RUGHOOKER.

Martin Luther King Day

2012-01-19T01:03:00.002-05:00

This is not one of my normal blog posts, but I wanted to send the top photo to the Ellen Degeneres show. After a wonderful concert in Hill Auditorium (bottom photo for you non-wolverines) a group of us were walking to the parking structure when we passed the store that carries UofM sporting goods and saw this mannikin in the window. Whoops.

DONE!

2012-01-18T23:57:00.004-05:00

My SJ rug is done! Well, at least the hooking is done - I still have to do the whipping, but I'm putting that off until some time in the future. I may want to add a border, but I'm anxious to get started on my Frost pattern and I want to think about border possibilities for a while. With the extra monk's cloth folded back, the rug seems a lot smaller.

And now, Gibby and Gabby are really pals. Gibby is soooo patient with the puppy - she jumps all over him, chews on his ears, bites his cheeks, puts her paws on his nose, etc. and he just takes it. Sometimes he comes to me for attention, but as soon as I pet him, she's all over him again - I think she doesn't want to share.

This morning, I was in the barn cleaning up after feeding the chickens and Gabby walked in. She and Gibby had been in the dog pen and apparently she figured out how to get out. I was a little panicky because I didn't have the driveway gate closed, but she ran right to the house - whew!

Patches

2012-01-11T20:04:00.005-05:00

Poor Patches.

Ever since her mother died before Thanksgiving, Patches has been in hiding. She's been hiding in a destroyed couch in my library, a room that is now basically only a pass-through to the door that leads to the dog pen. A few days ago, she spent about 36 hours hiding in the bathtub. The last couple days, she hid behind some boxes under my desk in the library - when I found her there this morning, she was shaking from head to toe. During this whole time, she would come out to eat, but only eat about half of a can of canned dog food, and if I tried to pick her up she gave a small growl and let me know she might bite me.

One of my motivators for getting a puppy was an attempt to bring Patches back into the world. She has always been a playful dog, so I was hoping she would play with the puppy - but, so far, she doesn't want anything to do with the puppy and even leaves her food bowl if the puppy looks at her sideways.

So, today, I begged Patches to come out from under the desk and was surprised when she came to me. I put a leash on her and led her out to the car - and then I realized how much I had been neglecting her - I used to take her with Blue and George in the car almost every day, but after Blue died, I had gone in the car alone or recently taken the new puppy - so, anyway, Patch was glad to be in the car - she went right away into the very back part where the sleeping bag and pillows are. She stayed in the car while I had lunch with friends, then I took her to the store.

I had just gotten Patches settled at the store when a young girl opened the door and waved to the driver of their car to come in - and here's where the world becomes a funny place. The woman who came in had not been here for a dozen or more years - she moved to Illinois years ago. She is the person who rescued Patches when she was only a year old. I had sold Patches as a small puppy to a grandmother who had never let her out of the basement for a year. Neighbors were talking about how horrible the grandmother's house smelled and that's how I heard how badly Patches was being treated. One of my weaving students volunteered to go get Patches, and she did.

She rescued Patches again a year later when she visited the dog pound and saw Patches being taken to the "euthanization" room. She stopped that process and called me and I, of course, was anxious to take Patches back. She arranged the adoption for me.

We had not seen her since that phone call, and here she was today in the store. Patches jumped all over her. I saw Patches happy for the first time in weeks. Patches is about fifteen years old now, and hadn't seen her rescuer since she was a young dog, but she obviously remembered.

Patches is better now, not hiding. She made a nest behind the counter at the store and has been acting like her old self all afternoon, even with lots of people in and out of the store. She even shared my supper with me.

New Dog Toys

2012-01-09T00:16:00.002-05:00

Gibby and Gadget, who is now being called Gabby, have been playing wildly for days now. Poor Gibby gets worn out long before Gabby is ready to stop, so he takes a nap while she shreds every piece of paper she can find. The noise of their wild playing gets really loud and sometimes their play includes leaping from sofa to chair to chair to dog bed and back to sofa - a wild whirlwind that makes sitting in a chair in the same room a little uncomfortable - so, I decided it was time to get some dog toys. I studied a catalog, read up on "unstuffed toys" called skins, and then I added dog toys to my shopping list. When I went shopping tonight, I picked up one toy, but trying to get a lot of toys was going to be expensive - so I bought some toe socks instead. The toe socks were on sale, 3 in a package for $2. When I got home, I gave the purchased toy to Gabby and it scared her - the toy talks and does some heavy breathing just like a playful dog. After a few minutes she played with it anyway. Then I gathered up a few coke bottles - bottles that had already been stripped of their labels by Gabby - and I stuck them in the toe socks. They made great toys, the crackle and pop when chewed on, there's enough left at the cuff end to hang onto for teasing and throwing, and Gabby likes to pull on the toes - great toys. Gabby wore herself out with the new toys and is now sleeping on the back half of my chair.

I got a little more hooked on my SJ today, now only three blocks to go. I also have a couple blocks in the middle that need to be redone - I must have been in a pretty dull mood when I hooked them.

Welcome Gadget!

2012-01-01T10:50:00.002-05:00

I had intended to spend every spare minute this weekend working on my Sincerely Jane rug. I thought I would have everything finished except the binding, but I haven't even picked up a hook. This little critter under the table, sitting on my wool bag, has occupied every spare minute.

This is Gadget, also known as Gidget. She joined us a week ago and is a wonderful addition to the family. Gibby has learned to play with her. Patches stays far away. She's in perpetual motion, always looking for a toy - like an empty dog food can, a toilet paper roll, or anythng that can be ripped and torn (just rescued my checkbook as the bite and double-twist were being applied).

Sincerely Jane Update

2011-12-03T02:23:00.004-05:00

This is my Sincerely Jane at the end of November. If I count the partially done blocks at the top of the rug, I'm halfway finished. I'm expecting a slow weekend at the store, so I should be able to get several blocks done. I'm finding this challenge is a lot more challenging than I expected - each block has to be individually color planned and then coordianted with all of the blocks around it - it's just like hooking a brand new rug for each block. The only blocks that aren't hard to do are the animal blocks - my favorites. The next animal I'm going to do is the dog - I'm going to reverse hook the tan I started with and hook the dog with a black and white tweed, in honor of Blue. I'm anxious to get this rug finished, or at least close to finished, so I can start the Frost Lion pattern.

Once Again, Mourning a Dear Friend

2011-11-30T23:33:00.004-05:00

Blue, Australian Cattle Dog

Blue and her daughter, Patches

Blue and Patches

Blue passed away on the Monday before Thanksgiving. It's taken me a week to be able to write about her. It's always hard to lose a pet, but it's been especially hard losing Blue. She was with me for almost a quarter of my life and was a connection with so many of my other dogs - she came to live with me soon after I lost Tuffy, a New Boston Terrier. She was a wee puppy who immediatly fit in with the pack led by Shady, Shady's son Shep, and Ben the Dog Who Came to School. Shep and Shady lived to 16 and 17, and Spot the Puppy Who Came to School for Show and Tell, joined us. Spot did everything he could to try to get rid of Blue - one time he took her off on a 20 mile run and then left her. Another time, he took her behind the store into the woods and dumped her in a frozen pond. Both of those times it was a miracle that she ever came home. Blue had a litter of puppies before I knew she'd had her first heat cycle. Ben fathered some, Spot others. Ben and Spot both met their demise as free-running farm dogs. Then our vet arranged an adoption and George came to us. I had sold all of Blue's puppies and she seemed pretty lonely, so I gave her the puppy and told her she could raise him - and she did. She set rules for George and bullied him into following them - they were inseperable. Then one of Blue's puppies, Patches, came back to us. She'd lived the life of an abandoned wild dog for a year and had been trapped when she was killing a farmer's chickens. Blue tried to make Patches behave, but Patches wasn't easily cowed and is still a little worried about being "caught" - eventually they became very close friends and Patches became Blue's guide dog when Blue's sight was limited. Blue and I had a special bond. Even when she was blind she could read my mind. Like a true Cattle Dog, she was happiest when she was with me or close enough to watch me.

Sauder Village Rug Show was Great - Again!

2011-08-18T21:25:00.003-05:00

The 15th Annual Sauder Village Rug Show was a collection of fascinating smaller rug shows: The Circus Train collection of mats made by the Green Mountain chapter of ATHA, a collection of rugs hooked by Patty Yoder, rugs hooked by Jenny Ruup, rugs hooked by Magdalena Briner and Evelyn Lawrence, the rugs in this year's Celebrations, etc. Each Sauder show is wonderful, and this one is no exception, plus it offers a unique educational experience by displaying new ideas (Nola Heidbrieder's pond rug hooked on dyed hookable foundation} and rugs hooked using embellishments, etc. I've never seen a better or more interesting show - so I'm going back to look again tomorrow.

Back in Business - the store is open

2011-08-12T19:54:00.003-05:00

I reopened my store a few weeks ago. It's taking up a humungus amount of time, so I have my hooking set up so I can get some done while I wait for customers. I took photos today and put them together in a slide show. With a nod to Gene and Marsha Shepherd, the slide show ends with a picture of my garden.

Cambria Pines Rug Camp

2011-06-15T16:18:00.005-05:00

Starting on the first day of June, I drove out to California to attend Gene Shepherd's Cambria Pines Rug Camp. The camp is held each year at Cambria Pines Lodge in Cambria, California. The camp started with registration on June 5, Sunday afternoon; Classes started Monday morning and went on until lunchtime on Friday. There were some very impressive teachers at camp: Susan Feller and Nola Heidbrieder shared a large room with Gene Shepherd, Laura Pierce and Diane Stoffel were in other parts of the Lodge building, and Jane Olsen taught with her grandaughter in a separate building. I started taking photos on the second day of my trip, after I had driven through Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska. I arrived in Cambria on Saturday afternoon and stayed the night in a motel (quite a treat after sleeping in my car on the way out) and spent part of the morning exploring on the ocean shore. The slide show shows the Cambria Pines Lodge building called Woodfern where I stayed for the week (and where Jane Olsen's class was held on the ground floor). Somehow, I never took a picture of the main lodge building where we had our classes and meals. This slide show ends with the mid-week rug show - I expect to make a part two slide show when I download the photos still in my camera.

Very Sad Day Today

2011-05-11T20:44:00.000-05:00

George, May 1, 2011

George is gone. He lasted only a few days more than the vet predicted. He passed away this afternoon. The warmer weather we've all been waiting for made his breathing more difficult. I put him in his "angels are everywhere" sleeping bag and buried him in the back yard. His good friend Cathy came out and planted violets on his grave. He was a good, brave, kind, and gentle dog. I'd like to believe he's with my mother now, she loved him, too.

Benefit for Hooked Rug Museum

2011-04-10T23:11:00.001-05:00

YOU ARE CORDIALLY INVITED to a HOOKED RUG MUSEUM BENEFIT HOOK-IN MAY 14, 2011 10am - 4pm Where: the Hamburg Senior/Community Center in the Hamburg Township Complex on Merrill Rd. ½ mile S. of M36 Take US23 N.from Ann Arbor, S. from Brighton, to the Pinckney exit Coffee and tea will be available in the morning, a lunch buffet will be available at noon There will be a brief presentation by a Director at Large for the Hooked Rug Museum of North America, with a possible (if all the high-tech stuff works right!) large screen Skype visit from Nova Scotia with Suzanne Conrod, a gifted hooking artist and founder of the museum. With high-tech luck, we might also get Suzanne and Hugh Conrod to explain their new and exciting discovery relating to the earliest history of rug hooking. There will be photos of some of the antique rugs in the multi-million dollar collection waiting to be housed and displayed in the new museum. The museum is going to be a real treasure and a vacation destination for all of us, starting in 2012. The rest of the time will be for hooking and chatting with old and new friends with maybe some time put aside to visit some very select vendors. *********************************************************************** Cost: $15, unless you would like to make a larger donation to the museum Lunch reservations must be in by May 5, 2011. Send check to: Phyllis Lindblade P.O. Box 96 Hamburg, MI 48139 If you have questions, please call Phyllis at 517 304-9659

Sincerely Jane Challenge #3

2011-03-20T18:40:00.004-05:00

On Saturday, May 14th, I'm going to hold a hook-in in this facility.

This is the Hamburg Senior/Community Center. A great place for a hook-in with two wide window walls helping to create great lighting for hooking. The main room will hold up to 150 people. The hook-in will be a benefit for the Hooked Rug Museum of North America. I have to work on getting invitations out pretty soon.

I spent all of my spare time this weekend working on drawing the patterns for my Sincerely Jane rug. While I was busy, the dogs were mostly sleeping - I caught this photo of Blue sleeping with George as her pillow. George didn't seem to mind at all.

It took all morning on Saturday to get the first two rows done, then I had to go to a meeting in Ann Arbor. When I came home, I drew a couple more rows. Then today, I've so far finished seven rows. I've decided to add a ninth row, so I have row number 8 to draw and row number 9 to select and draw - then I have to make a decision about wool. I was planning to do the outlining in antique black, but saw some lovely suiting wool at the JoAnn store today - it was a charcoal color with a lot of flashes of other colors in it. That wool reminded me of some dark blue I bought at Sauder last summer. I'm going to try to guesstimate how much wool I'll need and see if I have enough of the Sauder wool - it could be more interesting than antique black.

Another Doll

2011-03-04T21:13:00.002-05:00

I knitted another doll, and this time filled it with a lot less fiberfil. It's really not easy to determine how much filling is the right amount of filling. I'm going to pull out some of the filling in the first two dolls and re-felt them when I felt the new one. I'm hoping the re-felting will bring the hand and feet fibers closer together because right now, you can see the white fiberfil through the over-stretched stitches. To re-felt I'll have to pull out the eyes and nose and then the post-felting dolls will get new eyes and maybe have new personalities.

At my quilting group today I said I was making them for the rummage sale in the fall and I already have one sold! I think they're pretty cute and it's nice to know someone else thinks so, too.

Knitted Felted Dolls

2011-03-01T22:43:00.003-05:00

My latest project has been doll knitting. I found the pattern for "Felted Kuku dolls" in Love of Knitting magazine. The knitting is really easy - all stockinette stitch with a couple rows of purl two together and knit front and back in the same stitch. The only unusual stitch is the "bobble" that makes the ears - and that's basically knitting and purling in the same stitch multiple times. There are two rectangles for the legs, a bigger rectangle for the body and head, and two smaller rectangles for the arms.

The rectangles were sewn together and stuffed with fiberfil, and then hair was added. I followed the directions with the black haired doll, pulled a strand of yarn through and then knotting it, but I did the yellow haired doll like rug hooking, only with really long loops. Then, following the directions, I pulled some non-wool yarn through to hold the fiberfil in place. I won't do that with my next doll, or I'll do it very differently, because all of those white strands of yarn ended up as a mass of tangled soapy yuk in the washing machine after felting.

I learned that I had overstuffed both dolls - you can see how over-stretched the hand and feet yarns are. I pulled some of the stuffing out, but the yarns would not relax (because they're felted!) With the hair sticking up, the dolls are about eleven inches tall.

I needle-felted some eyes and saw the dolls finally have some personality - so then I added some needle-felted little snub noses. I took the dolls to the senior center today to show a couple people and then sat them in a chair next to me when I played Bingo - and I won, so I think they make lucky charms.

I learned several things with these two dolls that will help while I knit some more. I'm planning to donate them for our senior center rummage sale which will probably be in October. I'm going to be really careful about where I store these dolls, Gibby can't seem to take his eyes off of them. I'm sure he thinks I'm making dog toys.

Marauding Cats

2011-02-24T00:57:00.005-05:00

Whenever I talk about my poor old farmhouse, I feel like I'm telling that children's story that goes, "fortunately, such and such good happened, but unfortunately then such and such bad happened." This weeks adventure once again unfortunately has to do with cats. I thought all of the cats had left the building, but apparently I was incorrect. For two nights I heard strange noises from upstairs - last night, it sounded like a cats was racing around and playing in my bedroom (which I haven't used since I moved back into the house - originally because I was worried about rats running around in the night). This morning I finally decided I had to investigate. I found the odd door into the attic-like storage room off of my bedroom wide open. When I looked inside, I saw at least a dozen cats scurrying and leaping over boxes and piles of stuff that's been stored for decades and flying out of the window. The window that shouldn't have been open - in fact, it wasn't exactly open, it was broken.

It took a while to clear a walkway through to the window - in the process I found the typewriter my dad gave me when I turned sixteen, the framed illustrations from Kahlil Gibran my grandmother gave me to decorate my college room, and jars of dried-up poster paint from my first teaching job when I had to buy all of my own supplies. The window glass was very old, very thin glass with little bubbles in it that I'm sorry to lose. It was knocked to the outside, so maybe there was a cat stuck in that room who finally burst his way out. I took the measurements to replace the glass, but I went into town so late that it was dark before I got home and there's no electricity in that room, so I left the door tied shut (with the electric cord from an old tv antennae tied to the frame of the bed) since the latch doesn't hold, and let the cats have the room for one more night. What's a little more outside air coming into this house? I'll fix the window with plexiglass and put a hook and eye to hold the door closed tomorrow.

Sincerely Jane Challenge #2

2011-02-20T15:24:00.003-05:00

This is the second incarnation of my SJ rug plan. There will be five blocks across and eight blocks down, a total of 40 blocks, with a half inch sash between all blocks and an inch wide sash around the outside. The rug, before whipping, will measure 34.5" across and 49.5" down.

I divided the blocks into five types. The first type is animals, and there will be one animal block in each row - I haven't yet decided if they will all be upright, the way they are in the photo, or if they will be turned in several different directions so the rug doesn't have a top and bottom.

The other types are rounds, triangles, straights, and stars. Each block falls into one of those categories and my plan is to scatter the different types throughout the rug, with no two blocks of the same type next to each other. The photo shows two blocks that should be moved - at the far right (if you're standing to the right of the photo) the last blocks in the second and third rows are two rounds next to each other. Photos can be very helpful.

Now, I have to start working on color. I'm thinking antique black sashing with mostly red and a light gold for the block colors - the light gold taking the place of the white in the original quilt.

Sincerely Jane Challenge

2011-02-19T16:49:00.002-05:00

I've started organizing my pattern for the Sincerely Jane Challenge on Yahoo Rughookers. The original quilt made by Jane Stickle during the Civil War has over two hundred individual little patterns that are easily converted into geometric hooked rug patterns. I'm not particularly fond of geometric patterns, although I am terribly impressed by the Jane Stickle quilt, so I am planning to throw in some animal patterns just to make the rug more mine. Since the rug is being made from quilt patterns, I decided the animals should also be made from quilt patterns. I selected a book from the large quilt library at the Hamburg Senior and Community Center (a building I am particularly fond of because my mother was one of the Independent Seniors who planned and built this wonderful place - and today is the one year anniversary of my mother's departure.) The book My Grandmother's Patchwork Quilt by Janet Bolton includes a set of patchwork pattern pieces. I have copied the animals from those pieces to add to the Jane Stickle patterns.

I've copied some of the pattern squares, 4.5"x4.5", onto tracing paper and have laid them down in a possible arrangement. The arrangement in the photo is probably about half of the final pattern and doesn't include the sashing that will run between all of the squares. I'm thinking right now that the sashing will probably be a half inch wide in the interior with wider sashing around the outside. The animal patterns will be scattered wider apart than they are in this first photo. I need to copy about 30 more geometric patterns and will also probably create a few more animal patterns that aren't in the patchwork book - for sure, I will add a sheep that will look like the sheep pin for the Rughookers Merit Program.

So, I'm off to select more patterns...

Hanging Cat(s)

2011-02-17T18:07:00.005-05:00

Early this morning, there were two cats left in the pool room. The window shared with the bathroom was open all night, with the board leading from it, and I think about a dozen cats used the board bridge to leave the room. Once I closed the window and the two leftover cats finished eating the catfood I'd left in the pool room, I thought the problem was solved. While I was away with three of the dogs, Joe came out and rebuilt the part of the ceiling that had crashed. (He also brought out some beautiful stone that will be put on to camouflage the cinderblock chimney.)

George had a bit of an accident in the car while we were away, so when we got into the house I just wanted to have a quiet time with him. However, there was no quiet to be found. There were scritchy scratchy sounds in the walls, small kabooms that made Gibby jump, and then quiet little meows. I went upstairs and searched for cats - no luck. Back in the living room, the noises started all over again - it sounded just like a cat was stuck inside the wall, but the wall is only a single layer of plywood - there is no inside. Back in the living room again - scritchy scratchy, Gibby jumping - so I went out into the new room, and there, up by the top of the chimney, three quarters of a cat was hanging down from the ceiling. He wiggled and squiggled and pulled himself back up into the ceiling. I moved a big stepladder over to where he was hanging, if he drops down again and swings out a little, his feet should land on the top of the ladder. I don't know if he was trapped up there when Joe did his repair or if he is an explorer who found a new way to break through from the roof. I don't even know if he's the only one, but I'm hearing more meowing and Gibby is back on the alert.

I have a sign at my back door that says, "Welcome...come on in and hang around" with a little cat hanging from the sign - I guess it was prophetic.
The cat came down while I was writing this. I went out to check, scared him, and he raced right back up that stepladder and disappeared into the ceiling. A few minutes later, there was another big kaboom. Part of the ceiling fell down again. uurrrggghhhh!

It's Raining Cats!

2011-02-16T19:28:00.002-05:00

The work on my house seems to go from one disaster to another - today's was cats falling through the roof. The cats like to sun on the roof of my former pool room - the light wall of the house reflects sunlight onto the black roof that absorbs heat, so the cats sun themselves all day long. Yesterday, I heard a huge ka-boom noise and thought it must have been ice falling off of the roof. When I went outside to see, all I found was a pile of the tin shingles I had placed in the space where one of the roofs meets the side of the pool room roof. The tin filled a gap that I then shingled over. I didn't know that Joe the builder had removed the tin.

I didn't learn until today that removing the tin let the cats go deeper into the tunnel created by the shingles covering the gap. When Joe insulated the roof, he couldn't figure out how to deal with that section, so he put some 2x4s across the length of it and tacked some insulation board to it. Apparently the weight of the too many cats brought the temporary fix down. Yesterday's noise was that ceiling section crashing to the floor with some cats - and more cats fell during the night. I woke up several times thinking I was hearing the dogs making a lot of noise going out the doggy door - but it was cats. This morning, when I was in the bathroom, I heard a crash that sounded like it was right next to the bathroom wall - so, I finally went into the new room - and it was full of cats. Now, much as I care about and care for these cats, they are still barn cats and most of them are basically feral cats. Very few of them will come to me and even fewer will let me pick them up - and none of them will respond to me when they are already terrified. So, cats here, there, and everywhere, and no way to get them outside. I finally blocked the outside door open, put the dogs in the car, and left for a while. When I returned, the cats were out of the room, but the roosters were going in!

I thought the problem was probably solved and Joe said he would come out tomorrow to do some repairs - but then I started hearing booms and bangs and little meows. Upstairs. Over the dining room. Over the living room. Up where I don't go. UGH.

The open space created by the wall that melted away while the house was deserted had worked it's way up the wall to the second story. The dining room ceiling is barely six feet high, so the second story isn't very high up and part of it falls into the new room. There is a giant hole through the old board and batten and plaster going into that room. It's a funny little under-the-eaves kind of room that I never use - in fact, I piled stuff in there when I moved into this house in 1972 and I've never looked at the stuff since. I took a flashlight upstairs, found the door to that room open, (it opens into the "master bedroom") and the rooms were full of cats. I don't know how many because they all scrambled away and hid into, under, and behind all the stuff I haven't looked at in decades. I have no idea how to get them out of there.

Years ago, I expanded my bathroom to include the hallway that used to lead to the upstairs. So, I have now closed off the bathroom, opened the door at the bottom of the stairs, and opened the window into the pool room. If I was a self-respecting cat, I'd go down the stairs, see that open window and jump up, walk down the board I placed against the window sill, and get into the pool room. I haven't yet decided whether or not to leave the outside door open since I don't want to let more cats in...

I hear cats moving around, but no more ka-booms like they're raining through the roof...

More George

2011-02-10T21:20:00.002-05:00

George is the sweetest dog. He's half border collie and half gordon setter - I think he inherited intelligence from the first breed and gentleness from the second. He's thirteen years old and not going to have another birthday. When we moved into my mother's home, she claimed him as her own. When we visited her in a number of different nursing homes, George was always a welcome visitor - sometimes other residents wanted to pet him so much it took forever to get him down a hallway.

He's had a pretty decent life - when he first came to me as a puppy, I thought he'd be a small dog so I cuddled him in my lap and ignored his great big paws until my lap wasn't big enough to hold him. The photo above was taken last spring when he'd been shaved to make it easier to treat a skin problem - I'm glad his long hair has grown back. Unfortunately, he's been growing more than hair. I wish I could put him in my lap now.

GEORGE

2011-02-09T23:16:00.001-05:00

June Mikoryak's Yankee Ingenuity

2011-02-06T18:50:00.002-05:00

Well, the photos are proof that my memory fails me. Good thing June was nice enough to go out to her car and pull out this rug to show me the day before our class at Sauder Village. However, even though this is not my favorite color plan, the central motif is anchored to the rug and not floating above the background the way mine seems to be. I had remembered June's background as having scattered yellow strips, obviously remembered the wrong color and the wrong placement for them - they are mostly placed in a very orderly fashion, not randomly scattered like mine.

I think I need to rethink my background. In the meantime, I guess I'll hook some corners while I watch the Superbowl ads.

Yankee Ingenuity Progress

2011-02-02T23:37:00.002-05:00

This is the current state of my Yankee Ingenuity hooking. The photo shows the background as more gray than it really is - it has a lot of different colors in it, green and splashes of orange the most prominent. I'm afraid it's going to look disjointed with the central motif floating above the background. Maybe getting the corners hooked will help a little...

Eggs and the Barn Man

2011-01-30T15:32:00.002-05:00

These are the eggs I gathered this morning - just before the Barn Man again scared me half to death.I think the Barn Man is going to have to move again. Maybe I'll take him up to the store and let him scare the people in Hamburg!

Pool Man by a Tree

2011-01-29T00:23:00.004-05:00

The fellow in the photo used to stand by my hot tub/pool, the one we have removed from my soon-to-be sun room. He held my towels for me. More than once I've seen delivery men try to talk to him through the window and I firmly believe he chased away a number of people with ill intentions . When Joe was working on my new wall, he cleared the debris out of the room and put this poor guy out in the snow. He was standing by the tree for a couple days, until he scared me half to death twice because Gibby barked and I looked out the window to see a strange man standing in the yard. I decided to stop scaring myself and put him in the barn where he could be peering out of the barn door and scare away people who don't want to be seen.

I had forgotten how heavy he is, but I finally got him situated just inside the barn and forgot about him - until I was doing my chores in the stallion barn and stepped into the tack room - and saw him out of the corner of my eye. There is nothing scarier late at night when you are all alone in a quiet barn than a silent man just standing there!

I can see the headline now: Local Farmer Scared to Death by Mannequin

French Doors

2011-01-24T00:06:00.002-05:00

My new french doors have been installed - well, sort-of installed, there's no hardware, trim or finishing touches yet, but the doors are there instead of the pseudo- plywood from the back of the cupboard that was donated to me through Freecycle Ann Arbor.

I have to keep boxes and chairs in front of the doors to keep Gibby from pushing them open, and I put one of my wool treasures - a gold wool blanket - at the bottom of the doors as a cold barrier. It's very cold here, been below zero all weekend, but I've still been able to keep the temperature of the house (well, three rooms) up in a livable range - french doors and wool blankets are on my list of the good things on earth.

Clog Update

2011-01-16T13:49:00.004-05:00

I'm working on another pair of clogs - using multi-colored yarn this time. I'm planning to use U-glue from Joann's and glue this pair to some hard soles. I think I'll use flip-flop soles since I haven't been able to find any inexpensive crocs. This pair of blue clogs was made using the unchanged **original pattern - it lets the heel area rise a little higher and I think gives the clogs a "mukluk" shape. I wore this pair last night while playing Scrabble with some friends, letting my feet do the final drying of the sole, since they were felted just the night before - they were so comfortable I forgot I was wearing them and the soles were completely dry by evening's end.

I'm calling this pair "Possums". The cuff was purled with a strand of novelty yarn and the main part of the clogs were knitted with the kind of yarn used for fisherman's sweaters. It became a little fuzzier than the Paton's yarn used for the other clogs.

**There is a change that keeps the heel lower, making it easier to slide a foot into the clog. This change is especially appropriate if the clogs are going to be glued to a hard sole - with the unchanged pattern, it's best if the sole is flexible while working the foot into it. The change is at row 33. Replace pattern row 33 with this row: slip1, K12(10,11/12,13), K2tog., K1, ssk, K12(10,11/12,13), ssk, K2tog., K to end of row. Do not turn and skip all other pattern rows to cuff.

Do not knit second sole, E-Glue to croc or other sole and clamp down all around.

A Wall at Last!

2011-01-06T00:52:00.003-05:00

AT LAST! For the first time since I moved back home, my home is entirely enclosed!
It's only temporary and it isn't pretty, but it holds in the heat. Yahooooooo!

After living with a completely open wall since mid-December, I called my builder friend and told him I feel like I'm a homeless person living in my home, that the cold is unbearable. Poor guy, it never occurred to him that the floor for the old pool room was a deck with spaces between the boards, definitely not built to hold out a Michigan winter - he came right out and used my chicken coop plywood to board up the wall - after measuring for the french doors I'm going to buy at Lowe's tomorrow. Now I can get the temperature in the living room above 60 degrees. Nice to be able to sit without being covered by blankets - maybe now I'll be able to get back to hooking.

Felting Knitted Clogs

2011-01-01T14:31:00.014-05:00

In Nova Scotia, I watched Marliss and Barb working on knitted/felted clogs and decided I wanted to make some for Christmas presents. They are easy to knit on size 13 needles with double strands of 100% wool worsted weight yarn. When the knitting is finished, the clogs are HUGE.

The clogs are then washed in hot water in a washing machine with a little soap - the felting usually shows up after about ten minutes of washing. Then the gift recipient takes the funny, slippery, soapy blobs of yarn out of the machine and sees for the first time that they might have received a real gift. Then, the clogs are checked every few minutes to see if they have reached the perfect custom fit.

The washing machine shouldn't be allowed to go into a spin cycle or the shape might be stretched out. The soap can be rinsed out of the clogs in cold water - something you wouldn't do if you weren't felting.

The clogs can be rolled in a towel to help with drying.

Then the clogs should be carefully shaped - when they are left to dry, they will retain the dried shape. I found that the yarn I used tended to become fuzzy and the fuzz could be patted down at this point.

Plastic bags inserted in the toes help to retain the "cloggy" shape while the clogs dry.

It's important to play with the shape while the clogs are still wet. It generally takes two or more days to dry. Once dry and worn for a while, they will conform to the wearer's feet and become left and right clogs. They can be washed in cold water like fine woolens and they can be re-felted if they stretch out after worn for a long time.

It was fun giving these as gifts because the gift giving was then followed by another visit to do the felting - sort of a two-party gift!

The Hole in the Wall

2010-12-17T23:51:00.003-05:00

Debris pulled off of wall - will make nice cedar kindling for the new woodstove that will heat this room.

Looking at the wall from the inside.

In the upper left, the hole into the upstairs room shows. The two by four is holding up the side of the house until some supports are in place.

Wall with the new header.

Joe uses his truck bed for a work table.

The photos show the progress on my dining room wall. Soon, the window space will turn into a double-door between the dining room and the swimming pool room turned sunporch/woodstove room. Looking at the old wall today I learned that my house has had three outside renovations - first clapboard, then fancy clapboard, then cedar shakes. The cedar shakes were old when I moved to the farm forty years ago - they had at least two, probably three layers of paint on them (20 years per layer, sixty years of paint plus my forty= 100 years for the cedar shakes.) If the first layer of clapboard lasted 30-35 years and the second 30-40 more years, 160 years, we could date the house back to 1835 to 1840, which fits with the sqare, hand-forged nails in some of the construction. Since factory made nails appeared in 1850, I've always dated parts of the house pre-1850 and other parts post-1850 - the post 1850 construction has a mix of hand forged and factory made nails like the carpenter had some new nails added to a supply of older nails. Anyway, if I have to live with a hole in a wall I might as well play amateur archaeologist.

Keep Calm and Hook On

2010-11-28T18:41:00.004-05:00

LizoftheLake sent me a great website - a site that explains the Keep Calm and Carry On poster. I had heard about the poster, saw one in JoAnn's (although it was all wrong - black letters on white background with no crown), and then received the email from Liz. When the same thing is brought to mind so many times, I wonder if that means I should be considering a rug pattern. The original was printed in case of invasion of the British Isles during World War II - with King Edward's crown on it - but the posters were never used and were destroyed after the war. A British bookseller found a copy and reproduced it for sale. Liz's website allows users to generate their own posters - hence, the hook on above.

http://www.keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk:80/

Chicken Rescue

2010-11-21T14:35:00.009-05:00

I usually get on and off the expressway about a mile north of my road so I can avoid the traffic on my own road. One day last week, I was heading for the expressway when out of the corner of my eye I thought I saw a flock of chickens. Chickens move differently from other birds and their odd motion caught my eye. What was unusual was they were in the deserted parking lot of a torn down gas station. The area behind the gas station used to be a lovely little piece of nature with a small pond and a natural wooded area beyond, but now it's just a weed patch with a lot of detritus left by thoughtless people. I was on an errand and didn't stop or think about those chickens until later.

When I was on my way home, I saw two young men standing in the parking lot watching the chickens. I drove past, then decided to turn back and offer my help. I thought maybe the boys were dealing with an escaped flock. It turned out that the boys, Sean and Dakota, were just watching and wanting to pet a chicken. It looked like there were at least a dozen chickens running through the weeds and some of them looked injured. It was impossible to determine the breed of the chickens, they were kind of a motley crew, some white, speckled, golden, and black.

We decided to try to catch as many as we could, so I drove home for some supplies. Those very nice boys knew nothing at all about chickens, but they worked really hard for a couple hours while we tried different ways to catch or trap the chickens. Finally, when the sun was going down, the chickens started roosting and burrowing into clumps of grass, and we started catching them. The boys couldn't hold onto any of the poor hens until Sean found some gloves in his car, then the gloves made him brave enough to hang on. We caught five and scared away quite a few. One white rooster and a couple of hens were the only ones roosting above the ground and they were in a willow shrub just a few feet above the weeds.

I took five hens home that night and then went back by myself the next night. It was really cold and really dark, in a place that seemed really dangerous. A young girl was attacked there and dragged into the woods a year or two ago and once I started thinking about that it seemed really foolish to spend much time there alone. I caught three more hens, plucked two right out of the willow bush by giving the rooster a shove on his chest so he lost his balance and dropped down a branch. I surely do not need another rooster, but I'm sorry I didn't take him. The next day, all of the chickens were gone. I found only a few piles of feathers.

Yesterday, I visited with some people (freecyclers who generously gave me some wood for my chicken house)who live just down the road from that place - I got to meet their potbelly pigs, all four living in an apartment with two adults and two cats. They said the coyotes had been really loud a couple nights ago. Well, I'm glad that at least eight hens survived. They are living in my stallion barn - there isn't enough sunlight in there, but I thought they should be isolated at least temporarily.

Now that I've seen the chickens living in the barn, I'm wondering why I decided to build a chicken house, I should probably just move all of the chickens into the barn - I could put the hens all in the double stallion stall and put the roosters across the way in one of the 12x12 stalls. They would be warmer all winter and it would be easier to care for them. I can even heat that barn if necessary.

Basement Stairs

2010-11-18T20:13:00.003-05:00

I now have basement stairs!!!

I can't remember when a walk down into my basement was easy - the stairs have always been rocky - starting with a landing a foot lower than the doorway to get to it, and ending with bottom steps created by stacked boards that floated away whenever the basement flooded - but, NOW! Yahoo! I have real steps built correctly and beautifully by a real carpenter! However, I have only looked at them, haven't gone down them yet.

I had a rather bad incident a few days ago with the old basement stairs. I left for a few hours (went to a political potluck gathering at vegetarian co-op house - which should tell you it was basically on campus in Ann Arbor - where it seems grad students either look the same or are the same as when I was in grad school.) Since I was going to be in Ann Arbor, where every second citizen is on the alert for dogs left to suffocate in cars, I left all four dogs home together. Bad decision.

When I got home, I was greeted at the gate by the cats and at the door by the dogs - well, by some of the dogs. Blue was missing. I looked all around the house and couldn't find her. Then I heard her cries. She was down in the basement. I was pretty sure Gibby, in his excitement rushing in and out through the doggy door, had knocked Blue down the basement stairs - and Blue, with her blindness and deafness, was in a panic, bumping into the new wall and getting stuck under the stairs, spinning in circles. I went down the stairs, got to the last existing stairstep while hanging onto the handrail, and the step twisting, with the sides breaking loose from the wall - then the handrail pulled loose, and I was suddenly on the basement floor. I got Blue and tossed her up to the secure steps, and then realized I probably couldn't get out. As each day goes on, I get stiffer and stiffer and can barely lift my legs, so I was seeing myself stuck in the basement until help could come. I thought about calling 911, but then I remembered how the volunteer firemen around my store would laugh about the old or fat ladies who were stuck in bathtubs and had to be pulled out - I could hear them laughing about the fat old lady who got stuck in her basement - and somehow I climbed out of that basement.

I called Joe first thing in the morning and begged him to build some stairs for me.

Cats and Roosters Everywhere!

2010-11-11T23:03:00.002-05:00

What fun to walk out of the house in the morning - cats and roosters everywhere - running in my direction. The Barred Rock rooster is just like a dog, he follows me all over and he is soooo big - I'm really pleased that all of the roosters are nice, at least nice to me and nice to the cats, they certainly weren't nice to Old Rooster or the hens.

Tonight, two of the roosters flew up into the pine tree - I think that's the best place for them to roost. If they're going to continue to be free-range roosters I think I'll have to teach them to go into the barn - years ago a wonderful rooster used to live in the rafters. It would be fun to have five roosters living in the rafters.

I almost started hooking tonight, but the energy to go outside one more time, to get my hooking bag out of the motorhome, just seemed to escape me. I had already run in and out a lot while cooking my dinner in the campfire (pork chops do not need to stay in the coals as long as baked potatoes - even though they are double thick and stuffed.) This was my Majong afternoon at the library, then I went for a walk in the woods to gather some firewood to cook my dinner, and my legs were worn out. So, maybe I'll take my hooking to the quilting group tomorrow, if I wake up early enough - but my knitting bag is all set up and less trouble. I would like to have some ATCs started so I can hook them at Thrums and Chums on Saturday.

I'm very upset that bullying has occurred blatantly in my old school district - when I taught there we would have nipped that kind of nastiness in the bud. I can't figure out how teachers have so much less control these days. A fourteen year old girl was horribly harrassed while waiting to testify about being raped by an 18 year old classmate and neighbor. Maybe teachers are so concerned about being sued they are afraid to say anything to the kids - so a young girl is dead and the school district is a likely target for a wrongful death suit. Something is really wrong in a society that lets any of these things happen. I feel like all my years of teaching kids right from wrong were just wasted.

Rooster Increase

2010-11-10T19:21:00.005-05:00

After turning the roosters into free-range critters and seeing how happy the hens are to be able to leave their roosts and come out of hiding, I thought I would never acquire another rooster - until I got a call from my dentist today.

I drove out to the small town of Gregory to get my hair cut by my favorite barber and on the way home stopped in another town, Pinckney, to visit a laundromat. A friend told me it was much nicer than the one closer to the farm. While putting my clothes in a dryer, I got a phone call from my dentist's office with a "strange request". Since I had just been there for most of Monday afternoon, having a new crown fitted, I thought there must be something wrong with my teeth, but it turned out they were having chicken problems.

A pair of chickens, a hen and a rooster, had recently appeared in their parking lot. The children from the daycare that shares the building were having fun watching the chickens but the adults were worried about the children getting pecked. So, their strange request was, would I come and take the chickens away. Well, I need another rooster like a hole in the head, but I agreed to take them.

After the first hour, all I had learned was that the hen was really leery and very fast and the rooster was less fearful and not easily tricked. I tried to lure them into a box with the Cheerios the daycare children had provided, but they were smart enough to get close and eat all the Cheerios they could reach without going into the box. After the next hour of unsuccessful stalking I thought I'd have to wait until sundown when the chickens would try to roost, but three people volunteered to help and the daycare provided us with some blankets. The rooster was eventually trapped by the playground fence and a blanket was tossed over him while two people did belly flops trying to grab him. We put him into a box and then went in serious earnest after the hen.

The hen was very clever about going into bushes and clumps of branches, and then she started going up into the branches - and that was the beginning of the end. She jumped up to about our head height while her bushy brushpile was surrounded by the four of us. I yelled that she was about to go higher and Duane jumped up onto a loose clump of dead branches. As the hen took off to fly higher, Duane caught her by one foot. She struggled, but he hung on and got both legs in his hand. I couldn't believe he could get down safely and still hold on to her, but he did.

I took the box of chickens home and let them lose inside the chicken yard. The hen jumped out almost immediately, but the rooster stayed in the box while he listened to the free-range roosters doing their nightly crowing. I think he was intimidated until he realized they were fenced out while he was fenced in. I turned the heat lamp on and spent a few minutes building a roost for the Barred Rock rooster who seems to be too heavy to fly like the Americaunas - some of which are roosting on top of the chicken house and one is up quite high in a pine tree. When I went back to see how the new ones were doing, they were both inside the hen house and the rooster was balancing on the edge of a nest box - looking very content. My old rooster, with the injured head, was on a corner roost, hiding his head behind a hen - he doesn't look like he feels well at all.

Roosters on the Loose

2010-11-09T22:44:00.002-05:00

I now have half a dozen free-range roosters. For several days, my two year old Aracauna rooster and my favorite hen have been hiding in between a tarp and the back wall of a large dog kennel/cage in the middle of the chicken run. The hens have been roosting day and night in the nesting area, and the roosters have been patrolling the whole yard like a marauding army. I have been putting some food at the back of the cage hoping the two innocents would eat and today I tried to get some water to them - then I decided it was just stupid to let some roosters I never wanted destroy the whole flock, so I started letting them out into the yard. It didn't take long before they all followed each other out into the free world - with the cats. Some of the cats looked the roosters over pretty well, but the roosters ignored the cats.

I had to get scissors to free the rooster and the red hen. Once they could get out, they moved so fast I didn't even see them fly all the way around the chicken yard over to the food dish. The rooster has some pretty serious pecking injuries to his head, but I'm hoping he'll be okay. I watched the free-range roosters for a long time, but I didn't stay with them when the sun was going down. I didn't want to feel sorry for them when they couldn't return to their old roosts. I don't know where they're roosting. Too bad they weren't hens like they were supposed to be.

Gibby's in Trouble

2010-11-07T00:14:00.003-05:00

Today was a surprisingly busy day, although it started out as a "no-plan, nothing-to-do" kind of day. I decided to ignore all the farm work and house work waiting for me and count this weekend as part of my vacation, so I started the day with a good book (the new one by Dan Brown) at the Burger King. When I left the BK, I remembered I needed to visit my bank, but I had to stop at my store to pick up some paperwork first. When I drove into the village, I remembered the little church across the street from my store was having it's annual rummage sale - a soup and salad lunch and a bagful of ten cent books later, I was again on my way to the bank. The bank is inside my favorite grocery store, so I had some nut, taco, humus, salsa, and teriyaki chicken samples while I walked around the store before doing my banking. The banking business took quite a while, but at least this bank has comfortable chairs and nice privacy booths. With both a church lunch and a store sample run literally under my belt, I made a quick visit to a new gift shop. I'm always amazed when people start up new businesses in this economy. I wasn't in the market for gifts, but the store had some cute things, things I could give as small gifts if a reason arises. Then back to the farm. I called some friends and agreed to meet them for an early dinner, but I had a little time before time to leave, so I finally got some paper and scissors and made a cut-out of the pattern I'd like to use for my Artist Trading Cards. I'll have to hook some before I know how viable the pattern is - I'm hoping to hook it in a 6, but I may have to go smaller.

Dinner was a surprise, we went to a Japanese restaurant in Brighton. I haven't been in downtown Brighton for several years and found that the stores I knew are all gone, replaced by upscale artsy stores (one store has only lollipops and hard candy made on the premises). I ordered a boring, but safe, chicken teriyaki, but was able to sample some more adventurous suchi and octopus - interesting, but I found that most of the flavors were in the sauces.

We went back to my friend's home for dessert and a dice game, then I headed back to the farm. The cats met me at the gate and then the dogs barked me into the house. First thing inside, I fed the dogs, and immediately Blue and Gibby fought over their food - I yelled and swung a light-weight little broom at them, since it looked like Gibby was really going to hurt Blue - and I fell flat on my face. I don't know if I tripped over something or just fell for no reason, but I landed pretty hard - starting in the kitchen and ending up sprawled in the dining room. There was a while when I thought I wouldn't be able to get up and I used that time to tell Gibby was an irritating and foolish dog he is - he hid behind the quilt that blocks the door into the room he runs through to go outside. This is not the first time Gibby has attacked Blue and he's gone after George quite a few times, but this is the first time I ended up on the floor looking up at him - seeing the last flash of his agression leave his face. This kind of behavior has to end, one way or another.

Starting at the Beginning

2010-11-03T20:59:00.002-05:00

Many years ago, my mother and I worked in the same school district. I was a classroom teacher and she was a much respected school social worker. We had long discussions about students with problems and one of our discussions lasted for many months - it was about helping children learn to read by taking them back to the beginning, the beginning of their learning - teaching them to crawl all over again. The idea was new and quite popular for a while, but I haven't heard anyone mention it in years - however, I think that's what I'm doing with my housekeeping - I'm starting back at the beginning - living the primitive way people lived here back in the beginning. For the last two nights, I cooked my dinner in the coals of a fire in my backyard - sort of like being on a camping trip. Last night, it was only a sweet potato, but what a delicious treat - it was so well cooked it was almost like it was melted. Tonight, I made a "Girl Scout Stew" - chopped up potatoes, parsnips, carrots, onion, and ground beef - enough to share with the dogs and have for dinner again tomorrow. I've cleaned up most of the sticks and twigs laying around in the yard and I've burned all of the smaller pieces of wood that were dredged out of my basement before the new wall was built, so I'm going to have to start gathering firewood if I'm going to continue to have my primitive meals. Since I originally learned to cook over campfires, I'm repeating the beginning, learning to crawl again.

Election Day

2010-11-02T16:06:00.004-05:00

I love to vote in my township. When I first started voting here, a couple generations ago, we had only our townhall building for a polling place. The townhall looked just like a white frame one room school house, and it probably started it's life as a schoolhouse. It was so small that only the people actively voting could fit inside, so everyone else stood in a long line down the wooden steps and out into the dirt road. Often, we waited a long time in rain and snow. Some kind neighbors often brought cookies or cider and doughnuts and passed them down the line. It was the one chance each year to meet and greet new neighbors - and in those days we counted people as neighbors even if they lived a couple miles apart. About ten years ago, the old townhall was retired and moved into a little village of historic buildings, on property purchased from a wonderful horsewoman and artist named May Mast, who lived into her late nineties. When she was in her eighties, she was still painting giant murals on the sides of her barns and every building on her farm, including the little cabins that had housed children when she ran a summer camp. The historic village has been built in the pasture where May kept two old horses, a leopard spotted Appaloosa and a big fat shiny black Tennessee Walker. The new town hall was built in the adjoining pasture. Now, we have grown so much we have three precincts, all voting in the new town hall. When I fill out my name and address and hand over the slip with my driver's license, I do it at a table where half a dozen women do the paper work - and all of them have last names that are the same as road names in our township. I pass through to a voting booth in minutes, no long line or doughnuts anymore, but I always look for the old cigar box. For a moment today, I thought it was missing, then I spotted it on the floor behind one of the poll workers. It's an old tin cigar box, with old blue and gold paint. When it's open for access to the pens and pencils inside, the lid shows the five cent cigar price in Victorian gold letters. That cigar box has been present at every election since I started voting in Webster Township back in 1972. With all of the other changes, that cigar box represents a permanence to me, a permanence of rural values, which include neighborliness and the right to choose the people who run our government.

Freedom at Last!

2010-11-01T15:55:00.004-05:00

From one house,

To another

After six months of mourning, pain, and loss, I have finally moved on - and moved back - back to my farm, my home of homes. It will take quite a while to recover my home within the old farmhouse, but this work will be pure selfish pleasure compared to the job I have just finished at my mother's house. I never consciously realized how full Mother's house was - full of physical content and full of warm, generous memories. For the last month, I spent each day with thoughts and memories of my mother, my father, and my grandmother- all people who deserve to be remembered with love. I found a rug that was made by my grandmother, probably about sixty years ago, and another rug made by my mother, probably about thirty years ago. Neither of them are hooked rugs, but they will have places of honor with my hooked rug collection.

Next week, starting Sunday, we go off of Daylight Savings Time - back to days that are dark in the morning and dark in the evening. I'm going to limit my work on the house to daylight hours, so I should then be able to get back to working on my Sauder Village rug. I'm also planning a pattern to use for my ATCs (Artist Trading Cards)- I'm anxious to get those started.

Ah, it's so nice to be able to plan my own days - free at last, free at last!

Second Nova Scotia Slide Show

2010-09-20T15:19:00.004-05:00

This slide show includes rugs that may be displayed at the Hooked Rug Museum of North America collected by Suzanne and Hugh Conrod and a second collection of rugs that are in a private collection in Nova Scotia. I have hesitated to be more specific about the second collection for the sake of privacy and safety.

There are some unusual rugs in this slide show: one is an example of a proddy-type rug made for generations on Tancook Island, just off the South Shore of Nova Scotia, and the other is hooked with an old material almost lost in the fogs of time, a material recently researched and re-discovered, that can completely change our view of the history of rug hooking in North America.

A Visit to Old Salt, near Chester, Nova Scotia

2010-09-19T12:32:00.004-05:00

I arrived at Old Salt on the South Shore of Nova Scotia on Friday, September 3, after driving for 22 hours straight - I beat Hurricane Earl by about two hours. The slide show starts the next morning when the wind was blowing with enough strength to knock my legs out from under me. Eventually, other rug hookers arrived and we spent a week exploring the area. We were beachcombers in Blandford, shoppers in Mahone Bay and Lunenburg, and visitors to the soon-to-be Hooked Rug Museum of North America in Queensland, next to Hubbards.

I saved photos of hooked rugs to be posted in another slide show sometime soon.

Mahjong for Hookers

2010-08-11T16:55:00.009-05:00

I am really enjoying playing Mahjong, so I'm planning to use Mahjong artwork in my next rug. On Yahoo Rughookers we are having a hex sign swap. Most of the designs will come from Pennsylvania Dutch barn signs, but I am planning to use a Mahjong symbol. There are three suits in Mahjong, similar to bridge card suits. The suits are called by various names, our group uses Sticks, Cakes and Wans for the suits that look like bamboo, dots, and Chinese written characters. Each suit goes from one to nine. The one cake is my favorite tile. It varies in different sets, but it is always round and geometrical - like the barn signs. I found another similarity, the one stick, which usually looks like a bird resting on a bamboo branch, looks very much like the bird often used in the hex signs - so, I have two choices for Mahjong/hex signs. I just have to decide which version of the mahjong tiles I want to use as my source.

Teaching Rug Hooking

2010-07-30T16:20:00.003-05:00

I've finally published my book about teaching rug hooking. I set up a new blog to announce the book and offer a forum for talking about teaching. The new blog address is http://teachingrughooking.blogspot.com

Historic Tour of Howell, MI

2010-05-23T00:45:00.003-05:00

Today was exhausting - I went with some friends on a tour of the lofts and vaults and normally inaccessible nooks and crannies in the old buildings in our county seat. We saw some surprising loft apartments, stood in a beneath-the-sidewalk produce storage vault, saw a huge wooden log and wheel pulley that was used to haul pianos up to a third floor where they were repaired, visited a winery where a tunnel,large enough to drive a team of horses under the road had been walled off. We climbed stairs up and down all over town - I haven't climbed so many stairs since I went to Beijing ten years ago. The buildings were built between 1838 and about 1880. Some were brick and stone replacements for early wooden buildings - especially the Presbyterian church - a building large enough to be appropriate in New York City, supported by a congregation of 500. I came home planning to steam my bench rug, but my legs were finished for the day - it took a three hour nap to get me in shape to go to the farm. I may go back soon and take my camera - there were some architectural details that would be nice in rugs someday.

2010-05-22T00:06:00.004-05:00

I finished the bench seat insert yesterday, planned to steam it today, but was too busy to get it done. The time I had to work on it was taken up by rioting and rebellious chickens.

My youngest batch of baby chicks is old enough and big enough to join the rest of the flock in the chicken pen, so I decided today was a good day to introduce them to the great outdoors. I carried their bin outside, where they instantly froze in place and became silent as they heard the loud calls and singing of the wild birds. There were two baking cooling racks on top of the bin, serving as a cage top since the chicks are still light weight enough to fly (even without a mama to teach them how). While I was inside, something happened and the cooling racks fell down into the bin and the chicks flew out to become wild birds. Luckily, they didn't fly far - they were all within a few feet of the bin when I went out to check on them. An hour later, I had corralled five of them, but the sixth was really alusive. A little dish of food and another of water might have drawn her out if I hadn't popped out of the house every few minutes to look for her. Another two hours went by, with me on the ground looking under everything to find her, when she finally flew out into the open and I snagged her. The chicken bin had to return inside, just ahead of a thunder storm - maybe these babies will join the big flock tomorrow.

Farm blog comes to Rughooker

2010-05-19T17:34:00.003-05:00

My rughooking and farmlife blend so well together, I have trouble keeping them separated for the purpose of having two different blogs. Today, I am posting a copy of yesterday's farm blog here. It's not about hooking, but it's where my mind is when I'm hooking. I'm almost done with a bench insert that I will post soon, maybe tomorrow.
From the Gibbydogblog.blogspot.com :

I've been thinking about the story of "Old Drum" recently. I saw the movie a long time ago and thought I remembered something about a faithful dog - I found the movie and watched it, using an instant download through my Wii from Netflix. The story in the movie reaches its climax with a speech by a famous attorney. Turns out the story is basically true - except the dog that is shot in the movie survives. The reason I've been thinking about the faithfulness of dogs is my dog George's behavior since my mother passed away. George was very close to my mother, and vice versa. My mother saved his life a couple times when she knew he was not well and I hadn't noticed anything was wrong. The first time, I hesitated because I hadn't noticed he was sick, and barely got him to the vet in time. The second time, I loaded him in the car the minute my mother said something was wrong - I think they were able to read each other's minds. Anyway, Ol' George has always spent his sleeping time on the cold wooden floor of the downstairs bathroom or on the cold wooden floor of the kitchen where anyone using the back door had to step over him. Since my mother died, he's been sleeping on the carpeted floor next to her couch. After she turned 95 she spent most of her not-in-bed time resting or sleeping on that couch. That's where George is right now, stretched out on the floor, leaning his back against the couch.

Here is part of the speech, spoken in the real Old Drum trial in the Supreme Court of Missouri. It's the only part of the speech that was saved.

George Graham Vest speaking:

"Gentlemen of the jury, the best friend a man has in this world may turn against him and become his enemy. His son or daughter whom he has reared with loving care may prove ungrateful. Those who are nearest and dearest to us -- those whom we trust with our happiness and good name -- may become traitors in their faith. The money that a man has he may lose. It flies away from him, perhaps when he needs it most. A man's reputation may be sacrificed in a moment of ill-considered action. The people who are prone to fall on their knees to do us honor when success is with us may be the first to throw the stone of malice when failure settles its cloud upon our heads. The one absolute, unselfish friend that man can have in this selfish world -- the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous -- is his dog.

"Gentlemen of the jury, a man's dog stands by him in prosperity and poverty, in health and sickness. He will sleep on the cold ground, where the wintry winds blow, and the snow drives fiercely, if only he can be near his master's side. He will kiss the hand that has no food to offer; he will lick the wounds and sores that come in encounter with the roughness of the world. He guards the sleep of his pauper master as if he were a prince. When all other friends desert, he remains. When riches take wings and reputation falls to pieces, he is as constant in his love as the sun in its journey through the heavens.

"If fortune drives the master forth an outcast in the world, friendless and homeless, the faithful dog asks no higher privilege than that of accompanying him to guard against danger, to fight against his enemies. And when the last scene of all comes, and death takes the master in its embrace, and his body is laid away in the cold ground, no matter if all other friends pursue their way, there by his graveside will the noble dog be found, his head between his paws, his eyes sad but open in alert watchfulness, faithful and true even to death..."

This is one of those situations where the English language falters. Back when I was in grade school (we didn't ever call it elementary school) I asked a teacher why all of the speeches and poems we studied always said, "he", and I was told that "he" stood for everyone: men, women, and children. Well, I don't think Lawyer Vest meant it that way back in 1880, but I'll accept that the master he in this speech stands for my mother - and the watchful, faithful and true dog is our Ol' George, my mother's dog.

Rugs Labelled and Ready to Go

2010-04-23T13:09:00.004-05:00

I went to a quilting group today and sewed labels on the four rugs I've finished since last October. I'm going to take all of them to the SE Michigan Hook-in tomorrow. I guess I'm excited about going tomorrow - I'm all ready today. I steamed the rugs two days ago, ran roller tape over them yesterday to get rid of the dog hair, and labelled them today.

I even designed a new rug to work on at the hook-in. The rug I've been working on is too big to work on with all of those crowded tables. The one I'm going to start will fit on top of a little bench I've had waiting for months. I drew a row of horses out in the pasture - all facing away from the viewer. All well-built Quarter Horses. A row of big rumps. Makes me think of the Republican Senators who voted against the Health Care bill.

Grasshopper Rug Done!

2010-04-09T23:55:00.002-05:00

The Grasshopper Rug is finally done, all whipped and ready to steam - after I go over the back and adjust some loops that seem to have been pulled loose while I was carting the rug around to do the whipping.

The whipping is done over two folds of linen, folded upward. I keep thinking I should try Gene Shepherd's whipping technique, but my way goes so much faster - once I whip, I'm done, no sewing to do. The first rug I finished this way has been a dog rug for about two years now, requiring frequent vacuuming, and there's no problem at all with the edge.

Whipping Started

2010-04-01T23:08:00.002-05:00

I started whipping my Grasshopper rug tonight. I cut off the extra linen, leaving an inch and a half to fold toward the top of the rug in a double fold, then I whip over that folded linen. I'm using a bulky wool yarn, so I'm whipping with only one strand. Usually I use black yarn, but this time I'm using a kind of fuzzy gray color that matches some of the "antique black" in the border. The whipping goes fairly fast with the bulky yarn, but I stopped after whipping one of the short ends - that took about an hour. Maybe I'll use the same kind of dark gray/antique black for the background on my double-cross rug.

I had a nice drive through some very rural countryside today, as part of a funeral procession (see my http://gibbydogblog.blogspot.com). We drove through country where I used to ride horses and used to travel around with my vet - it hasn't changed much at all in the last forty years. Nice old houses - houses that might be deserted like houses all over Michigan, but they don't look any more deserted than they've always looked. I may go back soon and take some photos for future rug plans. There's an especially nice Queen Anne style house with some unusual gingerbread that I'd like to put into a rug. I saw a nice little herd of Texas long-horn cattle, pretty unusual in Michigan, and heard about one of the calves being stolen and sold to someone right down the road. Long-horn cattle are unique enough around here that the whole community spotted the lost cow right away. Turns out the cattle rustler was the son and grandson of the owners. I guess a black sheep stole the cow.

I'm Back Again

2010-03-31T15:54:00.002-05:00

I was just surprised to realize I haven't posted on this blog since last November. It's been a horrible winter for me, but I did get quite a bit of rug hooking done. My mother was bedridden all winter and passed away in February. I was allowed to visit for only two hours a day, when she was usually sleeping, so I set up a hoop that I could attach to her bedside table and carted a big bag of hooking with me each day. The last month or so I was working on Gene Shepherd's Double Cross pattern and my mother told me every day that it was just beautiful. I'm really going to miss that cheering section.

Anyway, I've been hooking that pattern with recycled sports coats for the crosses with a lightly colored mohair sort of background in the step part of the pattern. I like the crosses but dont' like the background colors, so I've put the rug aside while I decide what dark color to use instead. I may use black, although I probably don't have enough black wool, or I might use brown to go with the brown leather loveseat that will be placed next to it. I can't decide, mainly because brown just doesn't seem right.

While I'm debating that color problem, I'll get the whipping done on the Grasshopper rug - I got the edges all trimmed and ready for whipping last night, so I'll get started when I get down to the farm tonight.

Two rugs finished

2009-11-17T23:35:00.002-05:00

Last Saturday, I went to a Thrums and Chums meeting - the first one I've been able to attend in about a year. There were more people there than there were the last few times I was able to go, it was a nice group with lots of interesting rugs being hooked. I finished my Grasshopper rug, at least the hooking part. I'm not looking forward to doing the whipping.

To avoid whipping, I pulled out another rug, one that I hooked some time ago, and started hooking the frame - I thought I was all done, then decided tonight to add another row of hooking around the outer edge, it will be done soon. The pattern was given to me by a friend, the Santa and Rudolph from the Kopp book.

I haven't taken any photos yet, will post some when I do.

Sorry, Have Missed Blogging

2009-11-02T22:03:00.003-05:00

I'm sorry I haven't been blogging. I've been busy running too and from the hospital and then to and from the nursing home aka "health center" and "rehab facility". Life has been pretty mixed up ever since my mother's fall. She was sent home from the first hospital without any treatment. She got worse while at home for four days, so the visiting nurse talked with the doctor and she was sent to another hospital - the city hospital instead of the small town hospital. Ten days in the second hospital with professionally sad, cocker-spaniel-eyed people suggesting each day my mother might not live through the day, and then another ten days in a rehab facility where she has been up and down, depending on which medication she's being given, and I no longer know one day from the next. Add in the undoing of Daylight Savings Time and I'm really confused. Anyway, I'm not doing dyeing for the duration (I didn't tell in my last report that I turned on the water to rinse my last batch of dyed wool and forgot to turn it off - it ran out of the sink for about an hour - flooded the kitchen, etc), and I've only been hooking a literal ten minutes each day. I missed my hooking time yesterday when I fell asleep eating a late dinner - but then I realized yesterday was Sunday so it was okay to not hook! At this rate, the frame around the outside of my Grasshopper rug is taking longer than the main part of the rug. I thought I'd have this rug done weeks ago.

Red Dye Everywhere

2009-10-27T01:30:00.002-05:00

Not any blogger time lately with my mother in the hospital, but now she's in a nursing home and, as of Monday, I am only allowed to be with her for four hours each day. I spent the afternoon at the farm doing a few small chores and chatting with my neighbor who is working on getting my hayfield and pastures ready for haying next year. When I finally came home, I decided to throw some wool in a pot to see if a nice piece of Black Stewart plaid would bleed enough black to make antique black. That's the third or fourth batch of antique black I've made recently, but it seems I need more and more. The Grasshopper rug border requires more and I've changed the background on the silly hooking class mat so it's now antique black. The only problem was, I forgot I put the pot on the stove when I went into the living room to read and fell asleep.

I had added some red and green wool to the black stewart and the pot was pretty full. When it boiled over, the liquid was quite red. The stove was red, floor was red, and the large bath towel that I used to soak it up was red. Now the white enamel pot is quite red.

I added vinegar to the pot, turned the heat waaaay down, and put the pot back on the stove - then I promptly fell asleep again in the living room. I woke up about 2AM and thought I smelled another boiled over pot, but this time I was lucky. Most of the red had been absorbed, so I set the pot in the sink to cool. I guess that's really effortless dyeing.

2009-10-14T23:02:00.004-05:00

I was planning to do some natural dyeing today, but got involved in skimming through way too many rug hooking books to find the right recipe. I have some blue-green algae that should make a good color - but I don't remember what color, and I don't remember what I'm supposed to do to draw out the color. I think I'm supposed to soak the algae in ammonia - or something similar.

Right now the algae is soaking in rain water. The rainwater has picked up some color from something, it's a rich brown color - I hope that isn't what the algae will do, there are just too many easier ways to get a nice brown.

Soaking in the rain water seems to have really fed the algae, it popped up and away from the fallen branch its been growing on, and it was easy to pop it off the branch and into a jar.

You can see I'm a little scattered - trying to care for my mother while blogging sometimes makes me as confused as my mother is right now - so, I posted the same photo twice and can't find a way to delete the photo. Can anyone out there tell me how to delete an unwanted photo?

Saved by Rug Hooking

2009-10-12T22:03:00.003-05:00

Thank goodness for rug hooking and the Ten Minute Challenge. I've had a few rather stressful days but have been able to chase the stress away by being determined to stick to my ten minute commitment. Hooking for ten minutes always turns into a lot longer and each additional minute is just that much more relaxing.

My mother fell on Saturday and I was afraid she had broken her hip. Seven hours later, the ER doctor finally said she has a minor fracture of her pelvic bone. He admitted her to the hospital and I've been afraid we were about to start another hospital-nursing home routine, but I insisted we didn't need to follow that routine just because Medicare will pay for it, and - shock of all shocks, the discharge social worker actually listened to me. Mother will be coming home tomorrow.

I couldn't take my hooking to the hospital but was going to sit there all day, so I took my sketch book and a couple Martha Stewart magazines, some glue and a pair of scissors. My mother had fun watching me cut and paste, told me I'm a "real artist" after I cut out some cat and kitten pictures. She really loves cats - and here I have a couple dozen of them and can't even bring one into the house for her because of the dogs. There I was, working on my own selfish little project of gathering inspiring pictures that might help me with rug designs, when I suddenly realized that the kittens made my mother smile and feel better than she had since Saturday. For a few minutes, the kittens were great pain killers. My sketch/scrap book did for my mother what my rug hooking has been doing for me - and I'm going to go do some hooking right now.

Dyeing Antique Black Again

2009-10-07T20:20:00.002-05:00

The last time I dyed antique black, I really didn't get what I wanted. That batch turned out to be a smoky gray and I've been using it anyway, but, late last night, I decided I just couldn't go on with it. I simmered up another batch of the same tweeds and plaids and this time, added the collar from a black jacket, the black lining from the jacket, and the black lining from a black and white jumper. That batch became very black wool. When I'm cutting the strips, I rarely see any of the original colors peeking through, so I simmered up another batch this morning. I used the same black collar and same black linings as my sources for black dye. This batch is again dark, but it's a little more blue than black. I'll mix the black and blue/black and probably reverse hook all of the smoky gray that I've already hooked.

I guess the dyeing and strip cutting will count as my ten minute hooking. I really haven't hooked at all today and it feels kind of funny. Instead of hooking, I took my new boat out on a lake - but I'm going to write about that on my Gibbydogblog - where I'll tell the story about my little boat becoming a rescue boat.

Thirty-fifth Day on the Grasshopper Rug

2009-10-05T22:43:00.002-05:00

The final motif is done. The horse is going up a hill. I didn't change the saddle and rider to western, but I did put the rider in jeans instead of formal breeches like the rider at the other end of the rug.

My mother asked me yesterday what I planned to do with this rug, so for the first time I said that I wanted to put it over the opening between the dining room and the living room (I'm sure there's a name for that kind of architectural feature, but I don't know what it is.) My mother said she thought that was perfect - now I'll have to figure out which way to hang it. I guess there will be time to think about that while I hook the border - and then work once more around with the whipping. I guess I'm not nearly done yet.

Sketching Circles

2009-10-02T20:58:00.003-05:00

I started my afternoon with every intention to work on sketching circles. It was one of the afternoons when an aide took the responsibility for my mother, so I packed a bag with a sketch book, pencils, pens, crayons, water colors, and my camera, and headed for the nearest coffee shop where I fully intended to sit and sip coffee and draw circles all afternoon. On the way to the coffee shop, I made a couple stops and took some photos of circles.
These pumpkins and mums are for sale on the lawn part of our nearest strip mall, and would make nice subjects for rugs.

I thought the mums and pumpkins made great circles - and elipses, which I think are just stretched out circles.
These pumpkins were the smallest ones, all piled on some bales of straw. Circles bumping into circles.
These flowers almost make the series of circles that would be warm-up circles once I start drawing.

After the pumpkins, I reached an office that used to house my attorney, but now is a real estate office - and I thought how effective a nice black beauty line around a circular hooked rug would be.
This sign is on the little drive-up bank kiosk - nice way to turn a circle into a globe.

Then a surprising return to my youth - a peace sign on the car parked next to mine when I stopped to check out the consignment shop (where I bought a stone horse - no circles there, and some new hand cream that comes in a circular container .) Does the extra line on the peace sign mean anti-nuclear? seems like I read that somewhere...

Finally got to the coffee shop, which is in a red brick building with some nice extra architectural details, like this elipse. I not only think this circle pattern might be useful someday, but I also really like the bricks. Next time I hook bricks I want to remember to have some black bricks in with the red.
Later in the day, I went to the farm and found a few circles. Those cat eyes are certainly round, as are the cat heads and bodies.
This wheel is from my gold Schwinn bicycle with 3 gears - the first thing I bought with money I earned on my first job while I was in high school. I kept it forever until a man I hired to clean the yard threw it away, but strangely kept the wheels to hang on the side of the barn.

This wheel is from an old farm implement (probably a horse drawn manure spreader) that used to reside in my orchard. There used to be two of them, but someone took a liking to the other one and removed it from my gatepost.

I had great fun collecting circles but never got around to the sketching because I bought a boat. My first warm-up exercise at the cafe was to read a newspaper with my coffee and that's when I saw an ad for a rowboat in the classifieds. The boat I bought earlier in the summer hasn't worked out very well, it's really just too heavy and the motor is too complicated for me to use easily - so, I called the number in the ad, learned the boat is aluminum, and drove right over to see it. It's light weight enough that the ninety year old gentleman who was selling it could lift it by himself - of course, he's in pretty fit shape. If he hadn't told me he'd been married for 61 years, I would have guessed he was about 70. The boat was his wife's and he lost her 16 months ago. They lived all those years on a summer camp for poor city children. The camp sits on the edge of a good fishing lake, and I now have permission to take the boat back over there and fish in that lake. The camp, his home, is on a dirt road that brings back wonderful memories for me. Many years ago, I used to ride horses on that road. It was just a sandy track back then with hardly any traffic and we used to gallop up and down like it was a race track. That's where I rode my favorite horse, my Morgan stallion Tara. This new boat will be easy to handle, easy to transport in the back of my truck, so I can take it to any nearby lake, but I think I'll try out Mr. Witte's fishing lake first. So, anyway, I never did get to my sketching assignment, from Heidi Wulfraat's Sketching rug camp, I went to a boat camp instead.

End of September Report

2009-10-01T08:56:00.003-05:00

September is finished, but my rug isn't. I really thought it would be done by the end of the month, and it is close I guess it's the border that slowed down the progress. The border on the top now reaches the last motif, so I started the last horse hooking. I putzed around and fussed around and found wool in my barn studio, went to my old studio for more, and even acquired wool from the Salvation Army, all looking for a good, rich brown for the horse. I found the perfect brown in my sale wool at the old studio, put it in the washing machine, and then started hooking with the same heathery tweed I used for the trunk of one of the trees. I guess I just couldn't wait any longer. It's too bad dimensional hooking doesn't show up well in photos - this horse looks pretty blah in a flat photo, but I do like him when I can see his curves. I still haven't turned the rider into a cowboy, I still might make that change but probably won't since the horse's head is up too high for a western pleasure horse - he looks more like a European warmblood, which is completely inappropriate for the Grasshoppers since warmbloods hadn't even come to this country yet back when we were riding together.

Grasshopper Rug, Day 29

2009-09-29T20:48:00.002-05:00

I think this is day 29 and I'm still hooking border. I'm really surprised how long the border is taking, I'm going to have to come up with a faster way to get it done. I like the border better from a distance than from close-up. The edge of the main part has a rough-torn look that I like. I'll avoid doing some of the border tonight - after my mother goes to bed - by hooking some of the grass around the tennis court.

Slow Border Progress

2009-09-26T00:15:00.002-05:00

I've been getting in a lot more than the required ten minutes for the Ten Minute Challenge during the past few days, but I'm still not making very much progress on the antique black border. I found I needed to fill in a lot more grass under the horse, so I planted a few little wildflowers, too. That's one thing that's nice about working on my own pattern, I can change anything anytime without any qualms - but, at the same time, that need for change is a bad thing about working on my own pattern and finding I haven't planned very well - but, the truth is, I like hooking grass and flowers a lot more than I like hooking border.

I wanted to cut down on the amount of border at the far end, where I'm still holding off on hooking the final motif, so I hooked in some trees. I suppose I'm thinking about the apple orchard next to my outdoor riding arena because we didn't ride near an orchard when I rode with the Grasshoppers. I think I'll change the horse and rider to western. We used to ride English, hunt seat that is, for our weekly lessons, but whenever we could, we rode again on the weekend at a western stable. There was one stable in particular that we rented from for years, even though they moved almost annually to new run-down farms on the outskirts of the city. They ended up at a farm not too far from where I live now and I went there to buy my first horse - and ended up with two horses. The cowboy who owned the stable was quite a horsetrader. I picked out a small bay horse and the cowboy insisted he couldn't be separated from his "brother", a medium size gray. When I went back a week later to pay for the horses, the gray brother had disappeared and now the bay had a big palomino brother and they couldn't be separated. The palomino proved the truth of that lie by jumping over the hitching rail he was tied to when I tried to ride the bay out of the stable yard. He was caught halfway over the rail, teetering back and forth wildly. The rail had to be sawed apart to get him down. So, I took those two horses home. Named them Millard and Thunder. Anyway, I think I'll make the horse bay and put western tack on him.

Rug Hooking with Varied Stitches

2009-09-21T21:48:00.003-05:00

I finally started hooking some of my border, It's going to be hit or miss antique black with a worn out look - most of it gray now rather than black.

I'm hooking the border in straight lines, but those are just about the only rows of hooking done the normal way. For example, the horse is hooked with a little raised hooking - which doesn't show well in the photo, but the horses' rump is hooked higher than the legs, etc.

The hockey field is hooked anti-godlin style. That means the loops are hooked in all different directions - so they look like kernals of rice tossed into a bowl.

The skirt that was hooked with a gray, red, and white plaid was also hooked anti-godlin, while the blue skrt was hooked in wavy cornrows. The background was hooked in normal vertical rows with the loops generally locked together side by side.

The water in the swimming pool was also hooked with wavy cornrows, The contrast is apparent when the tile around the water is hooked in diagonal rows.

I think the wavy cornrows show up a little better in this photo. I think it gives some movement to the water. I like hooking with textured wools, but I also like creating more texture with the way the loops are treated.

Day 18 Grasshopper Rug

2009-09-19T22:50:00.004-05:00

I have the basic rug completed except for the last motif, the second horse. I still have some details to work on, then I'll surround it with an antique black border with an odd shape, sort of flowing in between the motifs. It's hard to get this rug into a photo and it's going to be even harder once the second horse is added.

I've made a lot of changes as I've gone along - the center pair in dresses have been a real problem - maybe because I wasn't even sure in my mind what they were doing. When we were in high school, we belonged to a YWCA group called Y-Teens. I mostly remember going to and presiding over meetings. I'm sure we must have done other things, but I can't remember them, so I thought I drew a fashion show, but in my mind they kept on being speakers at a meeting. The month I turned sixteen, I travelled by train for a couple days and nights from Detroit to Denver for a national YWCA convention. I had to speak to fifteen hundred people. I read a speech written by another teenager who couldn't take the trip. I practiced the speech a lot, but when I stood up to read it, I accidently left the last page at my seat. I never told anyone. I just stopped reading at the end of the second to last page and sat down. No one ever asked me about the abrupt ending. The other strong memory I have of that trip is that an anonymous donor paid my way. I never found out who it was who was so generous. It was enough money that even now, half a century later, I still think it was a lot of money - so that kindness and all the memories of my first train ride and the huge wooden YWCA where we stayed in downtown Denver were in my mind all of the time I was hooking and reverse hooking that part of the rug.

I think I've taken a photo I can use for my next rug - which also might be a runner. I'm going to post the photo on my gibbydogblog since it's a farm picture - shows my last four horses.

Only Ten Minutes Hooking

2009-09-18T23:30:00.002-05:00

Today was the kind of day that leaves me too tired to go to sleep. The day started with making coffee and breakfast for my mother, doing a couple loads of her laundry, and then filling in her caretaker so I could have some hours off.

As soon as the caretaker took over, I headed for the post office. Some books are on the way, but weren't in my mail box. Yesterday, I finally received Mary Shepherd Burton's book after wanting it for years, but the books I'm expecting aren't going to be that special.

Next on to Smart Auto, where Sid (of Sid's Mechanical and Repair Technology) removed the tailgate from my truck for me and then checked my engine for me. The computer said I need a part replaced, so Sid would order it and I could stop back later to have it installed. Then I was off to the farm. I passed a yard sale on the way, and left with a can full of 32 cookie cutters that I plan to use somehow to make patterns for mug mats. When I got to the farm, I went in the west gate and right back to the hay field where I expected to spend a few hours clearing the weeds with my brush hog. My luck wasn't so good - after about half an hour the tractor started acting up. After I cleared the debris in the filter bowl half a dozen times, and started and re-started the tractor at least a dozen times, I gave up and walked back to the truck. While I was on the tractor, I got a call from my vet's office. They offered to give me a bag of cat food if I wanted to pick it up - so I started out in that direction, but stopped at a gas station to try to wash off some of the gas that was all over my hands and probably my clothes. I guess I didn't do a very good job because now, about twelve hours later, I can still smell gasoline. On the way to the vet clinic, I saw a large yard sale - and, of course, stopped. I found a few things, the best being a Harris Tweed sports coat. It's basically tan and gray with a nice blue thread. I haven't found a good Harris Tweed for quite a while, and this one was only fifty cents. I also found a wool blanket - made in Scotland in a Clan Gordon tartan, a yellow wool sweater, and two really nice non-wool sweaters for my mother. Then I paid a whole dollar for a pseudo leather bag, like the ones advertised on TV for a lot more. With three dogs and the toys I thought I might want to use during my afternoon off (my laptop, camera, and bag full of sketching supplies) the truck was getting a little crowded, so when I was given the cat food and two big plastic bins full of hay at the vet clinic, I had to put that stuff in the tail-gate-less truck bed. I'm going to have to come up with a tail gate substitute.

From the vet's, it was back to Smart Auto where Sid installed the new part. Then home about four minutes late to relieve the caretaker. Fifteen minutes for phone calls, then I had to rouse my mother so we could go back to the farm and feed the animals. From the farm, to the grocery store, to the kitchen to cook dinner for friends coming for dinner.

We had dinner and played Blackjack, swapped some books and eggs, then, after our friends left, we watched a Sidney Poitier movie. During the movie, Mother finally agreed to go to bed and we had to go through all the getting-ready-for-bed procedures. By the time we were done, I had hooking time. I had watched my rug all through dinner and Blackjack and knew I had to dull down or dirty up the white wool making the YWCA sign. I tried tea first and wasn't satisfied, then I painted it with coffee. The painting took about ten minutes - so, minutes before midnight, I met my ten minute challenge.

Sky Instead of Background

2009-09-14T20:47:00.003-05:00

I'm finally happy with my background choice - instead of background, I'm just continuing the pictures by adding sky and ground - letting those elements unite the different motifs. I also did some work on the YWCA fashion show. I changed the blue dress, gave it a gored skirt and more of a yoke. I still have to complete the stage. I'm not really sure it's a fashion show because what I keep on remembering about the Y is giving speeches and leading group meetings. I have tried to remember other things that we did, but nothing else comes to mind. I know we had a sister city in India, the city of Madras, and I think we raised money to help the people there, but I don't remember how we raised money.

Anyway, I'll surround the pictures in the rug with antique black - an uneven border, no straight lines.

Dyeing, Bleeding and Mushrooms

2009-09-13T14:23:00.005-05:00

Dyeing instead of hooking today. I was unhappy with my third attempt to hook a background on my grasshopper rug when I realized I shouldn't be hooking a background. I wanted to have sky around the rider and top of the horse, so it made sense to have sky above the tennis players, too - and then I realized I should have sky all the way across the top (I'll do some kind of ground/grass/wildflower for the bottom portion) so I needed to dye some wool for the sky. I had some sky blue, but it's in a very heavy wool and I hooked it already around my horse and rider and I'm not really pleased with it, so I decided to do some bleeding. I chose a piece of dark royal blue, about a 3"x 18" strip, and selected some white wool - without measuring, I think I may have picked up about half a yard, and tore it into a few pieces. I simmered them all together with some dishwasher surfactant and some dish soap (I didn't have any powdered Tide, which I prefer.) I simmered them for about half an hour, checked and found all blue wool, no more white. I poured in a large glug of vinegar, and then added a second glug just to be sure. Then I tore two more strips of white wool and added them to the mix a minute or so apart. I left the new pieces in the pot only a few minutes and then pulled them out so I would have some lighter blue for the sky. I left the wool alone in the heat for another twenty or thirty minutes, then pulled them out to cool, and rinsed them with hot water. Then they went into the clothes dryer with a towel.

The photo shows the finished wool. The dark blue on the left is the source wool, the next narrow strip is what the source wool looks like now. The next two strips are the white wool I placed in the pot briefly toward the end. The next five pieces were in the pot the whole time. I have no explanation for the grayer looking piece next to the light wool, but the random results from bleeding wool are the things that make it fun.

After pouring in the vinegar and letting the wool set for about fifteen minutes, I started bailing some of the dye water out of the pot. I saved it in jars, so I will have acid dyes ready to go if I need to make more sky wool.

While the blue wool was in the dryer, I started working with some mushrooms. The mushrooms in the photos are two that were in our backyard. I gathered them this morning when I was concerned that the dogs were playing too close to them. I haven't identified them, my good mushroom books are at the farm and not here, but I'm thinking there's a good chance they're in the Amanita family and are poisonous. I didn't want the dogs to lick them or break them up and get the spores, etc. on their feet, etc. I put them in a stainless steel pan and added some water to the pan. Adding the water was a little iffy - without thinking, I took them into the kitchen and then suddenly remembered that they could be killers... so I was very careful with them from that point on.

They are now soaking in water. I should have shredded them, according to the books, to release dye color, but I didn't have the heart to shred things so beautiful - so I'm soaking them whole. The water immediately had a very slight yellow tinge, so maybe color can be obtained without destroying them.

Reverse Hooking

2009-09-11T22:13:00.003-05:00

I'm going to have to do some reverse hooking. My hooking time has been very limited today, I couldn't start until after I served dinner and played cards with some very good friends. I cut a piece off of the army blanket I've kept hanging down in the basement. It's a funny brown color, which must be faded khaki because the binding threads are an army green. The blanket has a big US stamped in the center. I have planned to use it right from the beginning, but it was a bad choice. The color isn't what I remembered and I don't like it - when I do the antigodlin hooking with it, it looks like spilled horse pellets that have gotten wet. But, even if I liked the color, it is just too heavy to cut in an 8 and pull through the MCG linen I'm using. I tried several different hooks, including the very fat primitive Hartman that I really don't like to use. I think if I continued with this wool, I'd ruin my hands and wrists. So, I'm going to have to do some reverse hooking and some rethinking. Maybe I'll revert to antique black for my background - antique black with a red beauty line and antique black border - or, maybe I should do a gray background with a red border - using our high school colors... hmmm, reverse, rethink,and revert, or reverse, rethink, and reflect...

Tomorrow the little village of Hamburg is having it's annual festival - a festival I started. When I planned the festival, I included a rug show, and I'm sorry I haven't been able to make that an annual event. At any rate, I'm going to spend whatever time I can at the festival. I'm hoping my mother will feel like going with me,although very little in the village is handcap accessible. When I'm festivaled out, I'll have to find my background wool - I'm thinking gray will be my first choice. Gray background, red beauty line, and antique black border...

Jump, Sky, and Ground

2009-09-10T22:32:00.002-05:00

Not much hooking time today, too many doctors, nurses, and physical therapists for my mother, and then a trespasser at the farm. I spent way too much time on the phone trying to solve problems, can't imagine how I could get by without a cell phone. However, I did get in more than my ten minutes of hooking time. I hooked a jump in front of the horse and rider - even though the rider is sitting on a dressage saddle. I set the jump down low so it would be reasonable for a dressage horse to jump it.

Of course, the dressage saddle is completely wrong for the Grasshoppers - back when we rode together, we either rode hunt seat or western. I didn't discover dressage until 1972 when I met Fritz Weiss who became my long time riding instructor. Fritz was a former Prussian Cavalry officer. I once wrote a magazine article about his experiences during World War II - his family raised Trakehner horses and were the last Prussians to escape on a ferry that took them from Prussia to Germany at a time when most Prussian Trakehner farmers had to drive their wagons and horses across a frozen ocean inlet - where they were bombed and about 90% were killed. Fritz was on the trek to Stalingrad when he had to shoot his horses that were pulling artillery. He was captured by the Russians and escaped from seven different prisoner of war camps. He walked from Stalingrad to Berlin in the middle of winter and found his wife and the baby who had been born while he was gone.

I also perused a very enjoyable little book today, Rag Rugs of England and America by Emma Tennant. I have to admit I mostly looked at the pictures because I was looking while I was on hold, but the pictures are of some very interesting rugs.

One Horse to Go

2009-09-10T00:50:00.002-05:00

Finished the swimming pool tonight. I doubt anyone will be able to figure out what it is without being told. Maybe I should do some lettering around all of the motifs. Hmmm, lettering is not my favorite thing to do.

I have the last horse to hook, then the background and the border. I'm still planning to use the khaki/gold blanket that's downstairs as background. First I'll have to fill in some landscape around the horses and do the stage for the fashion show.

Amazing how ten minutes turns into several hours and half of the night is gone.

Grasshopper Swimming Pool

2009-09-09T01:10:00.004-05:00

If I've counted correctly, this is day 8 - well, actually 9, because it's after midnight. I didn't blog last night because I was way too tired, but I finished hooking the field hockey grass and moved on to the swimming pool. I had to dye wool for the pool water. I had a jacket lining that was a shiny blue gray that would have made a great water color, but the color didn't bleed out of it. So, I used a large crockpot and simmered some white wool with a strip of navy blue and another strip of dark green (the wool used for the two swim suits). After the color bleeding was done, or at least done enough to get the colors I wanted, I threw in some pink wool - the pink I've been using for faces, arms, and legs. I figured that most of the body parts of the swimmers should be under water, so I wanted the pink wool to be overdyed with the water color. I think it looks like they are under water.

I'll probably get the pool finished tomorrow, then only a horse and rider left before I have to go back and complete each scene, then do background.

Grasshopper Antigodlin Grass

2009-09-06T23:38:00.003-05:00

I didn't get nearly as much done today as I thought I would. I hooked the grass of the hockey field with antigodlin hooking - which is supposed to look haphazard, like rice thrown into a bowl. The second photo is a close-up of the grass - somehow the close-up process changed the color of the wool - the antigodlin hooking looks to me like a swarm of little maggots, but I suppose rice is more appealing. I really like using the antigodlin here, since I'm using the same wool for the grass as I used for the tennis court. The tennis court was hooking in straight rows.

Today, I also added to my supplies for the Rug Hooking Daily rug camps - I went to Walmart and bought a new canner - I actually already have several, but any of them might have a little rust, and only one still has a jar rack and it's very rusty. I discovered at Walmart that they sell replacement jar racks - for a little over six dollars. While I was at Walmart, I checked out the art supplies and found the drawing pencils I couldn't find yesterday. I'm interested in the dyeing projects, but I'm most excited about the sketching. I have tried to draw and sketch forever. When I was teaching school, I could draw recognizable cartoonish things on the chalkboard - which impressed my students because they didn't expect to see dimensions or shading, they were happy with just outline drawings. Somehow during those decades of teaching I developed my scissor skills better than my pencil skills - so I can make cut-outs that look like the picture in my mind, while my drawing just never makes it. I looking forward to improving my pencil skills.

Grasshopper rug, Day 5

2009-09-05T23:11:00.002-05:00

I finished the two field hockey players and wanted to get the grassy field done behind them, but too many things interferred. One interference is the need to make a decision about how to hook the grass - I can hook it in straight lines, either horizontal or vertical, or I can do it the anti-godlin way like the dress next door, or I supposed it could do it in waves or swoops. I think I'm leaning toward anti-godlin, I kind of enjoyed doing the dress that way.

Re-do of Yesterday's Hooking

2009-09-04T23:52:00.002-05:00

Part of my ten minute hooking today was really unhooking. I pulled out yesterday's ugly dress on the right hand figure and re-hooked her with an anti-godlin dress. The wool for her dress came from a red and gray Pendleton plaid shirt. Her skirt was hooked with the red section, the top with the gray portion.

I'm leaving the Janet Reno looking figure for now. I'll probably re-hook her, too, but haven't decided with what color yet.

I took a photo of the part of the rug that has been done so far. I think I've decided on the background color - I have a khaki green/brass colored blanket. I've used strips from it on several rugs and always liked it. It will make a perfectly bland background.

Grasshopper Rug, Day 4

2009-09-03T21:18:00.003-05:00

I got the two dress-up figures done today. I'm not particularly happy with them. I was going to have them in a fashion show, but they turned out to be rather unfashionable, so I think I'll change what they are doing. When I was a teenager, I went to the national YWCA convention and gave a speech in front of an audience of 1500 people - more people than I had ever seen in one place. Maybe I'll have this pair of Grasshoppers speaking to an audience. I'm not going to fill in the stage around them until I have a better idea about what they are doing. Maybe I'll even go back later and revise their wardrobes.

Grasshopper Rug, Day 3

2009-09-02T22:44:00.005-05:00

There's something so addictive about hooking on a new rug. I was so anxious to get the next motif finished that I came back home from my afternoon off two hours early. After two years of being my mother's caretaker 24/7 we finally have some great help. Caroline seems to be able to talk my mother into anything - even taking a shower when she doesn't want to. So, I have no qualms about leaving the house and my mother in Caroline's care. I've been told I should get out of the house and go do something for myself - so, most Wednesdays, if I don't have lunch with a friend, I go up to the corner cafe, have a mocha caramel latte, and read the newspaper. Sometimes I work on a writing project (and try to pretend I'm J.K. Rowling working on something as wonderful as Harry Potter) but, today, I could hardly stand it. I read the local news in the newspaper - our township officials are always having a Hatfield and McCoy kind of vendetta going on - chatted with the hard-working cafe owner, and then I packed up my laptop and headed for home. I just had to finish that tennis court.

My tennis players have done something that I've seen happen in other rugs - something without planning, something surprising - and in this rug, that's the dimensional look of the tennis players, with the left player looking larger and therefore looking closer to the viewer. When you figure both figures were traced from cutouts that were exactly the same, it's hard to figure how that happened. It'll be interesting to see if that same look is still there after I hook in the background.

Today's Ten Minute Challenge

2009-09-01T22:59:00.002-05:00

B
Here's what I tried to do today. The weather was just perfect, not too hot, not too cold - I took Mother to play Bingo and tired her out, so I had some free time while she napped. I thought it was the ideal time to grab a pillow and a book and have a little rest on the swing in the backyard. My little rest lasted about ten minutes - my mind was jumping with rug plans and all I wanted to do was get inside to hook. I finally gave in and went inside.

This is what I hooked - one tennis player and the beginning of the tennis court.
I guess, so far, I'm averaging one Grasshopper per day. At that rate, it won't take long before I have to figure out what I'm going to do for the background.

Ten Minute Hooking Report

2009-08-31T20:45:00.003-05:00

I got the hooking started on my Grasshopper rug. I tea-dyed some pink wool for skin, so I can't hook the face and hand yet until the wool dries, and I'm fulling some white wool for the breeches, so I can't hook them yet,either. I hooked the horse with directional hooking, so I'm going to try out anti-godlin hooking in the dust and dirt under the horse.

Rug Designing, Step 2

2009-08-30T20:28:00.003-05:00

Last night, I arranged my cutouts in a row so I could decide if that was the way I should use them - and it is.
I traced them onto linen today and the pattern is now 15" x 70".

I put a horse at each end, one with a taller rider, the other with a shorter rider.

So, we have a horse on the left, followed by a tennis court with two tennis players. Then the two who are dressed up are standing on a stage - a stage at the YWCA - they are participating in a fashion show.

Then we have the field hockey players - both fullbacks (because that was my favorite position after I became convinced that I could never run fast enough to be effective on the forward line.)

The field hockey game is followed by the swim team - only two lanes in that pool though. One swimmer is doing the backstroke and the other is swimming freestyle. The rug ends then with the second horse and rider. I left enough room for a border, with a couple things dipping down into it. I think it won't be a straight-line border since each motif will be surrounded by appropriate landscape that can be odd shapes with a background color surrounding the landscape. If I do some dyeing, I may have the border be a darker version of the background. I think I'll color plan as I go along...

Rug Designing

2009-08-29T23:17:00.005-05:00

I made two failed attempts at getting my Grasshopper rug design started. Sometimes I can draw, and sometimes I can't. Today was a can't kind of day, so I switched to paper cut-outs, but I had the wrong kind of paper and I had too much of Deanne Fitzpatricks Big Boned Women in my head. I had to stop and put it all away. I was thinking I needed to go to the store and buy some of the right kind of paper - but 11:00 on a Saturday night is not a good time to go buy paper. So, I dug through the waste basket and pulled out some of the junk mail. I found some paper that felt better and started cutting.

One of the things we Grasshoppers did a lot of was ride horses - some of us took riding lessons one night a week and most of us went riding as often as we could at a public stable where we rented horses. After I earned my first paycheck teaching school, I went back to that public stable and bought two horses, Millard and Thunder. Had lots of adventures with them.

Some of the Grasshoppers were on our high school swimming team - Georgia swam back stroke and I swam freestyle, so I cut out two figures that could do either stroke - so, I'll have to have some water in the rug.

We also played tennis, so I have two tennis players that I'll put in white shirts and shorts.
Ann will definitely be one of the tennis players, as I remember, she was really good.

In the fall, we played field hockey, which I look back on now as my favorite sport.
I wasn't great at it, but I played all the way through high school, college, and graduate school.
I'll put these hockey players in gray and red uniforms for our high school colors.

We also did dress up things. When we graduated from Eighth Grade, we all had to wear nice dresses and high heels. For many of us, that was our first experience wobbling along in high heels as we walked across the stage.

So, now I have all of these figures to play with and I have to decide how to arrange them - maybe in a runner, with the figures side by side - or, maybe just a mish-mosh the way I have them on the table now. Of course, I could make six or eight horses, lots of tennis and field hockey players, etc. I don't have to stick to two of each, I made two because that's how I folded the paper. I'm going to go to bed and see if an arrangement comes to me magically in my sleep.

Hooking Without Hooking

2009-08-29T13:29:00.004-05:00

I was feeling really scattered today and I suddenly realized why - the photo shows my work table. It was a complete blank at noon when my mother's nurse came for a home appointment. Ever since, I have been doing a little here and a little there - sort of "grazing" on my various non-hooking but hooking projects. I went through Linda Rae Coughlin's Contemporary Hooked Rugs and was inspired by the tremendous variety in the amazing rugs inside. I re-read the chapter on rug hooking in the 1927 Home-Craft Rugs by Lydia Le Baron Walker - I really enjoy her history of rug hooking. She traces hooking back to just after the Colonial period - which I enjoy because I want rug hooking to be an American craft, not a British Colony craft. She also talks about home-made backing used for rugs before burlap was available. I also spent a few minutes in Cheticamp with The History of Cheticamp Hooked Rugs and their Artisans by Chiasson, Deveau, and LeBlanc - the story of hooked rugs rescuing a poverty stricken community is compelling, but the book is not easy reading, perhaps because it was not written originally in English. I put it down in favor of How to Make Hooked Rugs by Mary Perkins Taylor, written in 1930. She works with hand-torn strips and makes some very detailed rugs, but I was not happy with my attempt at her technique, so I was looking for clues to what I had missed - I think I just tore my strips too wide because I wanted them to be wider than I could cut easily with my cutter.

What I really wanted to do today, and will perhaps do when I am finished writing, is design the rug I will make with Deanne Fitzpatrick's Big Boned Girls patterns. I have decided to not use a photograph of my Grasshopper friends, I'm going to use Deanne's drawings as a basis for drawing my own impressions of those friends - which means they are not going to be the women who are gracefully ageing and talking about how Medicare works, they are going to be the young women I remember - Ann in her tennis shorts, Diane in a red and gray field hockey tunic, Georgia either on a horse or in a swim suit...and four more to go...

I also have a pack of rainbow colored fleece from Peace Fleece. I'm probably going to use some of it to make felted beads and some for texture in my Grasshopper rug - I wanted to buy something from the Peace Fleece website because I was really impressed with their attempt to bring peace to the world by purchasing fleece from farmers in countries that were former enemies. I find it hard to imagine people who spend their lives nurturing life, in the form of crops and livestock, going to war to kill people - but then again, I have heard some pretty vitriolic statements and political threats from local farmers around here (of course, this isn't real farm country anymore.)

George and Patches dog rug

2009-08-22T14:33:00.003-05:00

I tried to upload a photo of this rug on ning today, but it posted all stretched out, so I thought I would post it here. Diane Phillips was the feature teacher this year at Sauder. A few years ago, I took a one day class at Sauder from her. The class was about hooking dogs. The photo is of the rug I started in that class. The cloud dogs are Shady, Shep, and Ben, three of my best friends who have crossed over the bar. George and Patches are two of my current best friends. George was explaining a little about civilization to Patches, who joined our family after her first two horrible years - the first year she was shut in a basement and completely ignored, the second year she was adopted by a new family who moved and left her behind - she lived wild for a year, until the people who owned the chickens she was feeding on caught her and turned her in. She came to us because I was her breeder. Her mother is Blue, who still runs herd on our pack, and her father was Ben, the smallest cloud dog.

Diane Phillips hooks with the people in Vermont who are always sort of pushing the envelope, experimenting with the artistic aspects of hooking, so her rugs are quite varied. She had a number of dog rugs on display at Sauder, rugs that she used as examples for our class, so I didn't take new photos of them. She also had several portrait mats, and I did photograph a couple of them.

Hooking Again, AT LAST!

2009-08-16T11:53:00.004-05:00

Isn't this a silly rug? It's one I'm doing without a pattern, it started out as one thing and turned into something else, but I don't care, I am just very happy to be hooking again. My hooking isn't back to normal yet, though. About every fourth or fifth loop, my hook grabs the bandage on my thumb and gets stuck, but at least I'm not poking the healing cut. I changed the way I hold the strip in my left hand to protect my thumb and somehow, in the process, I rubbed the top of my left arm against the top of the frame - who can figure? All of a sudden I realized I was dripping blood on the floor plate of my frame stand - I looked at my arm and I must have punctured a little blood vessel with a gripper strip, UGH - a couple minutes of pressure and a band-aid and I was back in action. I know that the ten minute challenge doesn't provide for accumulating hooking time, but I figure I really need to pay back the days I missed because of my foolish knife handling - so, I hooked enough to cover twelve days before putting my hook down and taking a photo. I posted the photo, but I really took it to see what this silly rug looks like at this point. Sometimes photos look better than the close-up look while hooking, but I'd say not so in this case.

Sauder Village Rug Show was Great - Again!

2009-08-15T10:30:00.005-05:00

My mother and I made our annual one day trip to Archbold, Ohio for the Sauder Village Rug Show. This was the 13th annual show, and I think I've been to at least 12 of them, maybe 13. The first time I went, Cindy Jones drove and I went with her and Dianne Klamik. The trip was about shopping for antiques as much as going to the rug show. Cindy used to drive 18 wheelers and I was definitely car sick by the time we finally reached Sauder. I don't remember being able to enjoy much of the rug show - however, this show was entirely different.

We arrived before there was much of a crowd and were able to really see all of the rugs without bothering people with my mother's wheelchair. It wasn't long before I found my favorite rug. It was in the Celebrations portion of the show and it's called "Warrior Horses". On my first trip through the show, I took a cursory look at the rugs and I thought the horses were given their multi-dimensional shape by needle felting or possibly hooving, but a closer look later on revealed the horses were hooked with raised #3 loops. They were hooked through a plaid fabric - some kind of stiff even weave that I've never seen before.

I posted almost fifty photos of the show on Rughookers, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rughookers

so I won't repeat them here.

I also told about my great chance meeting with June Mikoryak. She spent quite a bit of time telling me about the color plans in rugs hooked by her students. I really could see the difference between her students and other rugs, she really is a color expert. The secret on several of the rugs was just the right bit of spark, or poison. The poison color was one that you wouldn't normally include in the same color palette as the rest of the rug, usually a much brighter color. Those almost unseen additions added a depth and spark that set Mikoryak rugs apart from the other rugs - I'm afraid quite a few of the other rugs started looking quite dull to me.

June also taught me about something I'd never heard of before called "antigodlin" or "antigogglin" hooking. It's done so the loops look like rice thrown randomly in a bowl.

The photo is a close-up of a petal on a flower on a large bedrug hooked by Ann Bond.

June Mikloryak said she studied the old rugs and the old books and realized the old hookers used this antigodlin technique - it certainly works well in Ann Bond's bedrug. June said the trick is to be sure your bottom hand is keeping the strip from twisting. She also said there might be spaces left between strips and you can go back and fill those in. I think I learned more from my chance meeting with June that I've learned in classes. I've always heard about using poison in color planning but have never seen such good examples, examples where the poison doesn't even show up unless you know what to look for - I think now I might have enough nerve to try sneaking in some poison myself.

Planning a Grasshopper Rug

2009-08-08T15:52:00.005-05:00

In June, I got together with some of my friends from elementary school. They came from New Hampshire, South Carolina, Texas, and Ann Arbor to spend an afternoon getting reacquainted in a display garden belonging to Michigan State University. From left to right in the photo above, they are Ann, Diane, Me, Sharyn, and Georgia. Patt and Jane and Barbara are missing.

When we were kids, we formed a group called the Society of Pedigreed Grasshoppers. None of us remember for sure why we chose that name - although I remember that it was Ann's idea when we were having a get together in her home. We all lived in Northwest Detroit. Our school, T. Dale Cooke Elementary, was just about in the middle of our neighborhood. There were eight of us altogether, and about five of us started kindergarten together. The others joined our class of eighty some students before eighth grade, the last grade in Cooke School. Seven of us spent all of our high school years at Redford High School, and one of our number travelled downtown for part of her high school years to be in a special Art curriculum, then she came back and we all graduated together from Redford.

Seven of us got together last year at a school reunion, only Patt was unable to come - it is a long trip from California. This year there were five of us. I want to make a rug featuring the Grasshoppers. I used one of those conversion programs to make this year's photos into line drawings and those drawings are kind of interesting, but I'm not sure they'd make a rug. I've also been thinking about using Deanne Fitzpatrick's Big Boned Women patterns in some way - but I haven't figured out how yet. Way back when, we did so many things together - we played field hockey, were on the swim team, tennis team, basketball team and went horseback riding weekly, plus we had our Grasshopper gatherings - I don't know whether to go far way back when or the mature adults we are now.

No Ten Minutes for a While

2009-08-04T22:03:00.002-05:00

I made a foolish mistake tonight that will keep me from hooking for a while. I was going to cut up some cold chicken for a salad for dinner and somehow, I let the knife slide off of the chicken bone right into my finger and down to my bone. Owwweee, that really hurt.

When I wasn't able to stop the bleeding, I decided to head for Urgent Care, which is only about two miles away and is in the same office as my regular doctor. Unfortunately, it took a few minutes to explain to my mother that I was going, so I got there right at closing time - and they were closed. So, I thought I could get some butterfly band-aids at the grocery store. I had to keep mopping up the blood that kept dripping onto the grocery cart, so I bought a bag of frozen peas and wrapped that around my thumb. A twenty minute wait in the check-out line and the bleeding stopped.

I got a bag of first-aid stuff home, poured peroxide over the wound (because I'm reading a great book about growing up on an Iowa farm during the Great Depression and they used peroxide to "bubble out" the germs.) I taped the cut tightly together and then wrapped a bunch of stuff around my thumb to help me remember not to use it. I probably won't need the reminder right away because right now it's hurting enough to remind me. Anyway, I'm going to have to do my ten minute hooking on reading or writing about hooking - I do not want to get the bleeding started again by trying to hook.

2009-08-01T21:44:00.002-05:00

April DeConick of Red Jack Rugs http://redjackrugs.blogspot.com has organized a challenge for anyone who chooses to join - the challenge is to hook for ten minutes every day, six days a week, for the next six months. If you go to April's blog and sign up, you can have a badge like the one above to place on your own blog or website.

The Ten Minute Challenge

2009-08-01T10:12:00.003-05:00

I'm going to take on the Ten Minute Challenge posed on April Deconick's blog Red Jack Rugs http://redjackrugs.blogspot.com/ To meet the challenge, all I have to do is hook for ten minutes a day. My understanding is that any rug hooking activity will count, and maybe that could be my monitoring of the activities on Rughookers http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rughookers and Rughookers Bulletin Board http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rughookersbulletinboard , but I think I will limit myself to actually hooking - maybe drawing a pattern or gathering wool might count, but not all of the other rug hooking activities that are always floating around in my mind, like the Rughookers Merit Program http://rughookersmeritpro gram.wordpress.com/ and reading the whole stack of antique rug hooking or hooking related books I've recently acquired (several by Dr. Grenfell and one about the history of Cheticamp, plus a few of the 1960s and 70s craft books that have only a few pages on hooking.)

My frame is all set up in the dining room. I had to put everything else away yesterday because we were having friends for dinner and I like to have small groups eat at the card table I use as a work table - my mother's cherry dining table is just too heavy to move and set up for just four people. This silly rug is still on the frame and I haven't done a thing with it for days - the ten minute challenge would push me to finish it and get on with some sort of planned rug.

So, many thanks to April for this challenge, I really like the idea of committing to ten minutes a day - why, I could be hooking right now!

Casserole Dyeing and Hooking without a Pattern

2009-07-26T13:40:00.004-05:00

I ripped out my second attempt at hooking with really wide strips and decided to just play. I found myself hooking a person, who turned into a teacher of rug hooking. Then I had to hook her students. So far, I have two of them hooked.
I'm not sure if this will become a round chair pad or what, but I'm certainly having fun with it - lots more fun than those hit or miss round mats.

I've changed the shape of the "teacher" several times, but she still is pretty strange - sort of a tough task master I guess.

The first student is a round, fluffy one - sort of a common type of hooker.

The second one is the thin, maybe nervous, very precise hooker - probably hooking a room-size rug with size 2 strips. I haven't come up with the third hooker yet, I'm waiting for her to show herself.

I put some stainless steel pans up for sale yesterday, on Rughookers Bulletin Board and on Wool Snippets Marketplace. I acquired them, sort of accidentally, yesterday at an auction. The auction was put on by Braun and Helmer, my favorite auctioneers - well, actually, the sons of my favorite auctioneers. It was mainly an auction for farm equipment, so I went with the idea in the back of my head that I might be able to pick up some replacements for my antique haying equipment.

There were some other things besides the farm equipment filling out the auction - there was a huge bear rug, and I turned around once while looking at the display of goods and almost put my head in that boar's mouth. Ugh!

I enjoy watching the men at farm auctions - they always take some time to tinker with the engines. This 1970 truck was a favorite gathering place. I enjoyed seeing the truck - it used to belong to the Dexter Fire Department - it came to my farm when a neighbor called them and said it looked like I had a grass fire that was getting away from me. I was a bit irked when the firemen showed up because I was sure I had the fire under control - but it was nice to know they were available if I was wrong. That was the last time I cleared up the roadside weeds with fire. Anyway, I think the truck probably found a good home and it won't surprise me to see it in one of our local parades sometime soon.

There was a long table full of restaurant equipment - turns out the man who was selling his haying equipment is an executive chef. There was a great big huge stainless steel pot and I was picturing filling it was ten yards of wool for dyeing when I realized some other people were also admiring it. I chatted with them a little and learned they had some kind of organic non-profit and were contemplating getting the pot to feed the poor - kind of kicked me away from my plan. I was still thinking about them when the auctioneer started the bidding on the stainless steel pans that would be perfect for casserole dyeing. I figured I could use a couple, so I jumped into the bidding but was distracted by thinking about those non-profit people - well, anyway, somehow, instead of a couple, I ended up with 23 stainless steel pans - quite a few more than I can use. So, I put together my thoughts about how the pans could be used and offered the pans for sale with an instruction sheet - 13 of them were spoken for before lunch today. whew! maybe it wasn't such a big mistake.

Some Wash Up, or...um..Wrap Up

2009-07-19T08:44:00.003-05:00

I explained on Yahoo Rughookers what happened to this sad little rug after I posted on this blog that I had finished the hooking. I steamed it, dried it, then put it on the floor under the card table I was using as a work table. My dear dog George used it like a puppy pad. I discovered what had been done when I saw some discoloration of the monk's cloth that I hadn't cut off for binding yet. Later the same day, I had to take George for a visit to his doctor and it turned out that the rug became diagnostic - George has a bladder problem, possibly very serious - so, I couldn't be upset with him, but I was afraid the little rug was ruined. I poured carpet soap full strength on it, then washed it off with cold water, then used a special pet cleaning soap and soaked the rug all over again. I took it outside, put it on a mesh table and rinsed the soap off with the garden hose - talk about mistreatment! Then I left the rug out in the sun for several days. Some color bled out, but the rug dried and the smell disappeared - at least to human noses. I tested the smell factor by placing the rug on the dining room floor again and Patches immediately stepped up to smell exactly the bad spot. So, this little mat will never again go on the floor and will probably never be a table mat either, but it did help diagnose a health problem for George and it also answered the question about how to wash a hooked rug. I think I should be pleased that it was hooked on monk's cloth and not burlap.

This circular mat is hooked with strips one inch wide. After reading the 1930 book by Mary Perkins Taylor, I thought I'd play around with some very wide strips. For some unknown reason, other than it was very late at night, the strips became twice as wide as Ms Taylor suggested. It wasn't easy to pull the strips through the primitive linen, I had to resort to the largest Hartman hook and still had to fold the strips in half.

The loops became pretty thick lumps that would make a very stiff and thick mat, maybe useful as a hotpad, but not particularly appealing. I am planning to pull these strips out of the backing, tear them in half, and try again.

In an earlier post, I showed a photo of my mother with her grandaughter - here she is again with her great-grandchildren. Max, who spent his early years in Kenya, and Zoe who has lived her three years in Guatamala. We were very pleased to have their annual visit home coincide with Grandma's 98th birthday party.

Some "New" Books

2009-07-18T15:48:00.005-05:00

For quite some time now, I have been enjoying the very old books about rughooking: the books that precede rughooking becoming an art, the books that were written for the hobbyist or the homemaker - back in the 1930s and 1940s - before Pearl McGown had become a known doyenne of hooking. This past week, I have enjoyed two such books. One of them, by Stella Hay Rex, Practical Hooked Rugs, was written in 1949 - I've kept my eye open for a copy of that book for about ten years and finally found one on the internet. The other one is a book I had never heard about, it's titled How to Hook Rugs by Mary Perkins Taylor and published in 1930. The Perkins book has one color picture and the rest are black and white, the Rex book is all black and white. The lack of color might seem like a handicap in this day and age, but somehow, it's like back when we watched black and white television, we get to create the colors in our imagination and the black and white illustrations then become very colorful.

Perkins teaches about using wide strips - the kind we would call nines or tens today, and shows mostly how to use them in geometric designs. The discussions about creating designs are just marvelously down to earth and homey - use a plate and saucer for one design, geometric lines and drawings for others. Perkins says, "Hooking is the simplest sort of manual work. There is nothing difficult or complicated in the use of the hook."

In her preface, Rex says, "...I have tried to give the individual hooker, whether beginner or advanced, some standard of instruction to follow to produce an inexpensive, substantial, and artistic floor covering. And...to inspire the hooking craftsman to achieve originality and individuality of expression.".

There is something gentle and relaxed about both of these books, about the attitude of both authors toward hooking - there is no instructional intensity like we find in more modern books.
There is mention in the earlier book that well-made rugs will be part of a heritage, but the more modern attitude that we are making something for future generations to venerate is pleasantly lacking - I enjoyed spending some time with the old-fashioned idea of making rugs for the sake of having rugs.

Both of these books are well worth reading, but definitely not easy to find. If anyone reading this blog has a source for any other old hooking books, please let me know at phylblade@yahoo.com

Rug Finished and New Frame

2009-07-07T13:48:00.003-05:00

I finally finished the little kit designed by Sharon Perry. I still have to bind it.I finished it on my new octagonal frame from BeeCreek. I really enjoyed using the extra space available on this frame and I enjoyed being able to just turn the frame without having to turn the stand. I hooked the last row, the black one, all the way around the rug without taking it off of the frame more than once.

The frame sits on a ball that lets it be rotated and tilted in all directions.

There's a ball under the frame at the end of the steel stand.

The stand has a steel plate that has just the right balance so the frame is extremely sturdy, but it's not very heavy. The stand is very adjustable height-wise.

The wooden frame around the ball is removable so the frame can be disattached and used as a lap frame - the stand can be taken apart so it would fit nicely in a suitcase. The whole thing arrived in a comparatively small box - that might fit into a large suitcase.

This photo has nothing to do with hooking - but it's one I love - of two of my favorite people - my mother, one week shy of 98 years old, and my amazing niece who lives with her husband and two children in Guatamala - working for the US Center for Disease Control on epidemics like the H1N1 virus.

Butler Hooking Frame

2009-03-17T14:55:00.003-05:00

Someone on Rughookers has been looking for Butler frames, so I thought I would share photos of mine. I have kept it out in my unfinished studio/barn all winter and have missed using it. It's really too big to leave it set up in my mother's dining room, so I've been using a Puritan on a floor stand - something that can be shoved off into a corner. The hooking space on this Butler frame is about twice as big as the Puritan.

The frame folds down,

and the floor supports fold up,

so the frame can be transported on it's wheels. There's a comfortable wooden handle for pulling. When I pull it in and out of hotels, I usually pile my hooking bags on top of the floor supports and use the whole thing like a cart. I really love this frame. The only faults I find with it are 1) the size for fitting into my mother's dining room - old houses tend to have smaller rooms, so it would also be too large for my own dining room, but it's just perfect in any of my studio spaces, and 2) I can't twist and turn it the way I can the Puritan when I want to hook in different directions - so, it makes me do what my old teacher always said I should do, learn to hook in all directions without moving my pattern - or, I can easily take the pattern off of the frame and turn it.

So, that's the Butler. The following photo is my sneaky Blue - loving to lay on the rug on the forbidden love seat while I'm so involved in hooking I don't notice.

More on the Cottage Rug

2009-03-14T14:12:00.003-05:00

I've made some progress on the cottage rug. I hooked the lawn, mostly with the strips that had already been cut - they dyed up nicely.

I did some more bleeding and marrying and came up with overly textured wools - I used some pendleton plaids and some dark gray tweeds - so, I decided, rather than get out the Cushing dyes, I'd just hook the water with the solid blue I already had. I also have a really nice blue and green check, so I used that for waves and decided that's my textured wool for the water.

I really started to have fun with this rug. I saw an old photo in an album I'm putting together for my mother, and my mother and grandmother were sitting in front of the cottage talking - so, I hooked my grandmother into the lawn. Then, I kept thinking about my brother going fishing - well, both of my grandfathers did a lot of fishing there, too, so I hooked in a boat and a fisherman. The boats at the lake were both painted white, but I decided to work with the wool that was already in a box at my feet and the lightest there was a gray. I finally had a good feeling about this rug, the same feeling I used to get as a kid when I had a piece of paper and a box of crayons, drawing without a plan, just adding parts as I thought of them. Hooking without a pattern is like that, and I think I'll do it more often.

Summer Cottage Rug

2009-03-10T12:19:00.003-05:00

I've pulled out one of those put-aside rugs. It's a pictorial/memory rug, a picture of the old stone cottage on Big Lake, near Davisburg, Michigan. The cottage was hand-built in the early twentieth century by the Thielmans, the in-laws of my uncle's wife's sister. Back then, the city of Detroit was like a small town, everybody knew everybody or knew their relatives or neighbors and my mother had a friend who married one of the Thielmans, and that friend's sister married my uncle - anyway, that friendship must be how my family was able to have the cottage every summer during my childhood. We used to spend our summers there in the late 1940s and early 1950s - and even back then, it was full of antiques and was basically an antique itself. The kitchen was outfitted with running water through a hand pump next to the sink - it was necessary to keep a glass of water by the sink to prime the pump. There was also an ice box, an ice box that held big fifty pound blocks of ice that was delivered every so often. I remember an ice wagon pulled by horses, but that might just be my imagination, and I also remember a truck built like a milk delivery truck with cold ice water draining out of the back. The children slept in a large room upstairs that was fitted out with a collection of old brass beds. The living room had a pot bellied stove that we sat around on cold, rainy summer days. There was a day bed over in one corner, by the window I've put in the rug, and that's where my mother read to us every afternoon. My strongest memory is of learning to read by watching her read Black Beauty to us.

I've tried several wool colors for the lawn in front of the cottage and haven't been happy with any of them, so I decided to take all the colors I was using, add some more green wool, and marry the colors together. Also, just to experiment, I added some strips that had already been cut.

Once I simmered the wool in a pot of water and added vinegar to set the color, I pulled the wool out of the pot. Most of the real green had already been used up and the color that was left was a blue-green, with more blue than I wanted in my lawn. Experience has shown me that blue is one of the slower colors to be taken up by wool and I knew I didn't want much of that blue.

The photo above shows the wool after it was pulled out of the pot - the bright green at the top were my bleeders, the strips on the left started out as a very light yellow green (I call it puke green), and the wool on the right is from a recycled coat and that must be the wool that provided the blue-green.

I still have to rinse and dry the wool. After that and after hooking the lawn, I'll have to start on the water and sky colors. I decided I want all of the wool to be textured, so I may have to set up a pot of blues to bleed so I can marry some of the same textures together as blues. I hooked myself jumping from the rope swing before I decided on all textures, but I'm not going to rehook my pink arms and legs.

It is fun to hook a memory rug of this sort, I keep drifting off in old memories - like my brother and his friend chasing me and throwing fish eyeballs at me, or going out in the rowboat with lunches packed by my mother that included milk in pop bottles, and my dad coming home from the office and taking us swimming and throwing us off of his shoulders. I have one regret, we used to throw our garbage in the swamp next door, long before we thought there was anything wrong with doing that. I guess we didn't do any long-term damage, the swamp is all gone now anyway, buried under several houses.

Using Antique Black

2009-02-23T12:57:00.005-05:00

I've been using the antique black wool that I dyed a few weeks ago. It's not very exciting antique black, just sort of common black that has a little bit of depth to it. I actually prefer the antique black that can be made using red and green and blue wool - if it is barely overdyed with black, a little of the red and green and blue peeks through. Then it looks like old wool, wool that has been used and worn and rubbed so much that some of the black has worn off. Sometimes a regular piece of black wool straight off the bolt has some or all of those colors hiding under the black. That happens when something was wrong with the original dye process, so the wool was overdyed. I love finding that kind of black. All you have to do is bleed off some of the black dye, and there you have wonderful worn looking antique black.

I used the antique black for this horse in my Yahooker swap mat. It's not easy to get something more than a flat silhouette when you want to hook a black horse - and I've loved black horses ever since early childhood - so I let the variation in color in the antique black delineate some of the muscles and contours of the horse.

However, my main use of the antique black has been in my Gene Shepherd blog hook-in rug ( http://geneshepherd.com/) . Over the last weekend, I played around with various colors for the scallops and for the background beyond the scallops. I hooked one corner all in blue, with red scallops - ugh! Then I hooked black scallops and red background - ugh! again.
One problem is that I've hooked the basket and flowers in brighter colors than I ever use. I wanted to bring those colors out into the background, but they are just too bright for me. I picked the darkest strips of the basket color and hooked them around the medallion, and then hoooked a pair of beauty lines - one red, and one of the blue plaid I used in the wing of the bluebird. After the ugh! attempts, I decided to fill everything between all of the lines with antique black. In a few places, I'm going to hook in short bits of very light black, just to keep the black alive. Today, I'm going to hook outside the red line to make a black frame all the way around. I'm going to kind of jump around with the rest of my hooking, in case I run out of antique black and have to cook up some more - I'm leaving just-in-case spaces for the new wool to fit in.

I'm so pleased to be doing this rug as part of Gene Shepherd's hook-in. He gives the greatest hints on his blog while he's hooking the same pattern - I think I've heard more suggestions and good ideas than in a regular class - the great thing about a blog class is you don't get too tired to listen and learn, which is always what happens to me in a day-long class (one of my post-polio symptoms.) With a blog, you can stop and start whenever you want and you can go back and re-read, re-look, anytime, day or night. So, here's a "shout-out" to Gene - THANKYOU GENE!!!

Rughookers Anniversary

2009-02-19T14:59:00.007-05:00

I had an absolutely wonderful surprise today when I read Gene Shepherd's blog (http://geneshepherd.com/ ). I had forgotten that Rughookers has been around for a whole decade now and what a nice way to be reminded. I thought I would take this opportunity to tell the story of Rughookers (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rughookers )

More than a dozen years ago, I bought that funny long frame building in this old aerial photo. The building is the largest one in downtown Hamburg, Michigan (which you can see is not a very large town). I loved the old building, bought it without a real plan, but I had a sporadic antique business at my farm and I was in love with some antique replica crafts, so I decided to turn the main floor of the building into an antique shop and then have craft classes held in other parts of the building.

I was teaching school in another small town fifty miles away and running a boarding stable and riding school at my farm, so I could only give Saturday and Sunday afternoons and Thursday and Friday evenings to the store. On Saturdays, I gave riding lessons in the morning and then raced off to the store, made a big pot of soup or stew on the old ten burner stove in the upstairs back hall, and fed the riding students and other teachers because making lunch was the only way I could get everyone to leave the farm in time for me to open the antique shop at noon.

I called the building The Hamburg Store because it had alway before been called The Hamburg Hardware. It was situated on a corner, with a refurbished general store next door and an old gas station converted into a fire hall next to that. Around the corner and behind The Store was an old church that had become the town hall, with the police station in the basement. After the township moved out, the old church became a library. That building is now a museum, started and run by the people who now own the old general store and the old fire hall. I started doing some of my school work at the store when the customers and hangers-on were gone, correcting papers and recording grades and doing research on the internet. The internet was quite different then, not nearly so many choices available, and somehow I found the rug hooking group called Padula. I learned that there were other rug hookers and started learning from them about schools and suppliers and Rug Hooking Magazine. We chatted a lot about rugs, but we couldn't see them, there was no photo hosting on the server. While surfing the internet, I eventually found the Yahoo group service. I set up a group, thinking Padulans would like to see photos of their rugs, and I called the group Rughookers. The people running Padula weren't excited about having photos, so I was suddenly the proud owner of a completely independent group. I can remember saying back then that if we could get three hundred members, we would probably have all of the internet savvy rughookers in the whole country.

I used to think about Rughookers as a home, a home where visitors should be welcomed and treated as honored guests. Netiquet really hadn't been established well yet and there were often unpleasant outbursts in the early years - sometimes it felt like we were the Hatfields and the McCoys with our foolish disagreements. That's when I hooked this little house, which would have been big enough to entertain the whole group.

It only took a few years for the group to grow so large we needed a new home. I thought this house would be the one I would build on my farm if I ever won the lottery, but instead, The Lottery House turned into The Rughookers Home, and the Rughookers Home is a place where all rughookers are welcome.

Almost two years ago, I moved from my farm to my mother's home, a couple miles from the store. I now sit inside this house when I surf the net and have the great good fortune to have a large group of friends on Rughookers.

The Cat Has Been Chased Away by a Dog

2009-02-11T22:33:00.003-05:00

I removed the cat and replaced her with a dog. Now there's no connection between the dog and the bird, but I like the dog. Maybe I can go back to putting a cat sneaking into the picture from the side - might give the pattern some better balance. I think I'll start on the black on the right side and leave the possible cat side alone for now.

Gene Shepherd's Blog Hook-In

2009-02-11T11:03:00.002-05:00

I'm having a lot of fun working on the December 2008 Rug Hooking Magazine free pattern with Gene Shepherd's Blog Hook-In ( http://www.geneshepherd.com ). The original pattern is a basket full of Christmas greens and a Noel ribbon, which is not really my kind of pattern, so I started out by following Gene's alternative tweaked pattern. I hooked a bluebird, and then thought that a basket of flowers, even with a bluebird was not really my kind of pattern, so I added a cat slinking in from the opposite side. The cat really didn't look like a cat, so I asked Vicki of fanXstitch if she would draw a sort of evil cat for me.

She drew a wonderful sly looking cat, but when I copied the drawing and translated it into hooking with size 8 strips, it didn't look evil and really didn't look much like a cat. Also, although it doesn't show much in the picture, the greenish/yellow tweed wool was definitely the wrong color. I shaped the cat face a little to give it some dimension and added some whiskers that were cut from a plastic bag I was saving for onion dyeing.

Then I added some flowers, doing sort of freestyle mini-prodding, mostly with size 8 strips, although I tore wider strips for the bigger yellow padulas.

I changed the cat to brown, kind of lost the face that I liked even though it was not sly, and kind of lost the whole point of having the cat. Today, I am either going to redraw the cat so he is facing in the opposite direction or eliminate him all together. I like the basket, the handle, and the flowers, but the bird seems pretty dull and kind of extraneous - and will be especially if I delete the cat. Plus, if I delete the cat, I'll have to hook in the left side of the basket and I really like it exactly like it is.

Well, I'll see. I think I have to go out to the barn and find some plain gray wool for the new cat. No more tweeds.