Rug Hooking with Varied Stitches

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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

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

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

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

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

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!

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!

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

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

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.

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

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://rughookersmeritprogram.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!