Thursday, September 16, 2010

Sometimes things just work themselves out



Okay this is a TERRIBLE picture, but I had to take it while I still had some of the wool left! I've been sitting here looking at my unfinished brown wizard rug. Unhappily, because the  background needed to suggest a deep forest to match my mental picture of what I was trying to create. The wizard has stopped and is looking behind him, before turning to disappear from sight. Once I began cutting strips and filling in the areas of the background it was perfect to me. Isn't that a wonderful feeling when your mental picture and reality converge? It has been sitting for a long time, because I couldn't find the right background wool. Then rug camp came along bringing the wonderful stacked jack-o-lanterns rug from Maria, and I also worked on the rug that will be for our granddaughter's birthday next February, the Karen Kahle design, Waterlilies. In fact, this summer was the first for a long time, where quilting didn't eclipse hooking.

I finally began palette dyeing in May. It has taken me 5 months to get to Yellow Green, so this wonderful wool nearly was overdyed several times earlier... but it would always have disappeared in my "creative piles" just at the time I needed to find it to presoak. I can be looking right at something and not see it. If you are the same you understand. If not, well although there are times it is a curse,  but sometimes it saves something special from being used or thrown away. Of course this wool was never a candidate for the trashbag. ;)

What is he looking at? I hope you will feel he is searching your soul. His face is the merging of a human and owl face. I especially love his eyebrows, which are somewhat like proddy, but merely very long loops cut to twist this way and that.

This jacquard wool is a piece of Pendleton wool, that was transformed via my Jam Jar with extra Khaki Drab added to my yellow green formula. The large white area will be a luna moth, my nod to LOTR movie where a luna moth is a messenger to Radagast, the brown wizard. This design is an adaptation of April DeConick's Santa for 2009. She used that rug to teach us value hooking at the Kirby Circle. I hadn't started dyeing my wool yet, and had more brown than anything. A brown Santa seemed sad. So with April's permission, I adapted her pattern to be a wizard instead. The beautiful lavenders of his cap were a swatch pack from April, to add an extra memory of the class and her teaching for me. This rug will be finished as a pillow most likely.

1 comment:

Farm Girl said...

Good Morning, I think it is going to be beautiful just like all of the other rugs you make. The wools you dyed look so great.

It sounds like you have been busy.
Your breakfast ideas sound good too.
I am lucky because my husband feeds me every morning. :) He has from day one of our married life together.
When he is out of town, I live on toast and coffee. I always look for great ideas for breakfast.
I hope no hurricanes are making to you.
Have a wonderful day.
Love,
Kim