Greens Galore

I had a request for some greens from a fellow hooker, so I spent some time in the dyepots recently. Greens sure do have a lot of blue in them, blue that likes to make it self known!

Anyway, I got a nice batch of greens. As I was taking pictures of the wool, I decided to pair it up with nature scenes. What fun to find just the right photo and match it with the greens I dyed. Here is what I did.

Who would have believed...???

Who would have believed we'd have a hurricane in upstate New York??? Irene is now a tropical storm, but is still pounding us with rain and wind. Luckily, no major damage, just a lot of tree debris and a few downed trees in Saratoga. Still about five hours to go before this moves out. Power was out for only three hours, so we've been lucky so far.

I hate when the power goes out. One of these days, we have to invest in a generator. It's times like these that I realize just how addicted to the computer I am.

Hope all those along the east coast are coping alright. My family on the New Jersey coast came through just fine.

Take care.

The Road Not Taken

Just finished reading The Other Life by Ellen Meister. Here is a link to the Amazon.com page:



This book reminded me of the poem by Robert Frost called "The Road Not Taken." In the story, the main character finds a portal to a different life, and ultimately she must choose which reality she wants to live in. I got thinking about what would my life have been like if I had made different decisions during my college years. Couldn't quite grasp where I would be today without my husband, children, and grandson. Kind of spooky to imagine this. And yet, there is a bit of wonder about other adventures I might have taken. Wonder if I would have eventually found rug hooking in that other life!!

Do you ever think about lost possibilities?

Blogs, blogs, and more blogs

I don't know about you, but I love reading blogs! A while back I compiled a list of as many rug hooking blogs as I could find. It was quite a long list. I can't imagine how many more there are now.

I find myself reading a blog from my list, and then looking at their blog list. I start reading some of those blogs, adding those I like to my list. It amazes me just how many different topics there are out there to read about. I love it! What a great way to voice your thoughts and opinions, get advice and share a love for a craft or hobby!

If you haven't checked out Hooked on the Lake, please do so. It's a great blog on rug hooking. Another great one is Mollie Makes, a fun blog about stitching, crafting, collecting, etc.

Two weeks until my daughter's wedding. We're in full wedding mode!

Have a great weekend!

The Group of Seven

Since reading Deanne Fitzpatrick's Inspired Rug Hooking, I've become quite interested in landscape rugs and landscape artists. I decided to check out some landscape artists in the library before starting my rug depicting my childhood home. Wanted to look at paintings with pine trees in particular. So I started looking at all sorts of artists, and finally found the Group of Seven. The Group of Seven was a group of Canadian landscape artists from the 1920s whose work was influenced by the impressionists. I googled them and found lots of links to their artwork, and finally bought a book from amazon.com all about their work. Here is the link.



I'm also including pictures from the Web showing some of their paintings. I love looking at these paintings and find that if I look at the brush strokes and coloring, it helps figure out which way to go with my hooking.

Loopy Ladies Dye Day

I've been meaning to post these photos, but time has marched on! Here are some of the photos taken during the Loopy Ladies dye workshop held at my house. We had a great time, and did a number of techniques.

This is called "Minerals". Five different quarter yard pieces are abrashed with a coppery formula. Just beautiful!






Sky at Dusk is a dip dye. Finished wool and shown along with the dip technique.







Peeking into the pot to see what's cooking!






A beautiful transcolor called "Asia."

Jo and I taking wool from a pot!

Some of our marbleized wool.

Our pancake dyed wool. Great variations in shading.

And last, I'd like to post a photo of my beautiful daughter trying on her wedding dress for her first fitting.

The ProChem Project

I must be out of my mind, but I've decided to dye every color of dye that ProChemical makes in the Washfast Acid category. What you see pictured below is 103 Straw through 351 Red.


Each piece is a quarter yard of Dorr natural wool overdyed with each individual color. 1/16 tsp. of dye was used in each overdye. I had a few reasons for wanting to do this. First, the little sample cards of overdyed yarn that you can buy from ProChem just weren't big enough for me. The water in my city is very hard (full of minerals), so I wanted to see how each color reacted to that water. Another thing this project is showing me is how deep the color is using 1/16 tsp. over a quarter yard of wool. In some cases, the sixteenth of a teaspoon gives you a nice strong color. In other dyes, the 1/16 tsp. barely covers the yard. The dye is sometimes taken up so quickly that the color can't get to the entire piece. I'm also finding out which dyes take longer to dissolve in boiling water. Red 351 is notorious for leaving spots of undissolved dye on the wool if not stirred and stirred and stirred in the boiling water. A few others are like this, too.

This is turning out to be an interesting project. It's going to allow me to lay colors next to one another to see possible blends for dip dyes and transcolor wools. Not to mention that I'm creating quite a nice storehouse of wool! I also am seeing all the colors, not just the ones I use most often and am most comfortable with.

I've taken a break from dyeing this weekend, but will get back to the project on Monday. It's been fairly easy to leave just one pot on the stove and have a pot boiling away while I'm doing something else.

My daughter is here visiting also for a few days. Today is her first fitting for her wedding dress. I'm taking pictures, so I'll post some later.

Childhood Home Rug

I finished all the drawing on the rug depicting my childhood home. I'm hoping to transfer it to the backing this afternoon. This will be my first attempt at filling in multiple pines and I've been looking over Anne Marie Littenburg's book on landscape rugs along with Jane Green Halliwell's book on pictorial rugs. This may take some work as I'm going to use a lot of yarns in the rug. Here is a photo of some of yarn I got from Webs.

I'm really happy with the greens, and I think the gray/brown (up front in photo) will lend itself to the bark well. It has a bit of a silver filament running through it, which I'm looking forward to using.

Hoping I'm not biting off more than I can chew!