So, the framer called that the mystery rug was ready to be picked up. Woohoo! And just in time, I might add, to get a couple of photographs of it to submit to Espanola Valley Fiber Arts Center. They’re co-sponsoring “Recall-Recapture-Remember,” a fiber show on memory with Tansey Contemporary in Santa Fe. The show will open at Tansey’s gallery May 18th in conjunction with the New Mexico Fiber Crawl weekend. It’ll run four weeks then move to their Denver gallery for a July opening. Here’s hoping I get in.

I’m happy with the framing. It seems that I go in there with something simple (you know, and elegant AND NOT EXPENSIVE) in mind, but the lady with the German accent, she has great ideas. She gets me to trying new things I never would’ve thought on my own. This time we finally narrowed it down to a black frame with blue running through it. Perfect! I also have to hand it to another customer, an older woman, a painter there that same morning as me; her input was very good too. I especially like that she told me the boldly colored frame was best even though she prefers pastels. To “prove” that bit of info, she swore to me that she wore “fairy wings” for three years. Real freaking wings. Like some kind of New Mexican retiree angel. You can’t make that shit up, but, man, she was a hoot.

The piece is called “Memory of Water.” The initial idea for it came to me one morning when I was walking in the Bosque with Tynan. The ground was parched and cracked as we hadn’t had any precipitation since the last of September’s monsoon rains. I knew I needed to hook something that fell under the theme of “Earth, Wind, and Fiber” for the Albuquerque Fiber Arts Council Garden Show April 7 and 8. Hey, rain, water – or the lack thereof – fit the bill. I decided to kick the environmental thing up a notch and use plastic bags. It’s horrible how our oceans and sea-life are being so messed up given the vast amounts of pollution caused by our prodigious use of plastics. So, I tried to make something beautiful – or at least interesting – out of plastic bags.

If you’ve been following the mystery rug’s hooking, you’ll know that it was easy enough to pull the loops, but not as satisfying as hooking with fibers like wool or t-shirt or bedsheet. Plus, there was the pain-in-the-assedness of the static electricity that reaches a zenith in the winter in an already humidity-free desert. I’m not sure what would’ve happened if I hadn’t had that can of Static Guard. And I’m still finding strips of plastic bags in my living room, never mind the clippings.Not sure I’ll run out and do another plastic rug, but it was a good experiment. And since I finished the rug I’ve purchased not just stainless steel straws and their very important straw cleaners. (I could never really clean my re-usable plastic straws; they were contributing to my recurring sinus infections, I realized.) I’ve also ordered washable produce bags that I can use at Sprouts and other grocery stores. It was really starting to go up my craw sideways that we were using a good 20 bags each week when we shopped. I kept thinking that I’d have to find hooking projects for all those bags. No!!!

Any-so-who, I’m back to working with my usual fibers, specifically t-shirt this week. Feeling a need to do something a little larger than the double mug rugs I recently finished (hooking only), I decided to make a table runner. The sunflowers are a trademark, if you will. I’ve made several similar rugs from them, but smaller. I’m really loving the bigger sunflowers. Hmmm, like the “Big Boucherouite,” I may have to go really BIG with the sunflowers on another rug. We’ll see…

In the meantime, you peeps back east have my sincerest sympathy. All those nor’easters in a row. I’m having flashbacks to 2015 when the snow in New England just wouldn’t stop, and we were trying to get our house ready for sale so we could move out here to New Mexico. Ice dams like we’d never seen. Snow piles alongside the driveway wayyyyy over our heads. The poor crocuses that never really saw light. Yeah, winter in Albuquerque is NOTHING like that. And we like it that way.

How’s your winter been? What’s it done for your rug hooking or any other art you might practice? Let’s all hold our glasses high to toast spring when it (officially) arrives next week.

Special thanks to all those who saved their plastic bags for me, especially you, Mary Ramsey. Without your pinks and turquoises and oranges and purples, the drought would’ve been far worse. 🙂