My daughters gifted me 6 weeks of lessons in traditional rug hooking (after straight out telling them what a great Christmas gift THAT would be) sometime in the late 80’s or early 90’s. As the saying goes, I was hooked!
“Boo”, a whimsical, Halloween rug, was a door prize I won at a hook-in several years ago. It was my 2020 ‘winter in Florida’ project. Whimsy is not my strong suit! I refer to myself as a ‘representational’ hooker – sheep look like sheep in sheep colors, jack-o-lanterns don’t have teeth and what is that exploding from the back of the crow! .
The initial plan was to use wool only from my own stash, which worked for the jack-o-lanterns and the crow. Lacking a sufficient amount of wool for the background, I purchased a lovely purple spot dye. It looked great in the store – not so much when hooked next to the pomegranate pumpkins. So, into the dye pot it went …, several times to achieve the moody, dark background I envisioned, that subsequently swallowed the black (remember representational) crow. After trying a variety of ‘poison’ colors, I outlined the crow in yellow sparkle wool, to bring it out of the depths of darkness. The crow’s wing is outlined with some on-hand, purple, novelty, eyelash yarn.
The ‘thing’ emerging from in back of the crow begged for a little sparkle. After some experimentation, I settled on reflective purple/black glass beads to create a subtle gleam. Sewn in and nestled in between loops, the multifaceted beads reflect any available light.
Horizontal and vertical lines suggested open boxes bordering the jack-o-lanterns in the original design. I ‘closed’ the boxes with the darkest value of the overdyed wool and hooked a lighter value swirl in each, echoing the larger swirls I hooked in the background.
The edges of the rug are whipped with rug weight wool yarn, dyed to match the background.
In spite of all my lamentations and misgivings about this project, I’m pleased with the outcome. The rug hangs in a stairwell visible when you enter the house. I didn’t wait for Halloween. It seemed appropriate to the current ghoulish times to hang it when it was completed in June of this year.