Mr. Wes Meets Magdalena

I'm preparing to teach in Tyler next month and spending lots of time in the dye pots and working up patterns for students.

For her class project, Barbara originally ordered my Lil' Scrappy Dog pattern because it reminds her of her grand-dog Mr. Wes.

Lil' Scrappy Dog Pattern

Barbara asked if I could make a few alterations to Lil' Scrappy Dog and she indicated she likes the Magdalena style of other dog patterns I've designed.  My original reaction was to revise Lil' Scrappy Dog and Magda-ize him.  Here's where that idea went:

Lil' Scrappy Dog Magda-ized.

Then Barbara sent me some pictures of the real Mr. Wes.

Once I received the picture of Mr. Wes I decided it was best to do a total redesign and make a pattern that represents a true Pom (primitive style of course) rather than substituting Lil' Scrappy Dog.

So I played on the computer last night and worked up these Mr. Wes meets Magdalena prototypes:
Version one:

Pom version 1 Magda-ized.

Version two:

Pom version 2 Magda-ized.

I'm favoring version two, but it's up to Barbara.  Either way, I think hooking Mr. Wes Magdalena style is going to be a lot more fun than hooking the original Lil' Scrappy Dog.  I guess Lil' Scrappy Dog will have to be on my frame soon so I can Magda-ize him.

Post Script:  whoops, he went through another change; version 1 dog with version 2 background, so here's the FINAL version of Mr. Wes:

If you wish to have your dog Magda-ized in a rug hooking pattern, feel free to contact me about the project.

If you copy pictures from my blog for Pinterest, please kindly give credit to my blog site for the pictures.  

Harvest Hooking

Last weekend I had the pleasure to attend the Wine Country Rug Hookers (WCRH) Guild Harvest Hook-in in Petaluma CA.  I drove over with three friends from the Sacramento Guild.

This was the first Harvest Hook-in event by the WCRH and hopefully it will not be the last.  What an incredible hook-in.  To start off we were in beautiful Sonoma County which is gorgeous any time of year, but it has a very special feel to it in the fall season.  Open farmland and rolling hills with a cool temperature and random pumpkin farms here and there set the stage for a beautiful location.

A very nice, state of the art school gymnasium housed the event.  From the moment you reached the entry, you were in for a harvest delight.  The ladies of WCRH outdid themselves in setting up an incredibly welcoming entry with full harvest theme.  Everywhere you turned there were harvest decorations:  pumpkins, interesting gourds, corn stalks, antique props to show off a harvest bounty, colorful flowers and more.  The decorating was worth the journey alone, but the goodies didn't stop there.

Upon entering the hook-in we each received a little bag full of goodies.  A scissor fob (each one individually made), a lavender sachet, a chocolate drop, some strips of wool.  A welcoming breakfast bar of baked goods with coffee and tea was overflowing with choices.

Guild members also offered vendor booths and of course you know we had fun shopping.  There was also numerous items available for silent auction.  I would estimate there were a dozen or more items, each cleverly organized and unique in composition.  In the first picture below you can see the tables on the right full of silent auction items.

A rug show was also offered and all participants of the hook-in were invited to bring a rug to share.  I will show pictures of the rugs in the next post, since I've already tantalized your imagination with all the pictures above!

What a fun day and a big thank you to WCRH Guild for sponsoring the event!

Magdalena Meets Andy Warhol

If you follow my blog regularly, you will know that I've been involved with a group that meets on Tuesdays that I call the Maggie's Girls.  We began as a group focusing on Magdalena's work and while this general theme continues, we are sort of moving on to other designs now, as more time goes by.  But lest we forget Magdalena, I want to share one of the latest Magdalena style rugs to come out of this rug hooking group.  I must give you a bit of background on this rug:

My friend Daniella is a very fine hooker and she tends to go back and forth between hooking either primitive or fine cut rugs.  After completing several fine cut pieces and watching me hook away with my larger cuts of wool, she decided she wanted to go prim again.  She has been telling me that she wants to hook a very, very old looking rug and so I encouraged her to hook a Magda rug along with me.  And so a tale of two lollipop bouquets was born:  Daniella and I started our lollipop bouquet rugs on the same day in the same room, sitting right next to each other.  But that is where similarity ends.

We decided we'd use up all our spare bits of wool and each of us brought lots of baggies full of wool to use in our rugs and to cross share.  After the first day of hooking Daniella went home and proceeded to hook all 70 or so of the lollipop circles in the next 24 hours.  She loved those little circles while I drag my feet on hooking them.  It took me few weeks to hook all of them!  By the next week Daniella returned and all the circles were hooked in luscious colors of wool.  They were not hooked in Magda colors of wool, but in Daniella colors of wool.  And they are drop dead gorgeous.  Daniella kept asking me if the colors were OK or not, since my rug was so different in comparison.  I encouraged her to follow her own spirit and not my lead of using drab, dirtly, old looking wool influence what came from her heart.  And follow her heart she did.

Whaaa-la!!!!  Can you believe this rug?  It is Magdalena on steroids and it is so beautiful.  Daniella took an old design and brought it into the 21st century.  Does this knock your socks off or what?  Don't you just love it?!  I love the spirit of it, the beauty of the colors and it is so fascinating to look at with all the beautiful colors and diversity of wool strips.

Seeing this rug is certainly enough to make me question my use of drab wool!!  I may be changing my tune soon enough!

Magdalena lollipop bouquet with tree stump vs. vase and primarily pastel and brighter colors by Daniella Brooks.

The beautiful artist who made a beautiful rug!

This is the first rug Daniella has bound on her own.  The yarn is very pretty with the rug.

Betty coaches Daniella on binding.

 Here are the three lollipop bouquet rugs together that have been produced by Betty (top), Daniella (middle) and me (bottom).

This just goes to show you can teach an old dog new tricks!  Might we all want to reconsider using primitive colors and just go bright?!

Recuperating, Again!

It's been several days since we returned from Hooker Hill Rug Retreat, held in Oakhurst CA, the gateway to Yosemite.  This was our third year at HH and as always, the ladies who put this camp on did a stellar job!  The Wool Poppies of Fresno CA is the host ATHA group that puts on HH.  The members of this group are small in number but strong in personality, kindness, organization and team work.  We love being with the Wool Poppies ladies and I wish they lived closer so I could go to all their meetings.  For more about HH you can see photos from each year and read about next year's camp at:  http://www.woolpoppies.com/

Our teacher for class was Michele Wise from Washington.  Oh my, Michele is a walking encyclopedia of rug hooking technique, color planning and whatnot's to make your rug special!  Not only is Michele as knowledgeable as can be, she brings an amazing number of hooked projects and wares along with her.  I didn't see the kitchen sink in the mix, but she had about everything else you can wish for and she keeps her prices reasonable and fair.  Do, do, do take a class with her if you get the chance.  I can't say enough about her kind spirit, knowledge and quality attention to everyone in class.  She can go primitive to classy, small cut to large cut and never blink and eye!

Larry and I hooked until at least 10:00 each night, and Michele was staying later than that (she would never divulge how late she actually stayed, but she did tell me she's a night owl) working on drafting out a pattern for Debby in our group.  Pictures are included below of the magnificent pattern Michele was drawing.  The pattern is 5' across (circular) and Michele was drafting it out effortlessly.  Just watching her work on the pattern was amazing.  She had drawn out the preliminary part of the pattern with planes in it before camp so Debby could begin hooking the pattern.  Then she worked on the background for the pattern at our class, each night after teaching all day.  The design is made to look like you are looking down (birds eye view) at the planes and the earth below them, with all kinds of topography from desert to agriculture, all based on memories and places where Debby and her husband have lived.

Michele is working on drawing in the background for Debby's plane rug.
The rug honors the flying experience of Debby's husband.

Here you can see the rug in progress on the upper left side of this photo.
Debby started hooking on the planes, but the background design was still being drafted on paper before
being transferred to the monks cloth.  The rug is 5' round

Close-up of the plane pattern.  It is so clever!  It is one of the most fun rug designs I have ever seen.
I do hope Debby enters it in Celebrations and Michele gets lots of notoriety for designing it.  

I could have watched Michele work on this pattern for hours and skipped hooking it was such a clever work of imagination and art!

Michele's rug; sorry about the shadow on it and there is a rug behind it too.
Note the very interesting directional hooking in this rug.

This is Michele's ram rug.
You have to see it in person to appreciate how incredible it is.  I tried to get some closeups below.

Michele has amazing talent.  Do, do, do try to take a workshop with her.  She is humble about her talent and very giving in sharing information and techniques.  I can't say enough about her qualities as a great rug hooking teacher.

I will post more pic's of camp later this week, before I head off for another hooking venue in Texas!  Yahoo and yippee yi-ay for hooking with the Texas ladies!

My Rug Camp Rug Post 3

I am adding one more post on my rug from Cambria Pines Rug Camp, then I'm going to highlight the other/better half of the household which is Larry's rug from camp in my next post.

At the present moment I have decided to put my Corgi dogs antique rendition aside and I will continue work on it at my next camp:   Hooker Hill Rug Retreat http://www.woolpoppies.com/

In this past week I've made some changes to the rug, before setting it aside.

I am satisfied with how I've hooked Gracie into my rug but Piper has been through about 4 transitions in his face.

The first face was very cutesy and had a heart shape to it.  My friend Gail noticed the heart shape first, then it stood out to me once she asked me if I had intentionally hooked the face with a hidden heart. Some people do this - adding hearts into their rug in a sort of hidden way.  While I like the idea of doing this it was not intentional and I actually wanted to reduce Piper's cutesy look.

I superimposed a heart shape in the photo above to show this random shape in the rug.  Below, is a photo to show you the changes Piper's face has gone through since I returned home from camp.  Now before you look at this photo carefully, you have to know that Elizabeth Black was teaching at camp.  Elizabeth is a master at animal faces hooked in fine cuts and her students were doing magnificent work.  So as you can imagine I didn't carry my rug all around camp to show it off because my dog faces are very PRIMITIVE.  Remember, I don't do fine cut hooking so my guys will be prim.

Here are the changes Piper's face has gone through after version one above.

The order of these faces are:  face 1 (with heart super imposed above), face 2 on the left of the trio of faces above, face 3 in the middle and face 4 on the right is currently in the rug.  You can see face 4 is cute like face 1, but not as cutesy and not heart shaped?  I think that's the face that's going to stay in the rug.  Just as a reminder his is real-life Piper's picture again.

You can see in the picture of the three faces above that the right ear has been redrawn a few times.  After hooking the original drawing on the pattern, the head looked strange without more of a profile to his face, so I tweaked the pattern.  Here's my original mock-up of the pattern for reminder's sake and you can see only his little nose was going to show.

This is as far as I've gotten so far on this rug.  It is my most favorite rug I've ever hooked by far!  But my corgis are in it, so how could it be otherwise?!

If its Tuesday it Must be Magdalena Day Continued

The Maggie's Girls met yesterday to continue working on our Magdalena style rugs.  This gathering seems different from our other hookin meetings.  Our conversations about everyday life are the same, but this experience feels different.  Studying Magdalena is bringing us together with a focus, new imagination and discussion, and it is challenging comfort zones. 

Sandy and Denise have made progress through hooking on the sly at home.  We aren't publicly hooking these M rugs other than through info shared on this blog.  Unless a blog reader lives locally, and knows us, this project is top secret with our locals until we have the rugs finished.  We think our guild sisters will be very surprised when they see our rugs, especially Betty's rug!   Betty is a 3-4 cut fine shading florals hooker, so this project is way out of bounds.  She is really enjoying it too.

We had an active day.  Denise was ready to add lines, symbols and hit-n-miss to her rug.  We took pen to cloth and it was fun. 


Denise's rug before any lines or symbols are added.



Denise studies the Magdalena book for ideas.

Betty (left), Denise and Sandy have fun discussing ways to let
 their hair down and add lots of Magdalena business to the rug.

Symbols, echo lines and hit-n-miss has been added to Denise's design. 

Sandy continued hooking animals and has begun some echoing around the animals and a bit more hit-n-miss in the lower right. 

Sandy's rug in progress.



Sandy's cute little dog.

Sandy's bear.  Love the colors.

Betty has stayed true to circles, lots of circles, little bitty circles, 70+ in number.  She will start having fun when all those circles are finished. 

Betty's circles are coming along nicely!  I don't envy her on this, I've done my time with these circles.

I have to keep up with the others, so I started a new modified Magdalena design of the eagle rug, leaving out the crows on this version.   You can see by my linen backing, I have no problem adding lines, lines and lines.  I love the business of the M style.  I am not shy about it!

Eagle is hooked, just starting the background.  I am very happy with the eagle. 

By the end of the day I have begun the hit-n-miss under the eagle's
lower right wing.  I'm not sure I like it; it seems sort of mudy to me, but I won't know
for sure until I hook more of the background.  I also have to do something about
that black blob on the left wing.  It's not working for me.

I was studying some of the symbols used in the Magdalena Domestic Zoo pattern and tried to draw them out as reference points for today's gathering and discussion of M's background techniques.  Here's a copy of some of the symbols I drew and you are welcome to use them if you are designing a M style background.

Have fun and remember to hook outside the box!