Due to the Covid Delta variant we had to return to Zoom for this Quabbie meeting. We had a great time anyway! Below is the show-and-tell (with permission from all) that we had at the meeting. Here are finished works or works in progress. Carole is a recent member (but not a new rug maker) who lives in Acton. She started this ambitious rug project 4 years ago in a class with Janet Connor at Green Mountain Rug Hooking School. At the time, Carole was new to the art of rug hooking and was really intimidated by this rug which she adapted from a photograph of one of Van Gogh's transitional paintings titled "Bulb Field." Janet Connor drew the image on the linen for her and she got the rug started, but after the rug school ended she came home and put it away. She'd take it out every once in a while and work on it, then put it away again. Fortunately time and her experience creating other rugs since then has allowed her to overcome her intimidation and now she's working steadily on it. She's using cuts from 3 to 9, with the larger cuts mostly in the foreground where the scene would be closest to the eye. This rug is approximately 16x24" and will go on a wall when done. A closeup of a small section is above. Next up, we have a rug from Debbie Palmer of Olde Hadley Wool. If you look back at our last meeting notes, you can see the start of this rug, self-designed by Debbie. She made it for her Cape Cod cottage as a runner to hold everyone's sandy sandals when people come into the house from the beach, and completed it very quickly. She used 6, 7, and 8 cuts. Most of the rug is over-dyed textured wool in a variety of colors from her stash. Approximately 12x28" Here is Lynda Faye's rug design (is this fun or what?) based on a dream she had in which she was thrilled to be hanging around 2 hippos, one of whom was craving and eating peanut butter. In the dream Lynda was getting ready to feed even more peanut butter to her hippo friend. Although the design is the product of Lynda's happy dream, she is also paying homage to the Rug Hooking Magazine challenge from last year asking people do design rugs with "thought bubbles" in them (a la cartoons). She volunteers each week at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst (unbelievably charming) and found a book there with two hippos that also inspired her. Her hippos will likely be bright pink, and she's left room for a wide border with lots of possibilities for colorful geometrics surrounding the center. Approximately 17x28. She'll use a 6-cut. From Phyllis Lawrence we have a wonderful self-designed rug of her four grandchildren. She developed this from a photo of them running out of the ocean waves at a stony beach in Maine three years ago. It's her first try hooking people. She's using a 4 cut on monks cloth and the piece is about 17x28. Because her grandkids live on two different coasts in the US, she's very fond of this rare image of them all in one place. Last but not least is Tricia Miller's Wood Duck, measuring approximately 10x16 and developed from an open-source photograph. Done in a 3-cut. She had quite a challenge here, creating the amazing background by hooking dip-dyed wool horizontally, exactly in the order it was cut. And since the strips were not quite long enough to make it all the way across the width of the piece, she had the added challenge of somehow kluging left-over pieces of the dip-dye together where the strips didn't meet, without making it obvious. It's so seamless, you'd never guess!
Her comment on this was that it's not the kind of hooking one can do while talking or while watching tv, as it requires total attention. And she remarked that hooking this way with a dip-dye results in a lot of leftover pieces, so it's not cost effective either. However, the effect is worth it.
1 Comment
Kathleen Knisely
8/24/2021 12:27:25 pm
I really enjoyed this show and tell. I thought Carole F.'s idea to use wide strips in foreground, thinner behind, was brilliant in creating the sense of distance with the changed textures. Clever hands at work out there!
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