January is nearly over already. Where has the time gone? Nova Scotian’s have been fortunate as we have had a great winter so far, not a lot of snow and not a lot of cold but February isn’t here as of yet!
When I decided I would blog about my Tall Ship Tales rug, I hadn’t realized how accountable that was going to make me and push me to do more.
I worked on this rug a couple evenings this week and a ‘lot’ this weekend, so I’m happy with my progress. Let me walk you through this weeks hooking calamities.
Pictorial rugs are harder to hook than they look or perhaps I should say, they are as hard as they look? I’ve hooked a few pictorial rugs but never one like this. I referenced a book I have that is a great resource by Jane Halliwell Green, Pictorial Hooked Rugs.
Jane provides wonderful information along with pictures and she advises you to think about things like, ‘what direction is your light coming from’? She talks about where the shadows are and hooking them in. I frankly have issues hooking shadows. I read and re-read Jane’s advise and looked at her Noah’s ark and thought, I need to create a shadow for the back side of the bow of the boat. That didn’t turn out so well so I scrapped that idea. You can see below, it didn’t look very well.
I re-hooked the bow and focused on the smoke stack and stern of the boat. I had finished up the other steam engine and I’m not sure I like either steam engine very much; you can see I hooked the second steam engine a bit different than the first.
Onto hooking the railway tracks. Do you know how hard it is to hook railway tracks? I thought it wouldn’t be that hard….wrong again. I made ‘several attempts’, ok, I hooked the tracks differently, 4 times! I was sure the 3rd picture below was ‘it’, but when I took a picture of it I could see it was too dark, I needed to tone it down a bit. I’m still not sure I’m 100% happy with it but it will do for now.
I drew a picture and penciled in how I wanted the tracks to look like but hooking it was another matter all together.
In Jane's book, she had lovely black and grey tracks but I didn't want that for this pictorial. This railway was being made on the Marsh, lots of mud and rocks. Not much grass because of all the work being done.
I wanted on either side of the tracks a lighter color mud and so I played around with my wool and found a wonderful textured wool that I thought would work with some darker brown accents.
I hooked in the flag at the back and filled in a bit of dark blue water.
The steep ditch I needed to think about how I was going to do this. I could mix in lots of different browns but wouldn't it be easier if I could dye a piece to be what I wanted then simply hook it in! That is what I did and produced a new color I'm calling 'Cliffs' and is available in my shop.
I got right to work filling in some of the steep bank as I couldn't wait to see how it would look and I was loving what I was seeing. What do you think?
I had plans to finish the tracks and the lighter shade ditches tonight but I'm not able to get back at it tonight.
I'm busy planning a special 'web page special' that is starting this week. If you haven't subscribed to my web page, please do so and if you did subscribe when I first opened my web page, I'd ask you to please re-subscribe as it wasn't working properly but now we've worked out all the kinks and I can't wait to offer a special for my wonderful clients. Stay tuned!
Have a wonderful week!