redoing on the trip home that night. I tried several different versions of the crocodile stitch before settling into a rhythm with which I was comfortable. I think I finished four rounds that first day.

The next day, the day before we left town, I finished six more rounds on the train. I was making progress.

On road trip day, we got up at 3 a.m. It takes me 45 minutes to container water the indoor plants, the garden in the front yard and the three raised-bed gardens in the backyard. My dear husband always shines one of the bike lights on me when I have to water anything in the backyard in the dark because we've had several bear visits, and I'm a fraidy cat in the dark!

We hit the road at 4, and I couldn't crochet for another two hours because I didn't have enough light. Fortunately, that meant I could sleep just a little bit more! Which actually helped me stay awake the next 8 hours as I tried to hook faster than the car could drive.

We pulled into town at about 3 p.m., just as I finished the final round of the narrow tip of the mermaid tail. We took my daughter's family to the local department store, where Grand Merbaby got a Frozen swimsuit with a mini tutu and an Ariel swimsuit that perfectly harmonized with the mermaid tail she hadn't even seen yet. Oh, and we had to get a package of swim diapers...

Then I picked up a solid color of yarn for the mermaid fins, which I worked up at the hotel while my better half and Merbaby's daddy got to know each other. About half an hour later, we transformed my grandbaby into a mermaid!




















Linking up with Crazy Mom Quilts and Confessions of a Fabric Addict.

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