Another week has quickly flown by. I honestly don't know where the time goes. I've been dyeing a 'lot' of wool this week and not much hooking on my Tall Ships rug but this weekend, I went to town on it!
Growing up, I felt my mother was a 'perfectionist'. She was a stay at home mom, looked after other peoples children during the day and after school in addition to 4 children of her own. I am the oldest of 4. Mom I felt did everything well, wonderful cook, maintained a great home, very crafty. When I was a child, there wasn't enough time nor money to put us kids into extra circular activities. I didn't care for crafts of any sort but mom felt the girls should go into 4H. In high school 'home Economics' was the norm. I didn't mind the cooking parts but I really didn't care for crafts or sewing. I don't think of myself as a perfectionist. I have a full time job outside of the home, I am a Quality Assurance Manager so 'quality' is important to me. When I dye, I look at it and think 'is this the best quality'?
My train tracks, if you have been following my blog, have given me a hard time. I think I said I wasn't too happy with them, but they would 'do'.
I live next door to my mother and she walked down to see me yesterday and I proudly showed her my work in progress. First thing she said, 'what is that?' pointing to the train tracks. I hung my head, sighed and said, 'those are the train tracks' and then I proceeded to explain the hard time I was having with them and that I had 'given up' and I wasn't farting with them any more! After mom left, I looked at those darn train tracks again, and thought maybe I'll try 'one more time' . To the left you can see my new and improved 'darn' (you know I mean something else) tracks and by golly, I think I finally got it! I am thrilled and couldn't wait to 'show mom'! I said 'thanks mom' for being honest and pointing out the things you don't think look right because it pushes me to 'do better'. Mom is my biggest fan, she truly is and maybe I have a bit of her perfectionism.
I hooked in the mustardy (is that a word?) on either side of the tracks today and a bit more of the steep ditch using my new color 'cliffs'.
This week someone had posted on one of the Facebook sites I frequent, her beautiful geometric rug. She had a very short caption asking us to find her mistake she didn't notice until after the rug was done, could we spot it.? I love a challenge and I blew up her picture of her finished rug to take a peek and I spotted right away what had gone wrong for her. I am quality after all, if I couldn't spot the boo boo, that wouldn't be saying much for me! I didn't respond to the posting but I thought it was fun to have a look at it. It seemed the owner of the rug wasn't too upset at her boo boo, I think she was having a bit of fun with it. We all could learn to laugh at ourselves and not take ourselves too seriously. I didn't think at first glance anyone would notice the boo boo and who cares really, it is to please her, and no one else. What was interesting was the responses of some people and one in particular that I read, someone was quite upset that we were picking apart the rug to find things wrong with it. The owner had invited us to do that. I don't think any of us would purposely put down another. We are all guilty of critiquing out own work more than perhaps is necessary, at the end of the day, it only has to please us.
I want to share this journey of my Tall Ship Tales with you to show you we can all struggle from time to time with our hooking, what color should go where, what do I do next, etc and the thought process we all experience. Embrace all of the steps and just keep going. I always say it doesn't really matter all the stressing because at the end of the day, it all ends up looking wonderful!.
Last weekend I had taken dozens of pictures of light, medium and dark wool to hook some rocks in my rug. I took black and white photos so I could see the contrasts. When I was all done, I thought, this is a lot of work, do I really want to hook piles of rocks this way? NO!
A wonderful lady, Ivi, had given me some lovely textured wool for helping her find wool she needed to finish a rug she was working on. If you follow me on Facebook, I showed you how I over dyed the textured wool with gray then hooked it into the wings of my William Morris birds. For my Tall Ship Tales, I wanted the left of the tracks to look like a rock pile or gravel. I over dyed up more of the lovely textured wool this time with black so I had two smaller pieces, one of black and one of gray. To the right you can see the circled area I blew up a bit to show you some of the textured wool as it looked not dyed. These pieces to me don't look very pretty but I got to work putting them into my 'rock pile'.
I thought I'd alternate between the gray and black pieces and I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the results! It almost looks like beach glass from a distance and gravel rocks closer up. I am very pleased and I can't 'wait' to get all of those lovely stones in place.
I created lots of new colors this weekend which are available on this site under the 'WOOL' category. I did a video on how to cut wool for a customer and the response has been so wonderful from the video that I'm going to add a category on my web site for videos so stay tuned for that.
Lots of snow coming our way this week, should be interesting. Stay warm and safe everyone and have a super week!