Hooking my Chateau

One of my new designs for this year is Le Petit Chateau. I began this rug last winter with a small sketch that I then enlarged to the full-sized pattern.

Love is blue

Color is a powerful element on my periodic table. Color is evocative. I have devoted much of this lifetime studying color, immersing myself in beautiful colors, surrounding myself with the colors that make me happy.

Fall colors in the dyepot

Pumpkin is not just a color in the pumpkin patch. I had a longing for the harvest colors in my wool collection so I set out to recreate some of the inspiring colors of Fall for my recent trip to be a vendor in Bothel, Washington. I am using my dye method called marbleizing for this batch of wool. I developed and refined this technique almost 10 years ago. The wool colorations reminded me of marbled paper, but since it was not an actual marbling technique, I decided to call it marbleizing.

I am happy to finish another rug

In my last post I was showing you a bit of my latest rug for next year’s catalog, and was working on hooking the final bit. Well, it is done and I did not change much this time. I alway flip the rug over and check to see that all it well on the back. There are always wool threads to trim, and occasionally there is and end that I forgot to pull to the top. Once in a while there might be a small open space that I forgot to hook. Now is the time to take care of that. Now that all is done, I steam press the entire back surface of the rug. This design fits on a table top, and I am using a small portable ironing board that I lie flat on the table. 

A great new color wheel

I have been looking for a new color wheel to offer for sale and I am excited to have found this one. One of the things I am looking for is a blend of softer colors. If I used bright colors, I might be happy with a standard color wheel. Since I use primitive colors, this interior design color wheel was just the thing.

The hidden world of colors

Do colors have a hidden life? Do they think? Do they feel? What would they tell me if we shared the same language?

Seeing red…in a good way

I detected a color theme in my dye kitchen today.

A dreamy day to rug hook

For today’s design I am reaching up to the pink and yellow colored wools to hook with.

The last stages of hooking Seaweed pull things together

 

Here I am almost finished with hooking Seaweed, and am happy with the interesting variety of the background. The lighter splotches of color are the Dark Olive Brown against the Inky Olive wool. The blue-purple that I hooked in the lower left I added near the bottom right.

Beautiful colors of wool inspire me as I hook

Here is my worktable with many of the wools that I am hooking into my Seaweed rug design. I also have out a color wheel that I refer to. I find that it can point me in a direction when I am looking for a color harmony.