Rug Finished and New Frame

I finally finished the little kit designed by Sharon Perry. I still have to bind it.I finished it on my new octagonal frame from BeeCreek. I really enjoyed using the extra space available on this frame and I enjoyed being able to just turn the frame without having to turn the stand. I hooked the last row, the black one, all the way around the rug without taking it off of the frame more than once.

The frame sits on a ball that lets it be rotated and tilted in all directions.

There's a ball under the frame at the end of the steel stand.

The stand has a steel plate that has just the right balance so the frame is extremely sturdy, but it's not very heavy. The stand is very adjustable height-wise.

The wooden frame around the ball is removable so the frame can be disattached and used as a lap frame - the stand can be taken apart so it would fit nicely in a suitcase. The whole thing arrived in a comparatively small box - that might fit into a large suitcase.

This photo has nothing to do with hooking - but it's one I love - of two of my favorite people - my mother, one week shy of 98 years old, and my amazing niece who lives with her husband and two children in Guatamala - working for the US Center for Disease Control on epidemics like the H1N1 virus.

Butler Hooking Frame

Someone on Rughookers has been looking for Butler frames, so I thought I would share photos of mine. I have kept it out in my unfinished studio/barn all winter and have missed using it. It's really too big to leave it set up in my mother's dining room, so I've been using a Puritan on a floor stand - something that can be shoved off into a corner. The hooking space on this Butler frame is about twice as big as the Puritan.

The frame folds down,

and the floor supports fold up,

so the frame can be transported on it's wheels. There's a comfortable wooden handle for pulling. When I pull it in and out of hotels, I usually pile my hooking bags on top of the floor supports and use the whole thing like a cart. I really love this frame. The only faults I find with it are 1) the size for fitting into my mother's dining room - old houses tend to have smaller rooms, so it would also be too large for my own dining room, but it's just perfect in any of my studio spaces, and 2) I can't twist and turn it the way I can the Puritan when I want to hook in different directions - so, it makes me do what my old teacher always said I should do, learn to hook in all directions without moving my pattern - or, I can easily take the pattern off of the frame and turn it.

So, that's the Butler. The following photo is my sneaky Blue - loving to lay on the rug on the forbidden love seat while I'm so involved in hooking I don't notice.

More on the Cottage Rug

I've made some progress on the cottage rug. I hooked the lawn, mostly with the strips that had already been cut - they dyed up nicely.

I did some more bleeding and marrying and came up with overly textured wools - I used some pendleton plaids and some dark gray tweeds - so, I decided, rather than get out the Cushing dyes, I'd just hook the water with the solid blue I already had. I also have a really nice blue and green check, so I used that for waves and decided that's my textured wool for the water.

I really started to have fun with this rug. I saw an old photo in an album I'm putting together for my mother, and my mother and grandmother were sitting in front of the cottage talking - so, I hooked my grandmother into the lawn. Then, I kept thinking about my brother going fishing - well, both of my grandfathers did a lot of fishing there, too, so I hooked in a boat and a fisherman. The boats at the lake were both painted white, but I decided to work with the wool that was already in a box at my feet and the lightest there was a gray. I finally had a good feeling about this rug, the same feeling I used to get as a kid when I had a piece of paper and a box of crayons, drawing without a plan, just adding parts as I thought of them. Hooking without a pattern is like that, and I think I'll do it more often.

Summer Cottage Rug

I've pulled out one of those put-aside rugs. It's a pictorial/memory rug, a picture of the old stone cottage on Big Lake, near Davisburg, Michigan. The cottage was hand-built in the early twentieth century by the Thielmans, the in-laws of my uncle's wife's sister. Back then, the city of Detroit was like a small town, everybody knew everybody or knew their relatives or neighbors and my mother had a friend who married one of the Thielmans, and that friend's sister married my uncle - anyway, that friendship must be how my family was able to have the cottage every summer during my childhood. We used to spend our summers there in the late 1940s and early 1950s - and even back then, it was full of antiques and was basically an antique itself. The kitchen was outfitted with running water through a hand pump next to the sink - it was necessary to keep a glass of water by the sink to prime the pump. There was also an ice box, an ice box that held big fifty pound blocks of ice that was delivered every so often. I remember an ice wagon pulled by horses, but that might just be my imagination, and I also remember a truck built like a milk delivery truck with cold ice water draining out of the back. The children slept in a large room upstairs that was fitted out with a collection of old brass beds. The living room had a pot bellied stove that we sat around on cold, rainy summer days. There was a day bed over in one corner, by the window I've put in the rug, and that's where my mother read to us every afternoon. My strongest memory is of learning to read by watching her read Black Beauty to us.

I've tried several wool colors for the lawn in front of the cottage and haven't been happy with any of them, so I decided to take all the colors I was using, add some more green wool, and marry the colors together. Also, just to experiment, I added some strips that had already been cut.

Once I simmered the wool in a pot of water and added vinegar to set the color, I pulled the wool out of the pot. Most of the real green had already been used up and the color that was left was a blue-green, with more blue than I wanted in my lawn. Experience has shown me that blue is one of the slower colors to be taken up by wool and I knew I didn't want much of that blue.



The photo above shows the wool after it was pulled out of the pot - the bright green at the top were my bleeders, the strips on the left started out as a very light yellow green (I call it puke green), and the wool on the right is from a recycled coat and that must be the wool that provided the blue-green.

I still have to rinse and dry the wool. After that and after hooking the lawn, I'll have to start on the water and sky colors. I decided I want all of the wool to be textured, so I may have to set up a pot of blues to bleed so I can marry some of the same textures together as blues. I hooked myself jumping from the rope swing before I decided on all textures, but I'm not going to rehook my pink arms and legs.

It is fun to hook a memory rug of this sort, I keep drifting off in old memories - like my brother and his friend chasing me and throwing fish eyeballs at me, or going out in the rowboat with lunches packed by my mother that included milk in pop bottles, and my dad coming home from the office and taking us swimming and throwing us off of his shoulders. I have one regret, we used to throw our garbage in the swamp next door, long before we thought there was anything wrong with doing that. I guess we didn't do any long-term damage, the swamp is all gone now anyway, buried under several houses.

Using Antique Black

I've been using the antique black wool that I dyed a few weeks ago. It's not very exciting antique black, just sort of common black that has a little bit of depth to it. I actually prefer the antique black that can be made using red and green and blue wool - if it is barely overdyed with black, a little of the red and green and blue peeks through. Then it looks like old wool, wool that has been used and worn and rubbed so much that some of the black has worn off. Sometimes a regular piece of black wool straight off the bolt has some or all of those colors hiding under the black. That happens when something was wrong with the original dye process, so the wool was overdyed. I love finding that kind of black. All you have to do is bleed off some of the black dye, and there you have wonderful worn looking antique black.



I used the antique black for this horse in my Yahooker swap mat. It's not easy to get something more than a flat silhouette when you want to hook a black horse - and I've loved black horses ever since early childhood - so I let the variation in color in the antique black delineate some of the muscles and contours of the horse.

However, my main use of the antique black has been in my Gene Shepherd blog hook-in rug ( http://geneshepherd.com/) . Over the last weekend, I played around with various colors for the scallops and for the background beyond the scallops. I hooked one corner all in blue, with red scallops - ugh! Then I hooked black scallops and red background - ugh! again.
One problem is that I've hooked the basket and flowers in brighter colors than I ever use. I wanted to bring those colors out into the background, but they are just too bright for me. I picked the darkest strips of the basket color and hooked them around the medallion, and then hoooked a pair of beauty lines - one red, and one of the blue plaid I used in the wing of the bluebird. After the ugh! attempts, I decided to fill everything between all of the lines with antique black. In a few places, I'm going to hook in short bits of very light black, just to keep the black alive. Today, I'm going to hook outside the red line to make a black frame all the way around. I'm going to kind of jump around with the rest of my hooking, in case I run out of antique black and have to cook up some more - I'm leaving just-in-case spaces for the new wool to fit in.

I'm so pleased to be doing this rug as part of Gene Shepherd's hook-in. He gives the greatest hints on his blog while he's hooking the same pattern - I think I've heard more suggestions and good ideas than in a regular class - the great thing about a blog class is you don't get too tired to listen and learn, which is always what happens to me in a day-long class (one of my post-polio symptoms.) With a blog, you can stop and start whenever you want and you can go back and re-read, re-look, anytime, day or night. So, here's a "shout-out" to Gene - THANKYOU GENE!!!

Rughookers Anniversary

I had an absolutely wonderful surprise today when I read Gene Shepherd's blog (http://geneshepherd.com/ ). I had forgotten that Rughookers has been around for a whole decade now and what a nice way to be reminded. I thought I would take this opportunity to tell the story of Rughookers (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rughookers )

More than a dozen years ago, I bought that funny long frame building in this old aerial photo. The building is the largest one in downtown Hamburg, Michigan (which you can see is not a very large town). I loved the old building, bought it without a real plan, but I had a sporadic antique business at my farm and I was in love with some antique replica crafts, so I decided to turn the main floor of the building into an antique shop and then have craft classes held in other parts of the building.

I was teaching school in another small town fifty miles away and running a boarding stable and riding school at my farm, so I could only give Saturday and Sunday afternoons and Thursday and Friday evenings to the store. On Saturdays, I gave riding lessons in the morning and then raced off to the store, made a big pot of soup or stew on the old ten burner stove in the upstairs back hall, and fed the riding students and other teachers because making lunch was the only way I could get everyone to leave the farm in time for me to open the antique shop at noon.

I called the building The Hamburg Store because it had alway before been called The Hamburg Hardware. It was situated on a corner, with a refurbished general store next door and an old gas station converted into a fire hall next to that. Around the corner and behind The Store was an old church that had become the town hall, with the police station in the basement. After the township moved out, the old church became a library. That building is now a museum, started and run by the people who now own the old general store and the old fire hall. I started doing some of my school work at the store when the customers and hangers-on were gone, correcting papers and recording grades and doing research on the internet. The internet was quite different then, not nearly so many choices available, and somehow I found the rug hooking group called Padula. I learned that there were other rug hookers and started learning from them about schools and suppliers and Rug Hooking Magazine. We chatted a lot about rugs, but we couldn't see them, there was no photo hosting on the server. While surfing the internet, I eventually found the Yahoo group service. I set up a group, thinking Padulans would like to see photos of their rugs, and I called the group Rughookers. The people running Padula weren't excited about having photos, so I was suddenly the proud owner of a completely independent group. I can remember saying back then that if we could get three hundred members, we would probably have all of the internet savvy rughookers in the whole country.

I used to think about Rughookers as a home, a home where visitors should be welcomed and treated as honored guests. Netiquet really hadn't been established well yet and there were often unpleasant outbursts in the early years - sometimes it felt like we were the Hatfields and the McCoys with our foolish disagreements. That's when I hooked this little house, which would have been big enough to entertain the whole group.

It only took a few years for the group to grow so large we needed a new home. I thought this house would be the one I would build on my farm if I ever won the lottery, but instead, The Lottery House turned into The Rughookers Home, and the Rughookers Home is a place where all rughookers are welcome.

Almost two years ago, I moved from my farm to my mother's home, a couple miles from the store. I now sit inside this house when I surf the net and have the great good fortune to have a large group of friends on Rughookers.

The Cat Has Been Chased Away by a Dog

I removed the cat and replaced her with a dog. Now there's no connection between the dog and the bird, but I like the dog. Maybe I can go back to putting a cat sneaking into the picture from the side - might give the pattern some better balance. I think I'll start on the black on the right side and leave the possible cat side alone for now.

Gene Shepherd's Blog Hook-In

I'm having a lot of fun working on the December 2008 Rug Hooking Magazine free pattern with Gene Shepherd's Blog Hook-In ( http://www.geneshepherd.com ). The original pattern is a basket full of Christmas greens and a Noel ribbon, which is not really my kind of pattern, so I started out by following Gene's alternative tweaked pattern. I hooked a bluebird, and then thought that a basket of flowers, even with a bluebird was not really my kind of pattern, so I added a cat slinking in from the opposite side. The cat really didn't look like a cat, so I asked Vicki of fanXstitch if she would draw a sort of evil cat for me.

She drew a wonderful sly looking cat, but when I copied the drawing and translated it into hooking with size 8 strips, it didn't look evil and really didn't look much like a cat. Also, although it doesn't show much in the picture, the greenish/yellow tweed wool was definitely the wrong color. I shaped the cat face a little to give it some dimension and added some whiskers that were cut from a plastic bag I was saving for onion dyeing.

Then I added some flowers, doing sort of freestyle mini-prodding, mostly with size 8 strips, although I tore wider strips for the bigger yellow padulas.

I changed the cat to brown, kind of lost the face that I liked even though it was not sly, and kind of lost the whole point of having the cat. Today, I am either going to redraw the cat so he is facing in the opposite direction or eliminate him all together. I like the basket, the handle, and the flowers, but the bird seems pretty dull and kind of extraneous - and will be especially if I delete the cat. Plus, if I delete the cat, I'll have to hook in the left side of the basket and I really like it exactly like it is.

Well, I'll see. I think I have to go out to the barn and find some plain gray wool for the new cat. No more tweeds.

Mystery Solved!

The mystery of the black bag left at the antique shop is solved! It was indeed Linda Smiths, and, unhappily, she and her husband are victims of the Michigan disaster - her husband was layed off from three different jobs, all auto business related. They finally had to make the tough decision to leave their home. Her husband found a good job down south, Linda is going to have to give up her teaching job and her rural life style and move into an apartment.

UGH! I gave up teaching when I retired and I still miss it. I'm uncomfortable every September when school starts, like an old workhorse put out to pasture, and I often see or do things that I'd like to share with students. Maybe Linda is young enough she won't feel that way - she'll find some kind of teaching to do down there. But - giving up rural living?? Not me, not ever, No Way!

I grew up with neighbors right next door - so right next door that I could stay awake at night and hear them carrying on their lives, just like listening to a soap opera on the radio. Now, my nearest neighbors are not within shouting distance, and I like it that way. When I was driving the tractor on a hot summer day during haying season, I could whip off my T-shirt and only worry about being spotted by low-flying pilots. So, I doubt I could do what Linda is doing - moving far away, leaving her mother, sister, and son behind. I suppose it's a lot like what our ancestors did when they loaded up their wagons and looked for greener pastures.

Linda is going to leave her chickens behind. Two of them. A rooster and a hen, pets that she hatched from eggs ordered from Maine. Lucky for me, she's going to leave them with me. I'll try to take the best of care of them, in case she eventually becomes a rural person again.

Maybe I'll try to finish hooking her rooster mat so she can take it with her.

Good-bye Antique Shop

Well, the bad economy in Michigan is good luck for me. My neighbors at my store in the village of Hamburg have had an engineering/design business that was tied to the automotive companies. There just isn't enough business for them to survive, so Suzanne has decided she wants to open a shop - she used to have one quite a few years ago in the building that is now their home and his design business - so she wants to lease my building. I want to keep my studios upstairs (where on earth could I find a place to store twelve looms??) so she's going to lease the downstairs - which is still filled with my antique business. So she'll sell my antiques for me along with her hand-made items - and they'll clean-up and fix-up the building.

We walked through the building today and I realized there's still quite a bit of rug hooking inventory downstairs that I'll have to move upstairs, but only a few other things that I'd like to hang onto. What a huge relief! I have not liked leaving the building unprotected, and kids have broken in several times, but I just haven't allowed myself to worry about it. I had talked about selling the building, but this is no time to do that and I really didn't want to give it up, someday I won't be caring for my mother anymore and I'll want to have work to do - so, this way I can have my cake and eat it, too. I have a huge antique inventory, and I'll only get half of my list price for the items, but I wasn't even getting that half while everything was in there gathering dust - and this way, I won't have to pay for the utilities. This will be good for me and good for the whole village - and, anytime I can, I can reopen my rug hooking business.

A Mystery

I stopped at my antique shop today. I was planning to serve onion soup for dinner and I wanted to get some soup bowls from the shop. I haven't been there for some time, usually now I only go if UPS has delivered a package there by mistake. I had the wrong key ring, so I didn't get the soup bowls, but I did find a big black plastic bag leaning against the front door. I glanced inside, saw that it was full of bags of wool, and put it in the car. I puzzled about the bag all the way home. I thought it had probably been left by a disenchanted or discouraged hooker, since bags of wool have appeared for those reasons in the past.

When I opened the bag at home, I found plastic bags full of wool, some cut, some not cut. There was a nice hoop, a pair of scissors, and a bag with a number of felted ball pin cushions.

There was no note, no explanation. There was an unfinished rooster rug, but that didn't offer any clues, other than it was hand-drawn and not a commercial pattern.

Then I found a real clue, that was even more confusing. If this bag belonged to Linda Smith, maybe it was just accidently left. Maybe it's a bag of ongoing projects, I can't imagine Linda Smith giving up hooking. It's not just a bag of leftover wool - there's some unused linen in the bag, too. It doesn't make any sense at all, I can't imagine Linda Smith giving up hooking - but it does make sense that this is her bag. The rooster would be one of hers, too - she gave me the chickens that started my revived interest in raising chickens. I think that was three or four years ago. I don't have her phone number and can't remember her husband's name, and Smith's are just too hard to find. I saw Linda last fall at the Webster Township Festival and haven't seen her since. I know where she lives, but don't know her teaching schedule this year - she teaches either morning or afternoon - I'll have to try and stop at her house sometime soon and find out what this bag means.

Making Antique Black

I drew a new pattern today - which I won't describe because I might use it for the Yahooker swap, instead of the one that required so many color adjustments. I needed antique black wool for the new pattern, but if I have any, it's out in the barn and I just didn't feel like walking out in the bitter cold to find it. I had some wool jackets and coats down in the basement, so I picked four of them, cut off a sleeve from each jack, and threw them into a dye pot. There was a dark green, a black and white herringbone, a brown and red tweed, and a black. The dyepot already had some leftover red dyewater and some dish soap in it. That one sleeve was probably black, but I'm working in such week light that I could be wrong, it could be navy blue. I was finally pretty sure it was black when the water in the dyepot started to change color.

I checked the color of the dye water by dipping a jar into the pot and holding it up to the light. After more than half an hour of simmering, the color was still very weak, so I figured I needed some more black, but I really didn't want to cut up any more of that black jacket. Then I remembered the sleeve linings - two of them were black and I had just thrown them away. I retrieved them from the waste basket and added them to the pot. About fifteen minutes later, I had a strong black in the dye water. I added a couple glugs of vinegar, and let the whole pot simmer for another half hour.

Patient dyers will remove a dyepot from the heat source and let it cool overnight - but not me. I singed my fingers by turning the faucet in the kitchen sink to as hot as I could get it, and then removing the wool from the pot to rinse it in the sink. The wool was really dyed black, only the two pieces of brown tweed showed any of the original color - at least while it was still very wet. I laughed to myself as I hung the pieces in the basement - I'll let them drip dry until morning, then I'll put them in the dryer. The laughing was because I was thinking about Gene Shepherd's blog and his beautiful yards and yards of wool hanging out to dry in his hot California sunshine - and here I was quite pleased with my colorless wool in a dark and creepy Michigan basement.
Sunday morning: Here is the finished antique black - the camera makes it look a lot lighter than it looks to my eye, maybe because it's sitting on a green jacket, but it isn't the dull sooty black that it looked like when it was wet. There is a nice variety of texture that I'm going to enjoy. Now I'm ready to strip it and start hooking!

I had the surprising good fortune to win two Ebay auctions for antique hooked rugs. The rugs aren't in perfect condition, but I like to look at the work of the old hookers - especially the hookers who made rugs intended to be used. The rug in the first three pictures is in good shape everywhere except down the center line. It doesn't show in the photo, but there are two rows right in the center where the burlap is worn out. The whipping was done with a very thin yarn, almost just a wool thread, and it completely covers the edge of the burlap - I'm only assuming the backing is burlap, I haven't really checked yet.


I took this photo to show the thin whipping thread, but now I'm intrigued with the way the black hooking made such a perfect corner. It almost looks like different people hooked different parts, since the pink is hooked so much tighter than the black, and then the gold looks like a different hooking style altogether.

If you draw an imaginary line between the rose buds, then find it's center and move about an inch to the right, you can see the strip where the hooking is gone and the burlap is worn out.

The pattern and the choice of colors looks like what I think of as a dimestore kit - I don't know why I call them that since I never saw a hooked rug kit in a dimestore, but that's where I think they would have been sold. I suppose I'm showing my age by even remembering dime stores.

The second rug is much larger than the first, it's as wide as the first one is long. It's also much more worn than the first one. It seems like a rug that was really cared about, it has already been mended in quite a few places. There is burlap added on the back and there are places where new hooking was added.

This is half of the rug, and it looks pretty good, although I suspect the burlap is having a hard time holding the weight of the rug when it isn't placed on the floor.

You can see the patches in this photo. The patches are all around the edges, although the outer edge hasn't shredded the way many old rugs have.

Here are the two spots that are in the worst condition. I suppose they could be mended the same way the other places have been repaired. I might someday do the repair, but if I do, I will probably put some muslin or canvas all over the back to try to support the weight of the rug.

I probably won't put the rugs on the floor - when I did put them down to look at them, I had to fight off two dogs who were determined to claim the rugs as their own. I'm sure the burlap on the largest one is not going to survive the pressure of dogs rolling, or even walking on it.

I really enjoy looking at these rugs and wondering who hooked them and where they were placed for so many years. There are no hints like worn pathways or protected areas on either rug to indicate that they were placed in or out of a traffic pattern. They both look like they have been walked on a lot, especially the large one. The large one seems to have been made with a variety of fabrics, the smaller one looks like all wool strips, although at first I thought some of the colors might have been hooked with yarn.

Color change

Well, I decided I just couldn't stand the motif color on my swap mat, so I changed it. Reverse hooked and rehooked with a darker color. Looked at that for a while, and decided I just couldn't stand it - so, reverse hooked it again. Then I chose the shade of the same color that I had wanted to use in the first place, and now I like my little mat for the first time. I think I won't use it for the swap, though. I still want to come up with another design.

I recently acquired a metal sculpture and I think I want to use a drawing of it for my next design. It would be similar to the present mat, same basic motif, just a very different approach. The new one would be based on a sculpture from East India and the old one was based on a native American Indian talisman. The same subject has been important in two such diverse cultures, and in mine, too!

Swap Hooking

I hooked on my swap trivet until late last night. I had to quit when my wrists wouldn't stop hurting, even when I soaked them in hot water. I'm working on finding the kind of movements that will let me hook for long spells of time without using my wrists - so far, no luck. I have learned that using a longer strip on the bottom helps, that is, my fingers work further away from the backing so I don't have to bend my wrist when I pinch the loop onto the hook. I've never heard any other hookers complain about their lower hand or wrist hurting, but I bet I'm not the only one. Although, I suppose there aren't too many hookers who've had their wrists smashed by horses. I guess there are consequences for all the foolish things done when we were young and foolish.

Anyway, I was working on my trivet for the Yahookers swap. I had to work in almost darkness because my mother went to bed and I hook in the room next door. No matter which lights I turn off, she complains about the lights. I even tried hooking with my headlamp on, but it scared my mother because there was light moving around - so, anyway, I hook with one little light on, and I hook as close to it as I can get - and that proved to be a big mistake with this trivet. I'm hooking with some wool that I dyed with some bled color - I thought the original wool was not the right color, so I bled some of the color out - then I put some off-white wool into the dyepot and got a nice mottled piece of the color. It was a little brighter than I had planned, but I expected my dull background color would absorb some of the brightness. I used that mottled piece for my main motif, liked it in the dark, and I was really surprised how much I didn't like it the next morning in the sunlight. Yuk. The dull background didn't absorb the brightness, it caused a color shift - the color moved over a notch on the color wheel and stayed just as bright, or actually a little brighter. I'm thinking about pulling it all out and rehooking the main motif with a different color, but, while I'm thinking about it, I'm working on designing another pattern. I think now I'm not as fond of the first pattern as I was.

A Great Hooking Afternoon

I'm sorry I haven't been very active on this blog, I've been spending my blogging time on the blog I set up when I acquired a great new farm dog - well, when I started the blog and got my new acquisition to the farm, I wasn't so sure he was a great dog. I thought writing about my experiences with him would help me make decisions about him. Come on over and see how I've been spending my time when you're through here, the dog blog is http://gibbydogblog.blogspot.com

Luckily, I had a little rug hooking afternoon today. My cousin came to visit for the afternoon. She has expressed interest in learning to hook several times, ever since I went with her sister-in-law to an Amy Oxford workshop in northern Michigan. She wants to set a time with her sister so they can both come to hook, but I decided to strike while the iron was hot even though she was here alone: I started by showing her some hooks, several different kinds, and some loops that were already pulled on a practice pattern. I wanted her to see the difference between traditional hooking and the punching from the Amy Oxford workshop. Then I pulled out a couple of books, one of them by Cynthia Norwood, and then on to the Youtube videos I discovered yesterday. I think my two favorites make a great combination, one by Deanne Fitzpatrick and the other by Gene Shepherd. I wanted Jane to know that decisions about how to hook would be up to her, after she learns the basics. Deanne hooks so amazingly fast that the backing threads sing and Gene hooks slowly, precisely, and very accurately. Deanne says it's okay to pull loops down a little when you pull on the next one, Gene says the opposite and shows how to avoid pulling down earlier loops.

I probably overwhelmed Jane with books - I pulled out Cynthia Norwood's book and the Leslie Linsley book, then one of Deanne's books, then a second one, and that led to talking about Deanne's background and her family from Newfoundland, and that, of course, led me to talking about the history of Newfoundland and Labrador and Dr. Grenfell - and I pulled out the Silk Stocking Mats book. Then I followed up with two books by Gene Shepherd and a couple chapters of Gene's proddy dvd.

I hope Jane still wants to hook! I had a wonderful time, and I didn't even pull a loop - I love hooking!

Fungus Dyeing

While looking for my lost dog yesterday, I spotted something white in the fencerow, so I stopped the car to investigate. I discovered two giant puffballs. Later, I was able to identify them as Calvatia gargantua.
I took the closest one home and took a photo of it with a coke can to show the size - it's larger than a soccer ball.
It may already be too late to use it for dyeing, there's a split in it that shows some yellowing of the inside. I was glad I kept it in a cardboard box because a lot of moisture was seeping out of it.
I sliced off a chunk of it and found that the inside was a light tan color. To eat it, it would have to be snow white, and I wouldn't be surprised if dyeing would have the same requirement - but I'm going to try it anyway.
I cut the slice into two inch squares and took the rest of the puffball outside. I put it in a woody area not too far from the house - maybe next year I won't have to be down at the farm to find puffballs.

I put the puffball pieces in a pot of water and turned on the stove. I let them simmer for about an hour.

The water had turned a nice brown color when I turned off the heat. I wanted the dyepot to cool before removing the puffball pieces, but it was already quite late and I fell asleep while the pot was cooling. This morning, the water color had cleared quite a bit, so I turned on the heat again and simmered the pot for another hour, then I removed the puffball and put a pre-mordanted piece of wet wool in the pot. (I took the puffball pieces outside and dumped them in another woody area where it would be nice to find giant puffballs next year.) The wool isn't dry yet, but it looked like it would be a warm and mottled yellow-brown. I was concerned about the color being fast, so I poured in a glug of vinegar, and the wool color changed right away. I'm not sure now that it's going to look any different from a dirty cleaning rag. It will, at least, be mottled.

Mushroom Dyeing

I haven't been hooking much lately, I'm getting ready for an exciting new dye project. I have been in love with mushrooms for forty years. I used to hike around in wild areas just to see them, and way back when, I could even identify dozens of kinds, at least by common names. I had two friends who were my former teachers and who were also excited about mushrooms and wild flowers. We used to go hiking with our Euell Gibbons Stalking the Wild Asparagus and other identification books and "stalk" for hours. We ate a lot of wild plants, which worked out okay because they were both gourmet cooks - I was just an eater. Unfortunately, they have both passed on, and I have been too busy for some years now to do much stalking.

This year, I decided I couldn't wait much longer to stalk some more, even if I just go on short little hunts. I started my hunting on the internet, ordered several mushroom identification books, but I'm finding that none compare to the one I used to use. I'm going to have to hunt through my books at the farm and see if I can't find that good old book. I also acquired a highly recommended book about dyeing with mushrooms - had it here for two weeks before I had enough time to open it. People seem to have stopped using common names for mushrooms, everything is listed under scientific names, which makes it much harder for me to re-learn what I used to know. I have gathered quite a few mushrooms anyway, figuring I'll identify them later.

I'm trying to figure out how to dry the mushrooms before they turn all gooey. I put them in a covered dyepot with some newspaper, then put the pot in the sunshine. I thought the heat would dry them pretty quick, but not so. Three days, so far, and they haven't changed a bit, other than making a good spore print.

While the ones I have collected are drying, I'll have to figure out how many I need to dye. I believe the dye process is basically the same as other natural dyeing, various mordants making different colors, etc. - but I have a lot to learn.

Natural Dyes

I started dyeing this week with some pine cones, gathered from the little pine woods that belongs to my mother. I gathered some brown ones and some green ones, simmered them up for half a day, let the pot cool, removed the pine cones, and put pre-mordanted wool in the pot.
The mordant was alum, but I seem to have lost my cream of tartar, so I left it out. The wool became stiff enough to teach me that cream of tartar is a good thing. The color is a warm brown, however, I should have strained the dye through some muslin because there is some pitch from the pine cones that adheared to the wool (you can see the darker brown spots on the wool).
On the way to the pine woods, I walked beneath a hickory tree that had already dropped a lot of nuts, so I gathered a bagful. I followed the same procedure as with the pine cones, only the dye was hardly present after one day, so I let the nuts, in their green husks, soak for three days. I might have had quicker results if I had chopped up the hulls, but I didn't want to make that much mess.
To make clean-up easier, I used an old enamel spaghetti cooker. It consists of two parts, the inner part is a strainer, so I could just lift it out of the pot and leave the dye bath in the pot.
This hickory dye was not as rich in color as I've had before. The picture shows it a little grayer than the actual color, perhaps because I took the photo when the wool was still wet. The picture shows hickory nuts in the hull and out of the hull on the dyed wool. (addition September15 - I put the wool back in the dye pot and let it sit for a couple days. It turned a much darker soft brown.)

My next project is walnut dyeing. I have an ice chest full of bottled walnut dye that I made last year. I've gathered some fresh walnuts so I can compare year-old walnut dye with fresh dye. If it continues to rain as it has all day today, I should get that project going tomorrow. I'm going to use the walnut dye as an overdye for some textured wools and maybe some plaids.

Sauder Village Rug Show

I've just started posting some photos of the Sauder Village rug show. There were 500 rugs on display and I wasn't able to take photos of all of them, but I do have a lot more photos to post.

I'm Hooking Again

With all that's been going on here; big dog George sick, losing Rusty dog, acquiring new dog Gibby, niece and family visiting from Guatamala, and getting extensive dental work done (three hours at a time in the dental chair, moooooaaaaaannnn), I haven't had time for hooking. Also, all of my hooking supplies have moved out to the new studio, but it's been waaay too hot to sit out there and I didn't want to carry it all back into the air-conditioned house - sooo... I turned to eBay.

I have enjoyed looking at the little kits made by Sharon Perry and auctioned on eBay for quite a while. She is Deanne Fitzpatrick's sister and often I see a bit of Deanne's flavor in Sharon's little rugs. Her kits are usually pretty basic and I decided that's what I need - something already planned, with the wool already cut - something I can hook without thinking. So, I bought one of Sharon's kits - a penny rug pattern that came in the mail yesterday. I started hooking it last night - I did have to go out to the studio to get my hook bag and one of my frames, but all of the wool is already cut and fits in a gallon size plastic bag - much easier than having to choose wool from my stash and much cleaner than having to cut strips and have wool dust all over. So, I am doing a lazy project - I have to think a little more than planned, since I have to decide what colors to put together in the pennies, but at least it's all sitting there right in front of me. Nice to be hooking again.

Found Rug

I stopped for a quick check of the local consignment shop and couldn't believe my luck - I found the rug in the photo. It's mounted on a piece of plywood. The burlap edges that are usually folded and whipped are just folded over the edges of the plywood. The burlap still has the pattern label showing that it's called Stained Glass Bench 13 x 26 by Jane McGown Flynn. On the back, on the wood, is the inscription, "Love and Blessings Barbara Branch 6/86". Barbara Branch and I used to belong to the ATHA chapter, Heirloom Hookers, in Northville, MI. I think she may now belong to the McGown guild in Dearborn, MI, but I haven't seen her for a few years. I couldn't leave it in a shop where someone who never heard of hooking might buy it, or, worse yet, might not buy it and it might just stay there.

Designing and Making a Memory Rug

My mother and I drive down to my farm every afternoon. On the way, my mother's deafness makes normal conversations difficult, but we have worked out a way to communicate - we point out trees - beautiful trees, old trees, tall trees, favorite trees. We have even "adopted" a set of oak trees into our family - there is a perfect one in the center of a large green lawn that Mother has named Jenny and two other trees are her "brothers". We look for them every day, and have now taken photos of Jenny through all of the seasons. This interest in trees led me to thinking about the trees of my childhood. We had a wonderful old cherry tree in our backyard in our home in Rosedale Park in Detroit - my brothers and I each had our own branch where we could sit without being disturbed. That was a great tree. There were also huge weeping willows in front of our summer cottage on Big Lake, near Davisburg, MI. I started remembering those willows and decided to hook a memory of them. We had a big heavy rope hanging in a branch that extended over the lake - we could swing on that rope and drop into the water. I can remember the thrill of fear that lasted for about three seconds while flying through the air. Those thoughts led to the making of a memory rug.

Step 1 was deciding on the theme for the rug and I chose the old stone cottage/willow tree theme.

Step 2 was creating the images. I did this by taking out some old Martha Stewart Living magazines and finding some ad pages that had spaces of solid color. I can cut images out of paper better than I can draw what I am thinking, so I started cutting. The first photo at the beginning of this blog is the cut-paper result.

Step 3 was using the paper pieces like stencils and drawing the pattern on linen. I used a commercial grade fabric-permanent marker to trace the stencils.

Step 4 was going through my wool stash to find appropriate colors. I found I had everything I wanted except flesh color for the child/me flying off of the rope. Eventually, I decided I didn't have to be too accurate and settled for a pretty bright pink - which, when hooked with a dark blue swim suit doesn't look quite so bright.

Step 5 is hooking and making any necessary changes. The second photo shows some of the hooking completed. I have decided that the flat front image of the cottage is too boring, so I'm going to add some drawing to make it more three dimensional. I have always loved the stones in that cottage and haven't hooked them very accurately, but I guess I will be the only one who knows that.

So, there's my brief lesson in designing and hooking a memory rug.

Parenting Parents

The following is not about rug hooking, it's about being a woman in the United States. I thought it should have wider reading than just in West Virginia. If you read it, I think you will know why it reaches me very deeply. This candidate is the only one who has ever acknowledged that taking care of parents is tough and deserves some help. Everyone wants to help parents support kids, but it would be nice to have help for kids to support parents.

Hillary Clinton's remarks on Mother's Day in Grafton, WV
Click here to listen to the speech. (MP3)
Good afternoon. Oh my goodness.
This is just such a pleasure and we are thrilled to be here. What better place to spend Mother's Day than here in Grafton, not far from the Andrews Methodist Church, where the very first Mother's Day was celebrated 100 years ago. So this is the hundredth anniversary and I want to thank all of you for spending part of this day with us here at the B and O Railroad Heritage Center. I want to thank the County Commission President Dave Goebel for being here and all the elected officials who are here with us. It is exciting to be here with my daughter too, because whether you're a son or a daughter, or in fact, a father or a mother, or maybe a grandfather or a grandmother '' or even a great grandparent, you know that you're part of an ongoing celebration every mother's day that began as a simple commemoration of a West Virginia woman and that's what I think is so special.
When I walked through the home and saw where Ann Maria Reeves Jarvis lived, and there's so much there that is authentic and of period, it really did touch my heart. I was told by Tom and Olive who were taking us through that people come sometimes every Mother's Day, they bring friends and relatives from out of the area to experience this real walk back through history. I was inspired when I first read about Ann Maria and how she worked so hard to raise her family like so many women in those days. She had ten children but only four survived. She taught Sunday School. I also learned that she was a Methodist like I am and her husband was a Baptist like my husband. For 52 years of marriage they never went to church together.
Well, Bill and I have done that a few times. They eventually, under the leadership of Ann Maria, organized what were called Mothers' Work Days and they worked to improve sanitation and health conditions and raise funds for medicine, and try to care for women with tuberculosis. They inspected bottled milk and food and treated wounded soldiers, both Yankee and Confederate. The upstairs bedroom, which is the guest bedroom, there is both the grey and the blue on the bedspread because they cared for any wounded soldier; it was safe passage if they made it to the Jarvis home. That was very inspiring to me. She had a tremendous sense of duty and obligation and her story might have been lost in history had her own daughter not come forward with the idea of Mother's Day and to honor her and all mothers for the contributions.
So as we look at the mothers and the grandmothers who are gathered here today and as we think about the tens of millions of mothers across our country who are busy taking care of their children, doing their jobs, supporting their communities and living lives of faith and service, we are reminded from generation to generation that our progress often come from the hard work, determination and the tenacity of women.
I wanted to begin by saluting my own mother who couldn't be here, because my mother, as some of you may have heard me say or read in my book, didn't have the benefit of a stable family growing up. Her parents were unable to care for their two young daughters and were divorced in the 1920s which wasn't very comment back then. My eight year old mother and her five year old sister were sent away on a train all by themselves from Chicago to California to live with grandparents who had little interest in raising them.
So when my mother was about 14, she left that home and was hired as a live'in helper by a woman who encouraged and supported her. My mom took care of the children in the morning, got them off to school, then she could go to high school, she would come right back and take care of them when the kids got home from school. She never had the chance to go to college, but she was determined that her own children would have that chance.
As I grew older and learned more about my mother's own story, it really impressed upon me more fully what it took for her to forge ahead in the face of life's challenges. I saw how hard she worked every single day to support my father and our family, to raise me and my brothers, and to be involved in teaching Sunday School to helping out at the neighborhood school.
My mother didn't have the luxury to put up her feet and take a breather. She just kept going, kept working, kept meeting her responsibilities and pursuing her dreams for her children so that we could have opportunities that she, and prior generations, never ever dreamed of. She wasn't alone.
Judging from the mothers I meet across our country, I've come to believe that hard work, determination and resiliency are encoded in our DNA. We know we have the "worrying" gene. We know we have the "put your coat on because it's cold outside" gene. Well, we also have the "stand up and fight for what you believe in" gene.
Take, for example, my grandmother, my father's mother, Hannah Jones. She was a formidable woman. She died when I was quite young but I have vivid memories of her. She was the kind of woman who never took no for an answer.
And one time, when my father and a friend were hitching a ride on the back of an ice truck, and their feet were dangling over the back of it, the truck came to an abrupt halt and skidded and smashed into something crushing my father's feet. He was rushed to the hospital, word went out to Hannah that her son had been seriously injured. She got to the hospital only to be met by doctors who said that they had to amputate his feet. Hannah said no. And she barricaded my father and herself in their hospital room, would not let anyone in until her brother'in'law who happened to be a doctor arrived and then she basically browbeat him into agreeing to save my father's feet. My father went on to play football in high school and college. They did a good job, I think. But if it hadn't been for that mother saying "no, you're not going to do this," my father's life would have been so much different.
So when I think of Hannah, I think of the mother who is working to help her child who is labeled a failure in school until he finally experiences success. I think of the mother who petitions the mayor or the city council or the police chief to demand more protection for children when they are outside playing in the neighborhood. Or the mother who takes matters into her own hands and sends body armor to her son or daughter in Iraq when the military didn't provide it.
This is not a new phenomenon. Women have been standing up for what we believe in, defying convention, and going forward for a long time. What about the brave suffragists who didn't abandon their fight for the right to vote even when they were ostracized and harassed and thrown in jail? What about Harriet Tubman, who wouldn't back down in the face of danger as she led slaves out of bondage on an underground railroad? What about Dolores Huerta, who helped to found the United Farm Workers and worked long and very unglamorous hours as a grassroots activist to bring dignity to the lives of other mothers? What about Sally Ride, who wouldn't give up her dream of soaring into space when women were told they didn't have the "right stuff" to become astronauts? What about the women around the world like the extraordinary Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who became the president of Liberia in 2005 and whose leadership has literally helped to mother a wounded and suffering nation?
I find inspiration from all of these women and from their stories and I find inspiration as I travel around West Virginia and America. I find inspiration from the mothers and grandmothers I meet every single day. I was in Indiana toward the end of the campaign; in fact it was the very last event we did in Evansville. We were in a high school gym, hundreds of people were there and after I spoke I was shaking hands and I came upon a beaming glowing mother, standing next to the wheelchair which her son, who was incredibly, profoundly disabled. She introduced me with such love and pride to her son.
And he could be well understood by me but she could understand everything he was saying. She proceeded to interpret for him how excited he was about this campaign. And how he knew exactly what I was saying across Indiana. Jobs, jobs, jobs. And he said it over and over and over again.
I think of all of these mothers who take whatever life throws at us, gets up every morning, gets the kids ready for school, does the laundry, buys the groceries, cooks the dinners, helps on the homework and maybe works a day shift, a nightshift or a double shift. And mothers who tell their daughters "you are just as smart and capable as anyone else and don't ever think you aren't." Women who ask the PTA "why don't we do more to get girls into math and science classes." Women who dare to compete in the board room and the back room, the locker room and the newsroom, the halls of academia and the corridors of political power. Through their perseverance and resilience these women are standing up for the bedrock principle of American democracy '' the promise of opportunity for anyone who is willing to work hard and pursue their dreams. That is a principle and a promise that must always include girls and women.
Now, if you are a woman of a certain age, as I am, you have likely experienced a moment along the way when your own sense of limitless possibility collided with a harsher reality. For me, it was a small moment.
I was a teenager; I dreamed of being an astronaut. So I wrote to NASA to volunteer for astronaut training and find out what you had to do to be prepared. I got a letter back: Girls were just not accepted into the program. The truth is, given my poor eyesight and very, very modest athletic abilities, I would have never been accepted in any event. But the rejection, however small, carried a message. I hadn't realized until then that anyone be denied an opportunity simply on the basis of being a girl.
Later, in a class of 235 students at law school, I was one of only 27 women enrolled, at that time the largest group ever. Today women are the majority of students in law school. But I remember when I was just starting my legal career and a colleague advised me not to be a trial lawyer because, he said, I had no way of getting the one thing every trial lawyer needed. When I asked him what, he said, "a wife." I said, "Really?" Very seriously he said, "When you're in a long trial and you're busy, who's going to make sure you have clean socks for court?" I had honestly never thought of that and I had always washed my socks myself. So it didn't seem like it would be that big an obstacle.
Thankfully, I, like generations of women today, are able to make our own choices because other women stood up and demanded that for us. I often think about how much lives have changed for women since when my own mother was born in 1919, when I was born in 1947, and when Chelsea was born in 1980.
We've made an enormous amount of progress. Women are now neurosurgeons and NASCAR drivers, judges and generals, CEOs and CPAs.
But it's also true that the higher you go up in the ranks, the thinner it becomes, whether it's business, or law, or politics, or other fields. Women still face a lot of barriers, some visible, some invisible.
In 2008 it's really important we recommit ourselves to making sure that our daughters and our sons have an equal chance to lead and serve in the future.
Over the past few days I've gotten emails from around the country from people offering words of encouragement and advice. One man from California wrote: "Keep fighting. No matter what the outcome may be, the fact that you stood throughout the constant ups and downs in this race, one thing is sure: You never wavered and you never gave up."
A woman named Linda said, Linda wrote and said: "Don't give up. I'm supporting you looking at my girls and knowing that when the going gets tough, you keep forging ahead."
A Californian wrote, "For the sake of all future and current mothers everywhere, keep your head up and keep on in this race, keep fighting, I am with you all the way." But I guess my favorite message was from a woman named Angela. "Keep strong," she said, "it's not over until the lady in the pantsuit says it is."
I share that, because the underlying lesson is not so much about me but about all of us. About whether or not we do stay with what we start, whether or not we can make progress if we don't commit ourselves to it and see it through, unless we are wiling to stand in the face of adversity. The same is true for our country. We need to rise to the challenges facing us, no matter how daunting, and take care of the unfinished business before America.
Unfinished business that resonates not only for women but for all of us - for children whose lives and well'being is affected because their mother is paid lower wages than male counterparts doing the same job. For husbands who share the burdens placed on a family when a woman can't get maternity leave or get a bank loan or qualify for a decent pension. For fathers who want their daughters to have the same opportunities as their sons ' to compete at sports, or be engineers, or fly jets or break any barrier to be whatever they dream, including president of the United States.
It's unfinished business that we see everyday in the headlines, the supermarket lines, the bank lines, the emergency room lines. The question before us as a nation is whether we will forge ahead with that sense of resilience and purpose that has always marked America. Will we address the mortgage crisis so more families don't lose their homes? Will we finally achieve health care so that every single American has quality, affordable health care?
Will we get serious about reducing our dependence on foreign oil? Will we tackle the gas prices that are going up astronomically? Will we stop shipping American jobs overseas? Will we adopt green energy policies including clean coal that will make economic sense and protect us, and our children's children? Will we make college affordable again for the young people who are now being shut out of going to college? Will we end No Child Left Behind, which is not working? Will we bring our troops home from Iraq and end this war that has cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars?
Will we take care of those who have taken care of us - our veterans. West Virginia has the highest proportion of veterans anywhere in our country.
I am running for president because I believe we can answer all of those questions. I know we can achieve solutions to fix our economy and create new jobs and safeguard people's homes from foreclosure, relieve the burden of soaring food and gas prices. I believe we can bring our troops home with honor, following a strategy that is smart and safe starting within 60 days of my becoming president. I believe we can once again see good jobs with rising incomes, to do more to support children and families, especially in places like West Virginia.
And for just a moment, I'd like to mention your wonderful Senior Senator, Senator Robert C. Byrd. Many of you know that Senator Byrd lost his mother when he was only 1 year old. He grew up in poverty, but was fortunate to be taken in by an aunt and uncle who gave him the love and foundation of family. Every year around Mother's Day, Senator Byrd gives a speech on the Senate floor in appreciation of mothers. When I came to the Senate, and my mother spent a lot of time with us, she now lives with us, she used to watch C'Span all the time to see if she could catch a glimpse of me - to be very honest about it. And she fell in love with Senator Byrd. And a few years ago I took her to have lunch with Senator Byrd in his office and she told him how much she appreciated his Mother's Day speeches.
In 2003, he said something so cogent that I just want to repeat it here. "That the best mothers invest the best of themselves in their families - they are high'stake brokers, and we, their families, are the stocks on their exchange. If we simply try our best, she will consider the return on her investment to be well met."
One of the poems he read that year was "Like Mother, Like Son". Although he barely had a chance to know his mother, to this day he still feels her gentle presence, her soft urging to do his best to make her proud.
Bill and I often talk about the challenges he faced in his family - when after his father died before he was born, his mother had to leave him to go to school to become a nurse. He was left with her parents while she was away. And there is such a poignant picture of him being taken to go visit his mother who was in nursing school in New Orleans. And he is about 3 years old and he is all dressed up in a little suit that his grandmother had bought for him for the trip. And I remember his mother, Virginia, telling me that she was so happy to see him but it was so heartbreaking when he left on the train going back to Arkansas. One of Bill's earliest memories is seeing his mother drop to her knees and just sobbing as her son left. But she was there to get a better education so she could take better care of him. I know Bill, like Senator Byrd and millions of sons across America, as well as daughters from coast to coast, carry their mother's love with them everyday.
I think there is more we can do to make sure that young parents are not so stressed out. It is hard raising children today. There are so many demands - the jobs don't pay what they used to, which means that usually you have to have both parents working, don't you? If you are a single mom, honestly, I think you are a miracle worker to be able to manage the family and a job at the same time. I think we should do more to help young families -I would like to see us experiment in our country with what other countries have.
And that is not only expanding the Family and Medical Leave Act, so that we protect more families in times of emergency. I am very proud that millions and millions of people have taken advantage of that, the first bill that my husband signed. But we need to expand it because right now it cuts off at 50 employees - we need to bring that down to 25 employees because when you have a newborn baby, or you adopt a baby, or your spouse or yourself is sick, or your parent is sick, it is terrible having to make a choice between losing your job and taking care of your loved one. I just worked to pass legislation which we have passed to extend the Family and Medical Leave to the families of wounded soldiers. Because so many of them, when they are brought back to the country they need extensive and lengthily care, and they need their families by their side. So we're going to make sure we protect their jobs and I'd like that to be available for more people. Here in West Virginia, that would help a lot of West Virginians.
I also want to push for something that is not available in very many places today. That is some form of paid leave for limited purposes, because what happens now with unpaid leave is that if you can't afford to go from your job, you can't take it even if it is available to you. If we had a small limited program of paid leave that the federal government would work with the states to provide, 490,000 workers in West Virginia in the private sector might be eligible.
I also think it is important we look at the end of life and the beginning of life together. We need more child'care for families. We have 64,000 children under six in West Virginia that don't have good child'care. But we also have many, many families taking care of loved ones and they don't get much help doing it. The average family in America taking care of a child with a disability, a spouse with Alzheimer's, a parent with Parkinson's, will spend at least $5,000 out of pocket taking care of that loved one. I think we should give a $3,000 caregiver tax credit so that families are not put at a financial disadvantage for doing what they are doing out of love and dedication.
I also would like to see us make it easier and less expensive to buy long'term care policies. It's one of the biggest concerns families have What happens if my parent or my grandparent or my spouse is no longer able to take care of him or herself and I physically can't do it any longer and don't have any help to do it. How can we get some long'term care in the home or in some other setting? And I think we should have a long'term care tax credit, as well, so people can buy long'term care insurance.
On all of these issues, it really does matter whether we are going to care for one another. And I think it is interesting that this holiday we start today was the idea of a woman, right here in Grafton. Anna Jarvis prevailed against the odds. If you were to come with an idea right now for a national holiday and you persevered for nine or ten years like she did, it would be a labor of love. And that is what it sometimes does take to make the changes that are going to benefit us.
I want to just end by spotlighting another mother, because this whole question of equal pay for equal work really is at the core of my belief that we have got to get to equality in the workplace. Lily Ledbetter was a mother who raised her two children while working at a tire factory in Alabama. For almost two decades, before she learned she was being paid far less than her male counterparts doing the same job. She sued under the Equal Pay Act, which has been in existence for 40 years. The Supreme Court, controlled by the new Bush Chief Justice threw her case out. They said she didn't file the complaint soon enough. The only problem was she hadn't known until after all those years she wasn't being paid the same. You don't go up to your fellow employees and say show me your pay stub. You just don't do that. The information was a secret.
So we tried to fix that loophole in the Senate a few weeks ago but the Republicans blocked us. I want people to remember that in this upcoming election season. Because when women in workplaces are discriminated against, paid lower wages than they deserve, that affects their husbands, it affects their children, it affects the family income. When women make $.77 on a dollar for a man and a mom goes to the grocery store, the checkout counter person doesn't say, you only make $.70, so we are going to cut the cost of the groceries by 25%. That doesn't happen. So we have got to remedy that.
And there is a lot of other unfinished business. But it is exciting to know that we are here on the hundredth anniversary of this celebration. And in two days, the voters of West Virginia will join the tens of millions of Americans who have already cast their vote for president.
I am asking for your support so that I can continue to fight for you and fight to finish the work that we have started. I would not be standing here if it were not for all the women who went before. Not only the women in my own life, like my mother and my grandmother, or my wonderful daughter whom I am so thrilled to have with me here today, but it is also because of countless women and men whose names we may never know who really believed strongly in what they thought would make their community and their country better places.
So I leave you today with a Mother's Day message I received a few days ago from a 23 year old young women in Kentucky: "Happy Mother's Day," She wrote, "Hopefully I will be wishing you one next year as president. You have already succeeded as the world's hardest job, being a mother. The second hardest job should be a breeze for you."
Happy Mother's Day everybody.

Back in 2006 I posted a blog about some of the UFOs I had accumulated. One UFO that I mentioned was a rug I started after one of the Harry Potter books came out - well, I finally finished that rug this year. That's it in the photo. I didn't have the wool that I had planned for the squares in the border, so I finished it (three sides) with textured wools I have accumulated since I've been at my mother's house. Some of the squares make me feel really good because the wool was sent to me by Yahookers (http://www.groups.yahoo.com/group/rughookers ). The original background wool was dyed with one of my favorite antique reds, but that wool is gone, so I mixed up all the reds I could find - some left over from my cave horse that looks pink - and just hooked it anyway. It's a lot brighter than it would have been - I know that it almost looks fluorescent in the photo - but I like it anyway. I have put it on the floor and my big dog, George, loves it. George is not well and has been losing tons of hair, which all accumulates on the rug, so I have to vacuum it a lot. I've never vacuumed a rug before but it works really well. I thought I ought to prove that it may take me forever, but I actually do finish some rugs. I'm going to take this to the SE Michigan Hook-In rug show next week.

Two New Books!

I have been waiting since last August for Cynthia Norwood's book, and almost as long for Deanne Fitzpatrick's newest book. Creating an Antique Look in Hand-Hooked Rugs by Cynthia Smesny Norwood is a wonderful photo collection of antique rugs and "imitation" antique rugs. The photos are really inspiring, and then the addition of Cynthia's suggestions for wool and dye and style - makes me want to start hooking this minute. One of the photos reminds me that I have the same pattern - half-hooked and waiting over at my studio. Unfortunately, I sold the wool to finish the background - something I seem to do too often - but with Cynthia's suggestions I think I can just go on and hook it with whatever wool I can find on the front porch. Maybe I'll run over to the studio and get it after Mother goes to sleep tonight.

The other book, Hooking Mats and Rugs, 33 New Designs from an Old Tradition by Deanne Fitzpatrick is a wonderful addition to my collection of Deanne's books. I have loved Deanne's rugs ever since I bought a collection of her kits to sell when I opened up my shop back in 1995. Her rugs have changed, all for the better. I was lucky enough to take a class from Deanne in 2005 and one of the things that stayed with me is a sketch book. Deanne suggests having one along all the time so you can sketch the things you see whenever you have a chance - well, I find I'm really not much of a sketcher, but I use the sketch pads to record ideas and thoughts and information that helps me keep my mind active - it would be too easy otherwise to sink into thinking about being a 24/7 caretaker, about loading the dishwasher, changing Mother's bed, running out for groceries when she's sleeping, putting batteries in her hearing device, keeping her wheelchair nearby, etc. This way, I have the sketch pad and I can flip through it and get right away into a relaxed and purposeful zone. The last few days, I've filled a book with information from the internet about my family. I have been amazed to learn that the internet lets me sit right here in Hamburg, Michigan while my mother's snoring and trace my ancestry back to the 1500s in England and Ireland. I have enjoyed learning about the Great Removal that effected Deanne Fitzpatrick's family back in the 1940s and now I have some real stories about my family, too - like the Indian raid that killed some of the Otis family while others were carried off to Canada. I didn't know that the Pilgrims didn't like the Quakers, even though they all left England for the same reasons, and I didn't know that some of my family members were Quakers. Ever since the peace marches during the Vietnam War, when so many gatherings of thousands of protestors remained peaceful because of Quaker leadership, I have thought the Quakers were a cut above normal people - now I am pleased to know my great-great-great grandparents were Quakers. Now, if you followed that chain of thought, you know why the sketch books are important - I obviously need something to organize my thinking!
Anyway, I need to stop writing and start reading my wonderful new books!

Contemporary Hooked Rugs

Contemporary Hooked Rugs, Themes and Memories, by Linda Rae Coughlin, published by Schiffer, came to me from an eBay auction today. I am so glad I won that auction. I opened the package in the car right after picking it up at the post office. That gave my mother a chance to look at the book while I went to the farm and fed the chickens, cats, horses and dog - by the time I was finished, she had decided Contemporary Hooked Rugs is the most beautiful book she has ever seen.

I didn't have time to sit down and look at the book until after dinner, dishes, putting Mother to bed, etc. Normally, by that time I'm ready to kick back in my recliner and take a snooze, but after the first few pages of Linda Rae's book, I was wide awake. What a wonderful collection of rugs!!

The book starts with Patty Yoder's alphabet of sheep rugs. I was already familiar with those rugs, I had a copy of Patty Yoder's book until I foolishly gave it away, but I am so pleased to have those pictures. Now, when I tell people about Patty Yoder, which I do often because she is my prime example of how kind and thoughtful and creative rug hookers can be, I have an easy way to prove my point - at least about her creativity!

Another of my favorite creative people is featured in the book, Deanne Fitzpatrick. So far, I have only looked at the rug pictures and haven't read the text, but the rugs look like they tell a story about the people and places Deanne first hooked - the people her family lived near when she was a child. I had never heard about the Great Removal when Newfoundland became a part of Canada until I opened my shop in 1994 and bought my first rug hooking kits from Deanne. I was so impressed by her story that I'm sure I talked my kit-buying customers half to death before they bought the kits.

There's another set of rugs that tell a heart-grabbing story - a story about a black and white dog, a border collie who is the star in seven rugs. As soon as I saw the wonderful dog rugs, I started thinking about all of my sources for dog rugs - surely with four dogs I must have some good rug possibilities. I made the little mat in the photo, and fastened it to the top of a little wooden stool before I saw the border collie series. The dog in the mat is Blue, an Australian Cattle Dog, who goes with me almost everywhere. I'm sure she could help me design more Blue rugs.

There are a great many other wonderful rugs in the book, it's definitely a book well worth having.

Dyeing update

I had some disappointing results from my dyeing experiments. The cold I mentioned in the last blog turned into really being sick so I neglected the dyeing. The lichen was left in a plastic container on the stove, too close to a cooking pot. I heated something in the pot, the heat melted part of the plastic and I think the lichen was heated up. I didn't even notice it for over a week. When I did notice it again, the red color was gone. I didn't even try to put it in a dye pot.

The moss was also a bust. It sat in water for a long time, a week or so, then I simmered it and got only dirty water. I added some ammonia, just in case it worked like the lichen, and still only got dirty water.

I have been doing a lot of reading about natural dyeing and I think there is a lot more to it than just being able to run out, grab some lichen, and simmer it up. My experience with natural dyeing so far has been so easy, but expanding into lichen, moss, etc. requires more knowledge. I now have the book that is listed as the definitive book on lichen dyeing, so I won't try again until I have thoroughly digested it.

I've been reading a book by Pat Hornafius, Victorian Cottage Rugs, published in 1995. The book was written during the Cushing Dye transition from union dyes to aniline dyes. The discussion of this transition clarifies the reason for being careful about following dye instructions from older books. I think the natural dyeing instructions from way back when are helpful, but the commercial dye instructions from maybe the 1970s, 1980s, or maybe even the early 1990s would not be talking about the same dyes we have available today. There is not only a difference in what fabric the dyes will dye - the acid dyes will only dye animal protein, the old union dyes also dyed plant material - there is a difference in the dye process. Pat Hornafius recommends using a lot more vinegar in the dyepot than I usually use and she recommends putting it in the dyepot only after the wool has been in the pot for a while and then adding a couple cups of vinegar, a quarter cup at a time, every fifteen minutes or so. I think back to some of my dyepots that never exhausted and wonder if this technique would have solved that problem.

This book includes 16 Victorian patterns with instructions for not only how to hook them, but also how to dye the wool for them. Dye formulas are included with very thorough instructions for each one. The patterns have the sort of "frue-frue" look that I always think of as fine-cut designs, with lots of flowers, but the instructions are for hooking with 6 and 8 cuts. I find this interesting because they are wide cut but not primitive designs. Some of them are old Edward Sands Frost adaptations. This is one book that is not going to be stored away on a shelf, I think I'm going to read it again, from cover to cover.

Some Natural Dyeing

I'm getting ready to do some natural dyeing. I have a butter tub partially filled with the lichen from the downed branches in our yard - probably black walnut branches. I gathered the lichen last week and put some ammonia in with it. The liquid has turned a deep red color. The little reasearch I have done indicates that it should dye wool that same deep red color - I hope so. I'm not sure how to do it, I guess I will just add water, boil it, and then put the wool into the pot.

Today, I found some really nice moss. The moss was on rotted wood in the field behind my dog pen at the farm. I have no idea what kind of wood or what kind of moss, but I gathered a couple of really nice clumps. I don't feel bad about removing natural things from that field - if the new owner ever gets the right permits it's going to be fenced off and filled with hair sheep, so all the wild things will be removed. I am debating with myself about adding ammonia to the moss and letting it sit for a while - maybe I'll just boil the moss by itself.

I'm also not sure if I want to use alum and cream of tartar...

I have a cold sapping my energy right now, if I feel better, I'll do the dyeing tomorrow and post the results.

2008 Brought a Huge Snowstorm

My plans to hook today didn't work out. I fell asleep shortly after welcoming the new year in, woke up a few hours later because it was soooooo quiet. The power was out - no tv, no furnace noises, and no light. I took the dogs out and found a heavy fog, almost a complete white out - to hook it would be impossible. I went to bed and woke up when I could hear my mother's power wheelchair beeping - she was up and eating breakfast. Outside, everything was completely covered with snow - it was so deep the dogs had to jump instead of walk - over a foot deep. Instead of hooking, I spent the day getting my mother bundled into several layers of clothing and several blankets, and then trying to shovel out. My new snowblower wouldn't work - I bought electric instead of gas. I worried about going in and out of the house too much and letting all the heat out, but I had to keep on checking on my mother and I had to get enough snow cleared so I could get down the hill and out of the driveway in case we had to leave the house and go to friend's in Ann Arbor where the heat was on. Finally, I was rescued by a friend with a wonderful snow plow. Shortly after the driveway was opened, the power came back on. So, I drove down to the farm, with the snowblower, and found the power off down there. I gave up, will have to go back down in the morning and hope the power is back on - but we're supposed to have a couple more inches of snow. I won't be hooking for a while - my arms are totally worn out. I guess I'll have to read about hooking instead.

A Happy 2008 to Everyone!

I am going to make a New Years resolution: I will finish my dog rug!

I started the dog rug at Sauder Village in 2006 and have been completely frustrated by the sky and water ever since. When I visualized the rug, I saw a pinky/red sun setting on a distant horizon where the water meets the sky. I hooked the rug half a dozen times with different colors, different cuts, etc. and didn't like any of them. I have hooked the sky so many times I am afraid the linen is worn out - I don't like the sky I have now but I don't think I dare take it out. I resolve to finish the sky and then do the water - and, like them or not, I resolve to leave them in. In fact, since I did my partying last night, I am going to stay quietly at home on New Year's Eve - maybe I'll hook the water in tonight.

Great hooking to everyone in 2008!!

A Great Antique Rug Hooking Book

A wonderful book came in the mail today. Handmade Rugs by Ella Shannon Bowles was written way back in 1937. The author learned about rug hooking from her grandmother, who was probably making rugs in the last part of the nineteenth century. Mrs. Bowles researched rug hooking, mostly in New Hampshire, and shares what she learned about the old rugs and the old methods. Reading her research puts the reader right in contact with rug hookers and collectors who knew the rug makers who hooked before burlap came to America.

A couple years ago - using my first copy of this wonderful book - I used the pattern Mrs. Bowles uses to explain how to hook, to create a challenge. Each person who accepted the challenge received a sheet of paper that had templates printed on it for the flower and leaf shapes and the basket found in the color photo above. They didn't get to see the photo so they wouldn't be influenced by it. They had to create their own flower arrangement and color plan with only those motifs and the rug size as their instructions. The rugs they created were really wonderful, each one similar but none the same.

I have set up an internet store with rug hooking stuff - mostly to celebrate Yahoo Rughookers. The url is http://cafepress.com/rughookers

Christmas 2007

I have explained in past posts that I moved to my mother's house last April and brought my mother home from the nursing home. She has been getting better and better ever since she came home. These are photos of her celebrating Christmas today - between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day she went to three celebrations and then we came home and opened presents. She had a wonderful time, but one of her presents was a large fleece throw and she threw it over herself and was sound asleep in minutes. I haven't been able to hook much since my mother and I became housemates, but I wouldn't trade this opportunity to be with her for anything. I will probably never find another person who thinks that every rug I hook is wonderful.

Primitive Rug Hookers

I found a great book in the Rug Hooking Magazine booth at the ATHA Biennial in New Orleans. It was written by Jenny Rupp (of Sauder Village Rug Show fame) and Lisa Yeago, owners of The Potted Pear - a rug hooking business. The book is Designs for Primitive Rug Hookers, part of Rug Hooking Magazine's framework series. There are 19 projects in the book and each one is thoroughly described with pattern, supplies, great color photos, instructions, etc. The projects are presented by different designers, including Kris Miller and Keith Kemner who are both from my part of Michigan. There are some unusual projects, like a "handbag slipcover", a tea cosy, and even a belt. I have looked at a lot of rug hooking pattern books over the years, but this is the first time I've seen a hooked belt. I might not ever hook any of the patterns presented, but each time I look through the book I have new ideas for rugs and patterns , so I suggest this is a good book for inspiration.

Great New Book: Basic Rug Hooking

I just finished reading a new Stackpole book: Basic Rug Hooking edited by Judy P. Sopronyi, with rug hooking consultant Janet Stanley Reid. It's a perfect book for beginners - all the way through the book I kept thinking it would be a great text book for a beginning rug hooking class, but I think students would be shocked if they were asked to buy a text for a rug hooking class.

Usually when I read a book that introduces rug hooking I find I disagree with some of the instructions, but this book covers everything in about the same way I would when teaching a class - I especially like the way pulling up loops is explained and illustrated with good photos.

There are five hooking projects included, with pattern, instructions, supplies list, etc. They are all good beginner projects - I really like the first one, a unique little rooster that could be hooked easily in one class since it doesn't require any background. The last project is making hooked flower pins, and that's another project that could be easily completed in a single class.

Now that I think about it, this book would make a good guide for a beginning teacher!

Brief personal update

I haven't visited this blog in a long time - I have been too involved with taking care of my mother. When I started this blog, my mother was an independent 94 year old. Since then, she has spent 8 months held prisoner in a nursing home, had all of her money embezzled and almost lost her home of 40 years, been rescued from the nursing home by my attorney, and is now sharing her home with me, now her 24/7 caretaker. I have spent so much time in court in the last year that I have finally decided I made a good choice when I gave up going to law school and became a teacher - I could never have loved being a lawyer the way I have loved being a teacher.

Rug hooking has taken a back seat to caretaking. I still think about it all the time, plan rugs in my head, and sometimes wake up in the morning with my hooking hand sore from somnabulistic hooking. Somehow, the quantity of stuff required to hook - the floor frame, the wool, the big sports bag I carry it all in, plus the bag of hooks and the pattern - just takes too long to set up and is too hard to move if I have to jump up to help my mother. As my mother shakes off the bad effects from the nursing home, she may relax more about calling for help - at the home, the technique to get help was to yell as though death was imminent if she wanted to go to the bathroom. Yesterday, at breakfast, she started to talk about "the fight" and when I asked what she meant, she said, "the fight with the people who were here before, the fight to get the house back" and then she realized it was a dream. How awful to have to dream about something akin to a civil war battle because her greedy relatives wanted her home. She can't damn them when she's awake, but she can fight with them in her dreams. I could almost make a rug of that dream, but I think I would grind my teeth too much while hooking.

I want to find a way to warn people like my mother about being ever so careful when granting a power of attorney to a loved one. My mother loved her youngest nephew, especially after his parents moved away when he was a young man and my mother let him live with her for several years. He paid more attention to her than her own sons, a lot more. When her oldest son seemed to be making some poor choices and ignoring his mother, she had her nephew do more and more of her business for her - at first writing out checks to pay bills and then having her sign them, and then eventually putting his name on her checking account so he could sign the checks himself. She had her attorney draft a power of attorney that had a safeguard - it could only become effective if my mother was declared incompetent in writing by two doctors or by the court. My cousin was able to ignore that activating clause and used the power of attorney to take out five mortgages on my mother's home, while he was draining her cash and savings by cash ATM withdrawals - with his name on her account, he had received an ATM card and started using it almost daily. Last July and August, he persuaded my brothers and their children that my mother was bankrupt and her home had to be sold. They immediately started emptying the house. When I saw that all of my father's things had been thrown away and found my Great Aunt's quilts in the trash, I filed a petition with the probate court to stop them. My oldest brother was/is furious because he had already made plans to take my mother's property, tear down her house, and build condominiums. He lives right next door and hasn't spoken to me or my mother, even though we've been back here for two and a half months.

Mother calls, have to go

I haven't been doing much hooking, so I haven't been doing any blogging. I am stuck in a bad place with my hooking - I have a pile of unfinished rugs and no desire to finish any of them. There are some that I would like to have when they are done, but some of them don't even appeal to me at all. It's a funny thing I do with rugs - I usually start a new rug with great passion and lots of forward thinking - while I am hooking, I am picturing the finished rug and thinking about how much I am going to like it, and then suddenly, I lose interest. I usually get the part finished that I really like, then I have a hard time making myself get the rest done. I have one, no two or three rugs, that mostly need background hooking to be finished but I have sold the background wool! One of them is a adaptation of a great old Christmas rug - with Santa and a reindeer standing in the center. I loved hooking the old St. Nick and the reindeer is a hoot - long bodied and drawn like a six-year-old's drawing - and that's the end of it. The background is partially hooked with some sort of creamy wool that I dyed with either onion skins or tea - or maybe both. At any rate, I am sure I will never match the background wool, so I should just take it out and start over, but I hate to do that. Not that I never reverse hook, I have one rug with the linen wearing out because I have taken the wool strips out so many times. On this rug, I foolishly drew a picture that required the sky to meet the ocean, and I have been fooling around with ocean and sky colored wool for a year now. At first, I thought I would have a colorful sunset and that would solve the colors problem, but the sinking sun I hooked multiple times always looked awful, so I pulled it out and decided that trying to hook a night scene was better, but that didn't work, so I decided to hook a daytime picture, and that's what I am carrying around untouched in my hooking bag now. In the back of my mind, I think I would like to cut the rug in half and keep the dogs that are looking over the ocean to the sky - but, of course, that would remove the whole reason for the picture. The dogs are supposed to be looking at their old pals who have already crossed over the bar - they are in the cloud shapes in the unhooked sky.

I have another unfinished rug - I started it when the fourth Harry Potter book came out, so you know how long I've been "working" on it. It's a horse that has a little unusual look to it - so it could be one of the pseudohorses that pulled the carriage to Hogwarts - right in the center of a red background, with a border of squares hooked in overdyed tweeds. The tweeds were all overdyed for other projects. Half of the squares are hooked and I have lost, misplaced, or sold all the rest of the overdyed tweeds! Also, the red for the half-hooked background is gone, sold I think. It was a very mottled overdye, using a Vermont Folk Rugs dye recipe, which I didn't record and I probably did some substituting for dyes I didn't have. I loved hooking the Harry Potter horse - I really love the pattern a lot, I even sold quite a few of them on eBay with a variety of different borders, but somehow I lost the steam to hook the rest of the background and the rest of the border.

Maybe I should get tough with myself, make some kind of rule that I can't start a new rug until I finish the old ones - or, maybe better yet, I should not allow myself to eat a meal until I get at least a hand size patch hooked.... hmmm, that could target more than one of my goals...

I have finally whipped the finish on a rug. I wanted to have it done for the annual southeastern Michigan hook-in and it's finished. I found I don't like whipping. It took as long to finish the rug as it took to hook it and I don't think the whipping added anything...

I have not had much time to hook, although I have been gathering a lot of recyclable wool. Getting the wool washed and taken apart has used up all of my meager spare time. Early this week, I bled some blues and aquas for sky and water. I had a lot of fun making blue and aqua primitive swatches. This is the season of rummage sales, so my truck is squashed full of wool and books - I almost didn't have room to squeeze in the great blue blanket I found on Tuesday - it's almost exactly the same blue as my hard-earned primitive blue swatch! I've been so involved with getting my mother settled into an assisted living situation that I haven't had time to unload my truck and gloat over all my findings.

Today, I went on a field trip with four classes of Third Graders to the same place where the big hook-in will be held on Saturday. The trip is annual and is called RED Day - Rural Education Day. We went to the county farm fairgrounds where we walked from station to station to see and hear about Michigan farm products. We met rabbits, turkeys, steers, goats, chickens, one very small horse, and even some wee little newborn quail. We observed an arena size model of the state of Michigan with the hundreds of products created by Michigan agriculture. We learned that Michigan is second only to California in farm produce. The really wonderful part of the trip was that one of the farm producer/demonstrators was my first rug hooking teacher! She was spinning llama wool, but I recognized her anyway - her name is Marge and she used to have the rug hooking shop called Ewe and Me. After concentrating for months and months on how to teach hooking and how to teach teachers to teach hooking, it was refreshing to remember that my first hooking lesson lasted all of about two minutes. I bought a kit from Marge and she told me to pull up a loop and then skip a space or so and pull up another one. That was it, the whole lesson - and it was certainly good enough to hook me permanently. Maybe the whole thing about teaching such a simple skill is overdone...

Well, the trillium are bursting out all over the hillside behind my family home and I'm sure the trout lillies are making a beautiful spotted carpet in my back woods. Blue Cohosh, from a few roots I ordered from Vermont forty years ago are beautiful behind the barn at the lake and next to my house at the farm. My mother is happy in her new apartment and I'm ready to enjoy the springtime!

I don't have a photo with me for this blog, but I did want to share my pleasure with Gene Shepherd's DVDs - they're both great! I am currently trying to make myself go slowly through the second DVD - trying to watch it a little at a time so it will last longer. The second DVD is about hooking the same pattern four different ways. I have only watched the "outline and fill" parts so far. I really enjoy seeing Gene's hook pulling up loops, his hook just slides through the backing and comes up with a perfect loop that sits in exactly the right direction. He talks about filling the spaces that are too narrow with loops that are turned sideways, then shows exactly how to do that - and that's how I will be filling narrow spaces from now on!
If you are interested in these DVD's I'm pretty sure you can find a link to his website by going to Yahoo Rughookers Links file (assuming you are a member of Rughookers - if you aren't, you are cordially invited to join) http://www.groups.yahoo.com/group/rughookers
We watched the first DVD at a meeting of Thrums and Chums, Kris Miller's group that meets in Howell, MI, and we are scheduled to watch the second one at our next meeting, but I am really glad to have my own copies so I can go back and back again over Gene's teaching.

I hope you're all looking forward to the Michigan Hook-in in April, the McGown National in the fall, and the ATHA Biennial in New Orleans next year - I'm planning to be at all three. I will be selling McGown National T-shirts at the Michigan Hook-in - they're not only neat t-shirts, they also provide the funds to finance the national and they're only $20. If you want one ahead of time, contact me at phylblade@yahoo.com

Also, I am working on a teacher training program and I am looking for guinea pigs - if you are interested in being a teacher and you have a friend who is already teaching, I would love to help you work with each other so you can become a trained teacher. You can reach me at the above email address.

Phyllis

I haven't been free to write here for a month or so - my mother fell and has been hospitalized and then in a nursing home. At 94, I knew she would be slow to heal, and I knew the system would not question where she was until her medicare time limit ran out, but I did not expect her to get worse in the nursing home. She has gone from an active, alert nonagenarian who was on her way to get into her car to drive to a bingo game, to a barely awake bedridden nursing home inmate. I have been visiting for hours every day, bringing her laundry home, taking candy favorites to her, and playing cribbage with her every evening until now she doesn't even want to sit up to play cards and has phantom pains all over her body, legs, arms, etc. I discovered last night that she was put on a narcotic pain killer around the clock - and it's destroying her. I am hoping my insistence that she not be given any more pain killers will make a change.

I started a rug the first few days when she was in the hospital and have been trying to bind it for the last week. I was hooking in very little light in the hospital and my loops are pretty ragged. I can't decide whether to leave the bad loops in or rehook them. I wanted the rug to look primitive - not just like pioneer primitive, more like caveman primitive. The photo was taken before I finished hooking the ragged black border and the horse isn't really pink, its hooked with wool that was tan overdyed with red and then bled so there was only a little red left on each strip.

How to Hook Rugs by Mrs. Harry King

I added a new book to my collection today, that is, a new old book. How to Hook Rugs by Mrs. Harry King was written in 1952. The combination of Helen King publishing herself as a no-name belonging to her husband and the color-by-number technique espoused in the book place it firmly in a bygone era. Just glancing through the book, I almost felt I should be wearing my white gloves and pillbox hat - but, I took myself firmly in hand and decided to look for the remarkable parts of the book - and I didn't have far to look.

The photo shows the kind of hook Mrs. King recommends and shows the way to hold it. The hook is not described as far as size goes, it looks like any old crochet hook that might be laying around in your grandmother's sewing box.

The other surprise is Mrs. King's attitude about frames - she disapproves of them. It's not that she prefers hoops over frames, she prefers using nothing. She describes hooking with only your fingers to hold the rug.

Here's how: "In your left hand, hold your pattern, on the under side. With your thumb and first finger hold the pattern as if you were pinching it, near the flower or the leaf, letting the strip of wool come up through the next two fingers." I was thinking about the heavy weight of a partially hooked rug being carried by a couple of fingers, but she solves that worry by suggesting that you might want to spread your rug out on a card table for convenience and comfort.

I'm glad to have this book in my library, but as a piece of history, not as a reference. There are many pencil drawings of flowers with a number system telling you exactly how to hook each petal or leaf, and there is an index telling which pattern each flower came from, but there are no pictures of the full pattern and no reference telling anything more than a pattern name.

A Rug Within a Rug

I tried to post this photo on Yahoo Rughookers and for some reason couldn't get it to post, so I've put it here. This photo is of a wedding rug that didn't work. The story about it was published in the ATHA Newsletter a year or so ago so I won't repeat it here. I have posted it here because someone on Rughookers asked about making "rugs within rugs" and that's what this rug has to offer. Barenaked Ed is resting on a rug - and that rug is intended to be a replica of the handwoven rug I had made for my nephew long before this wedding.

I was extremely lucky one day on a trip to the Salvation Army. I found a couple of wool blankets and quickly took them up to the counter. The very helpful worker there chatted with me and learned that I was interested in any wool blankets they might have - and it turned out they had a couple of big boxes of them in the back room. I walked away with 30 wool blankets. Most of them were the color green that you see in the border of this rug, but some of them were the dark red you see under Barenaked Ed. Some of those wool blankets became hooking fabric, but a number of them also became weaving material. I made a loom woven green and red runner for Sean and then, when I planned his wedding rug, I drew his dog resting on it.

Maybe I should add here, I have this rug because it was returned to me for framing. I dragged my heels a little about getting it done, and suddenly the marriage was over. So, what do you do with an unsuccessful wedding rug?

Sean was married again last October - to a wonderful young woman who knew him way back when he was a college student. They had drifted apart and travelled different roads, until somehow, when Sean was readjusting to single life, Kim knew she should get in contact with him. Kim stood beside Sean all through the difficult year when his mother fought a losing battle with cancer - she was a perfect supportive loving wife to Sean long before they were married - and I am very happy to have her in our family. However, just in case the wedding rug caused some kind of jinx on that first marriage, I did not make a rug for Sean and Kim. Maybe someday - maybe a family rug instead of a wedding rug.

I just added a new book to my library, by Barbara Carroll titled American Folk Art Rug Hooking, 18 folk art projects with Rug-Hooking Basics, Tips & Techniques. It's another book in the same vein as Pat Cross' Purely Primitive, Hooked Rugs from Wool, Yarn, and Homespun Scraps and Tara Darr's Wool Rug Hooking, Pillows, Footstools, Rugs. All three of these books would make wonderful gifts for the person who is just beginning their rug hooking adventure. They all offer great color pictures of primtive hooking, interesting information about the history of hooking,and patterns with instructions for hooking. Each of these books works like a visit with an interesting teacher.

Add Deanne Fitzpatrick's book to the pile and maybe these books represent a new trend in the hooking community - a trend away from pre-printed patterns and toward hookers doing more independent work. I would still like to have someone else draw the pattern on the backing for me if I was planning to work on a very complicated pattern - Cumberland Crewel comes to mind - but I'm not likely to ever want to hook that style. I like the idea of beginners starting out right away with drawing their pattern on backing - even if it is a pattern designed by someone else - there is an aspect of owning their own work that is enhanced by doing it all from scratch.

Well, come to think of it, it's really not a new trend at all. There are a lot of the old books that have patterns and instructions for hooking them, too - maybe the new trend is just the really flashy colored pictures - the pictures that cause me to pick up each of those books over and over again, even though I'm not planning to hook any of their patterns.

I am so frustrated! I have been trying al l afternoon to post some photos. The only one that finally posted was not supposed to be here in the blog but next door with my profile. Grrrrrrrrr. The book photos that were supposed to be here have disappeared into cyberspace - maybe they will return tomorrow like yesterday's photos that showed up today.

Anyway, this profile photo is really of me - I think I was the only person in China with white hair. People stopped dead-still in the streets and stared at me. I couldn't figure out if there were no people in China as old as I am or if Chinese hair just never turns white, or what - but I was able to climb briefly on the Great Wall of China and a kind person took my photo to prove I was really there. Going up (and down) those steps was a real challenge - every stone step is uniquely sized - there was no way I could walk without looking at my feet and pulling myself up with the handrail. I felt really old and out of shape until I turned around and saw (younger) people behind me literally laying down on the steps out of complete exhaustion. It was really hard to imagine the soldiers who used to guard the Great Wall running up and down, shooting arrows over the battlements, etc. and not falling down.

While I was in China, I wanted to see rugs being made, and I did - in a government store. The woman who was working on the rug worked at a stand-up frame that was more like a loom than not - it was warped with an uncountable number of threads - and she tied itty bitty knots that were invisible to the naked eye on each thread, in a row going across the rug. She said it might take some people a lifetime to make that kind of rug - and then I saw stacks of them for sale for bargain basement prices.

Photos of Rose Wilder Lane's book

I don't know what happened with these photos - I tried to upload them half a dozen times yesterday and several times today but they wouldn't post with yesterday's post. So, today, I wanted to write about another book and I started with some photos, thought I had them uploaded, and they turned out to be these photos - two copies of each! Who can tell!

These books are not reviewed in any sensible order, just by which book seems to jump out at me when I go to the bookcase. Today's book is a book and a box - a book that is encyclopedic on all kinds of needlework and a box that is full of patterns for all of those kinds of needlework. Despite the inferior placement of the chapter on hooking (I, of course, think it should be listed first), I think the seventeen pages devoted to hooking are some of the best pages about hooking available anywhere.

The book is the Woman's Day Book of American Needlework by one of the foremost female authors throughout American history, Rose Wilder Lane. Rose was the only daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, who authored the Little House series of books about her pioneer childhood (Little House in the Big Woods, Little House on the Prairie, etc.) Rose offers the most interesting history of rug hooking I have ever read, and it's flavor, wording, and information seem to show up over and over again in every newer history that has been published since 1963 when this book was published.

There are some wonderful pictures of antique rugs that don't seem to appear in too many other books (other than the Kopp book), but in addition to those pictures there are paper patterns of some wonderful rugs. There is one pattern right in the book with instructions for hooking it - its the marvelous old tiger that was once on the cover of Rug Hooking Magazine, hooked by Margo White (who is an outstanding hooker and designer and advocate of primitive rugs from Indiana).

The book is usually sold without the box of patterns, and vice versa, the patterns are usually found without the book. I was very fortunate some years ago when a very kind member of Yahoo Rughookers sent the hooking patterns to me. The book shows up on eBay every so often, but sells more reasonably when it is not identified with rug hooking - look for it and the patterns under needlework. If I was compiling a rug hooking library for my own enjoyment, not for instructing others, this would be the next book I would purchase - after the books I've already reviewed. If the Deanne Fitzpatrick book hasn't changed you into a designer-of-your-own-patterns, I would search for this book of patterns - hooking the rugs in the box could keep me busy for quite a while.

There is a very new book that I think is wonderful, it's The Secrets of Planning and Designing Hand-Hooked Rugs, by Deanne Fitzpatrick with Susan Huxley, presented by Rug Hooking Magazine. This is one of those wonderful books that you can carry around with you and read a bit here and a bit there and have good things to think about all day. Deanne offers advice, suggestions, and exciting instructions in the same warm manner that she does in real life - I hear her voice all the way through the book.

I have been hooking a crow rug ever since my trip last summer to Nova Scotia where I took a class from Deanne at the ATHA Biennial - I saw crows on both sides of the highway all across Canada, from Windsor, Ontario to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Since I was driving alone, they became companions on my adventure. I mentioned the crows in Deanne's class and she quoted an old rhyme her father used to say when they'd go out for a drive when she was a child - I thought about that rhyme while I was drawing my rug, but I couldn't remember it, and now I have found it in Deanne's book!

If you have any thought about designing your own rugs, this is the book to get. It's quite new and readily available, so I don't want to ruin your pleasure by telling too much before you get your own copy, but I do want to say you will be charmed into drawing your own design(s) and loving yourself and your talent as you do it.

It's the kind of book you will want to keep with you for a long time - you can't just flip through it, or even read it from cover to cover, and then put it away.

More favorite rughooking books

Two more of my favorite books are Hooked Rugs, An American Folk Art, with Ten Patterns for Rugs to Make by Leslie Linsley, published in 1991, and The Rug Hook Book, Techniques, Projects and Patterns for this easy, traditional craft edited by Thom Boswell and published in 1992.

Both books would work as textbooks for an interesting class on rughooking - they are pretty complete as far as offering everything a beginning rug hooking would want to know. The history, pictures, and patterns are also very interesting to experienced hookers.

I once made a huge mistake with the Linsley book and I still kick myself about it. In a bookstore in Ann Arbor, where publishers overruns and discards are sold, I found a stack of the Linsley book. I loved it right away and thought I could probably sell a few of them in my shop, so I bought a few of them - at, if I remember correctly, nine dollars each. I priced them at $25 and sold all but the one I wanted to keep right away. I had a large group of hookers at the store for the weekend, and somehow, during the weekend, my copy of the book disappeared. I decided I had to have a copy of it, so I started searching on the internet and discovered that most copies of Hooked Rugs were selling for around $90. I have been searching for copies ever since. It's been about seven years, and I now have three copies of Hooked Rugs. I paid through the nose for the first copy and bought the second and third because the price had dropped a little. One copy was under $50, but I had to wait six weeks for it to come from Belgium. The heart and hand pattern pictured is one available in the book, and the bird pattern is another, derived from a 1920 painted pattern.

The Boswell book has more patterns and more detail and is a lot easier to find at a reasonable price, but somehow it doesn't appeal to me in the same way as the Linsley book. The Rug Hook Book has an offering not available in the Linsley book, it's a gallery of rug hooking artists - pages about some of the more well known rug hookers with photos of some of their rugs. The pages that are shown in the photo on this page are about Marion Ham who designs and hooks primitive rugs that look very much like the old antique rugs. Learning about some of the well known members of the rug hooking community offers an understanding of the variety and creativity available to rug hookers.

After a discussion with a member of Rughookers, I thought it might be appropriate for me to share my opinion of some books about rughooking.

The book I recommend most to beginning hookers is Joel and Kate Kopp's American Hooked and Sewn Rugs, Folk Art Underfoot. First published in 1975, it has the best collection of pictures of antique rugs available. Many of the patterns sold as "antique" or "adapted from an antique" by professional designers are actually patterns made from the rugs in the Kopp book. It is the kind of book that can put a rughooker in a state of primitive rug euphoria. It is readily available in paperback in a 1995 reprint - which is larger and probably a little more attractive than the original edition.

I attached lengths of rug tacking strips to the floor frame today to try to get a tighter surface for hooking. To protect my arms from the sharp tacks, I put pipe insulation, cut in half lengthwise, over the strips, after my rug was on the frame. I only had time to pull a few loops, but I really like the way the rug is held taut by the tack strips. I am used to hooking on my Puritan frames that are set on their stands so they can move in circles - hooking on this floor frame is going to be very different. I hope I will be able to make the adjustment - at the moment, it feels pretty funny to hook on something that is so sturdy. I may have to learn to do what my first teacher always said to do - hook in all directions without turning the frame.