During the winter, I went to Heavens to Betsy's hook-in just south of Kinderhook, NY. Ali Striebel was there selling her wool, books, etc. The great thing to see in her booth was all the samples she brought showing the wonderful ideas for using wool. I was fascinated to see that she had made some pillows using wool fabric. Attached on top of the face of the pillow was a piece of dyed linen with a hooked motif on it. The background of the hooking was simply the dyed linen. That got me thinking about some of the small pieces of linen I had left from larger rug projects.
At a dye session in May, some of my fellow hookers went to Julie Smith's studio where we dyed perle cotton thread for use in embroidery. I brought some of my small linen pieces thinking I'd use the leftover dyes to create some colorful linen backgrounds for hooking. Of course, the linen got set aside for a bit!
A couple of weeks ago I came across a pretty aqua blue piece I had dyed, drew some shorebirds on it, and started hooking. Here is the rug I came up with. I haven't finished figuring out how the edging is going to look, but I did finish the hooking and did needle felt in some wispy clouds using natural roving.
I used a variation of the wool to the right called Murano Swirl for the sand. The variation is a fair bit lighter, but you can see how the colors play together. I also used a formula called Pink Sands that is a pale, pale gray pink shade. I like the effect of the colors hooked randomly.
This was one of those projects that I couldn't stop working on. Perhaps knowing I didn't have to hook the entire background helped a lot!
Hope your hooking is going along great this summer.
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