I haven't been doing much hooking, so I haven't been doing any blogging. I am stuck in a bad place with my hooking - I have a pile of unfinished rugs and no desire to finish any of them. There are some that I would like to have when they are done, but some of them don't even appeal to me at all. It's a funny thing I do with rugs - I usually start a new rug with great passion and lots of forward thinking - while I am hooking, I am picturing the finished rug and thinking about how much I am going to like it, and then suddenly, I lose interest. I usually get the part finished that I really like, then I have a hard time making myself get the rest done. I have one, no two or three rugs, that mostly need background hooking to be finished but I have sold the background wool! One of them is a adaptation of a great old Christmas rug - with Santa and a reindeer standing in the center. I loved hooking the old St. Nick and the reindeer is a hoot - long bodied and drawn like a six-year-old's drawing - and that's the end of it. The background is partially hooked with some sort of creamy wool that I dyed with either onion skins or tea - or maybe both. At any rate, I am sure I will never match the background wool, so I should just take it out and start over, but I hate to do that. Not that I never reverse hook, I have one rug with the linen wearing out because I have taken the wool strips out so many times. On this rug, I foolishly drew a picture that required the sky to meet the ocean, and I have been fooling around with ocean and sky colored wool for a year now. At first, I thought I would have a colorful sunset and that would solve the colors problem, but the sinking sun I hooked multiple times always looked awful, so I pulled it out and decided that trying to hook a night scene was better, but that didn't work, so I decided to hook a daytime picture, and that's what I am carrying around untouched in my hooking bag now. In the back of my mind, I think I would like to cut the rug in half and keep the dogs that are looking over the ocean to the sky - but, of course, that would remove the whole reason for the picture. The dogs are supposed to be looking at their old pals who have already crossed over the bar - they are in the cloud shapes in the unhooked sky.

I have another unfinished rug - I started it when the fourth Harry Potter book came out, so you know how long I've been "working" on it. It's a horse that has a little unusual look to it - so it could be one of the pseudohorses that pulled the carriage to Hogwarts - right in the center of a red background, with a border of squares hooked in overdyed tweeds. The tweeds were all overdyed for other projects. Half of the squares are hooked and I have lost, misplaced, or sold all the rest of the overdyed tweeds! Also, the red for the half-hooked background is gone, sold I think. It was a very mottled overdye, using a Vermont Folk Rugs dye recipe, which I didn't record and I probably did some substituting for dyes I didn't have. I loved hooking the Harry Potter horse - I really love the pattern a lot, I even sold quite a few of them on eBay with a variety of different borders, but somehow I lost the steam to hook the rest of the background and the rest of the border.

Maybe I should get tough with myself, make some kind of rule that I can't start a new rug until I finish the old ones - or, maybe better yet, I should not allow myself to eat a meal until I get at least a hand size patch hooked.... hmmm, that could target more than one of my goals...