The afghan that Heidi Piroso crocheted is beautiful. The center squares are a mix of pastel colors - light purple, green, orange, yellow, white. The next concentric square is dark - blue, purple, green. Then light, then dark again. The 4-by-5-foot blanket contains evenly spaced squares and holes, showing off perfect stitching. Piroso has never seen it.

Piroso, 24, of Concord, is blind. A hereditary disease caused tumors to grow in her eyes, leaving her without sight by age 14. But Piroso has not allowed blindness to stop her from living her life - riding horses, learning massage therapy and crocheting. Since July, she has spent nearly 500 hours making more than 50 blankets for patients of Beacon Hospice.

"Pretty much everything you can do sighted, you can do without sight," Piroso said.

Piroso, who grew up in Canterbury, knew from a young age that tumors lurked behind her eyes. Although she was born with sight, she grew blind gradually. She finally lost her eyesight altogether in the second semester of ninth grade at Belmont High School.

As her eyes dimmed, she learned to do more by touch.

"Because it was gradual, it was an easier transition than someone who had full sight one minute then went totally blind," Piroso said. "I could adapt more easily."

Piroso learned to count out change - quarters and dimes have ridges, pennies and nickels don't, and they are all different sizes. She cooks and she swims. She loves horses and is the only rider at her Goffstown stable to ride Western style. That way, she has a horn in front of her to hold onto, which makes it possible to ride without seeing. She loves brushing horses' coats and even cleaning their stalls. In high school, she started writing a book of short stories about horses - a project she still hasn't finished.

She started dating Nick Petralia, and the two have been together almost five and a half years. They met at a meeting that he attended with his ex-fiancee. She chatted with the ex-fiancee. Later, a friend introduced them. On their first date, they went to a Harry Potter movie. Piroso listened, and Petralia described the visual parts to her. Now, they live together and have adopted a cat named Buttercup. Petralia drives her places and leads her when she walks.

Petralia's brother is disabled, and he said he has always had a desire to help others, which made it easier to adjust to Piroso's blindness. "It's something you get used to," he said.

After high school, Piroso completed a massage training course, although she still has not passed the state and national tests. She dreams of opening a vending business, doing equine massage and training kids not to be afraid of horses.

And she wants to crochet. Piroso learned to crochet at the same time she became blind. Her cousin taught her the basic stitch, and her grandmother and aunt helped her perfect it. When she crochets, she looks down at her work and counts stitches.

"I count with my fingers, not my eyes," she said. She sticks a clip on the piece so she knows where the corner is, and where to switch colors. On some, which she calls her "crazy quilts," she doesn't keep track of colors. In 1999, soon after she became blind, she entered a quilt in the Deerfield Fair and won first place.

She's also quick. She can complete a 3-by-3-foot lap blanket in under three hours. A full size blanket takes a day. When she tires of yarn, she uses lamb's wool, crochet cotton or chenille. Her favorite blanket, which she kept for herself, is chenille and looks like a chocolate chip cookie.

At first, Piroso donated blankets to Warm-Up America!, a program run by Michaels craft stores, which gives blankets to the homeless. In July, Marcia Sprague, volunteer coordinator at the Beacon Hospice office in Concord, met Piroso through Michaels and asked her to crochet for the hospice program.

Beacon Hospice, a for-profit agency, has 23 offices throughout New England and provides hospice care to those with less than six months to live. It relies on volunteers.

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