Tinkering

It's hard for me not to tinker with my hooking.  By tinkering, I mean reworking parts of a rug as I hook the pattern.  I do this quite a bit; more than I'd like to admit.

I was loving my sheep, but I wasn't totally loving my brown background.  It wasn't making my heart sing.  I decided to pull a bunch of the brown background and get out my very large collection of dark worms for an antique black background.  I proceeded to hook a large portion to the left of the sheep to decide if the antique black won out over the brown.

When I talk antique black, it's not really, really black.  Yes there is some black in the mix, but it's more like 25 different types of dark wool that is truly dark brown to black.  My mix includes all kinds of wool.  Some is teal, some is dark olive green, some is tweed, some is nearly straight black or brown and a lot of it is a texture that has brown, black, blue, red or gold running through it.

Here's the differences in the background; brown before (right side), antique black after (left side):

Some of the original brown wool is still in the background on the top, right and under the sheep.  This is all coming out.

I beaded around the gold bird.  This picture was taken while the brown background was still around the bird.  

I'm liking the antique black.  It's staying in the rug.  It is very rich and interesting.  I'll take some closeups of it when I get back to hooking more of it.