That’s the thumbnail of first rug I put up on my Etsy shop: “Hatch’s BIG Chile.” I thought that it was pretty appropriate given how much I love my new state of New Mexico. But can you believe that I’ve lived her for almost three years?!!?
After about three years of telling myself that I was going to put an Etsy shop together, I finally broke down and did it. Woohoo! (Okay, the last vow was to do it this past winter. I got close; it went up the first day of spring, which is still practically winter in a lot of the country.)
You’ll find the shop at: https://www.etsy.com/shop/HighonHooking. Now, no sniggers. I know it’s still just an itty bitty shop with – at the moment – two listings. But everyone’s got to start somewhere. And not only did I have to figure out all that was involved with the shop and creating listings and taking pics, I had to do some updating of the website here, so that things would match. Okay too, maybe I hadn’t taken care of the Gallery in a while. Maybe some of those items were sold last year. But it’s better now. Not perfect; I’ll work more on completing the website after the Etsy show has a little more…heft.
So, spread the news! You might want to add that I’ll be adding more rugs to the shop on a regular basis. If you have any ideas of how to make it a more inviting shop, give me a yell. I’m happy to get advice, especially if you already have your own Etsy shop. And if you do have a rug hooking ETSY shop, feel free to share the address below in the comments. Later I’ll transfer the info onto the “Cool Resources” page.
To those who celebrate as I do, have a joyful Easter surrounded by friends and family!
“What’s on the frame” this week isn’t what’s on the frame. Instead I’m doing a LOT of sewing: starting and finishing rugs. If you’ve been around awhile, you know that I sew my rug binding on before I start to hook. It’s just the way I was taught. Plus I can hook right up to the tape and rarely need to do any whipping. But maybe you enjoy the tedium of whipping? Said NO ONE ever! Because I have Albuquerque’s Recycled Art Fair next month, I’m trying to get a jump on several mug rugs. Then there are the finished rugs; well, not completely finished rugs. I’ve been putting off their hemming. Also not my favorite thing, but so much faster than whipping (she said gleefully). And unless they sell right off, all these rugs and mats will appear in my Etsy shop. For those missing Tynan, I thought it best to keep him away from all the pins and needles. He can’t get hurt. Tomorrow’s his 10th birthday!
I try not to do NEWS-based posts too often, you know, catching up with what’s been happening here at High on Hooking, but sometimes you just have to. Not only is the selling season coming on quickly, but there are a couple of shows right around the corner.
First up is the Spring Show put on every other year (even) by Albuquerque’s Fiber Arts Council. Many of you watched as I hooked and hooked my little fingers to the bone to have “Memory of Water” ready for the April 7 and 8 (Saturday and Sunday) exhibition. As I’m on one of the committees, I’ll be busy from Friday through the weekend. If you’re a local, please try to make it down and support the fiber artists of the greater Albuquerque area. It’s free; hours are 9-5 both days with an artists’ reception Saturday evening, 5-7.
And let the selling begin! A couple of weeks ago I received official word that I’d again been juried into Albuquerque’s Recycled Art Fair. This year it’s a little earlier: the weekend of April 14 and 15, 10-4, and it’s at the Open Space Visitors’ Center on Coors. If you remember my experience last year at the end of April, you might also recall the snow, rain, wind, and all-round cold temperatures we had. Not the usual weather here in Albuquerque at that time of year (except for the wind, of course), but not completely out of the ballpark. So, PLEASE PRAY that this year we get the nice weather I moved out here for, that we’ve enjoyed all winter! This is a fun festival: food, music, family activities, and good art – treasures that came from other folks’ trash. Hope we see you there too.
Just this weekend I received notice that “Memory of Water” had been accepted into
“Memory of Water.” Framed, she’s about 22.5″x18.5″ and plastic bag on monks’ cloth.
another show. Woohoo! This one’s also being held at the Open Space Visitors’ Center on Coors here in town, and it’s a fiber arts exhibit with the theme of WATER. It opens April 28 and runs through May 27. For New Mexican fiber buffs, it’s being put on in conjunction with the New Mexico Fiber Crawl happening May 18-20. Call me if you’re interested in this one. By chance it’s right down the street from my house; we can go together.
As many of you know, for the past two years, I’ve vended at the Albuquerque Rail Yards Market that takes place May – October, from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. I love it there; it’s a people-watchers delight plus you can pick up good food, produce, and well-priced art and listen to different music each weekend. It’s just an all-round fun place to spend a few hours, and booths are more than reasonable at $20/any given Sunday. Unfortunately, last year I didn’t do as well as I had the previous year. Other artists said the same thing. So, this year, I’ve decided to cut my days at the market to once per month. I’ll still get the exposure and have a chance to sell, but I won’t worry that I could’ve been somewhere else.Or force Tom to help me set up and break down for nothing. Dates I’ll be at the Rail Yards are: May 27; June 10; July 8; August 12; September 9; and October 14. Maybe we’ll see you there…
I think that’s it for all the big, official news. Keep checking back to our home page; we add events as they come up. Now for the weekly “What’s on the frame” segment. Actually, this week we’ve got two frames and two rugs! Check out the pics for the scoop.
The “BIG Boucherouite” begins! It’ll be slow progress, something I can work on between projects and to breakup any hooking monotony. I’ve been cutting strips like crazy and still have more to go. A lot of the color-planning will be made up as I go. (Upcycled bedsheet strips on monks’ cloth, Anderson frame.)As usual Tynan brings you “What’s on the Puritan frame” news. The sunflower table runner (or wall-hanging) continues. Should be done this week sometime. (Up-cycled t-shirt strips on monks’ cloth.)
For your sake, I hope that’s spring’s either arrived in your neck of the woods or is right around the corner. My sympathies yet again for New England and the fourth nor’easter in as many weeks or less. But spring will come; it always does.
What’s the news where you hail from? Plans for when it finally warms up?
“Memory of Water.” Framed, she’s about 22.5″x18.5″ and plastic bag on monks’ cloth.
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.
A close-up of the mystery rug “Memory of Water.”
The piece is called “Memory of Water.” The initial idea for it came to me one morning when I was walking in the Bosquewith 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.
Another close-up of the mystery rug. Flowers and trees and grasses can disappear during drought and climate change.
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 Sproutsand 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…
Not to be forgotten, Tynan brings you this week’s “what’s on the frame.” Aren’t those cheery yellows? I’m having such fun with this one. I may even use it to make a new business card.
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. 🙂
Snow in March: Been there, done that. This is a pic of our old house in Franklin, Massachusetts. Okay, this was in December, but you get the idea. I never took pics of March snow. By then it wasn’t welcome.
So, the whole country is watching the east coast for a second time this late winter / early spring day. I know what I’m talking about when I say that two nor’easters in one week is a big, old bitch. See, weather like that is one of the MAJOR reasons Tom and I picked up in 2015 and moved to New Mexico. From Massachusetts. Yeah, we’re both native New Englanders, but we got tired of the winters.
Cheery daffodils yelled “SPRING” and welcomed me to Heritage Farm yesterday.
Don’t get me wrong, snow’s pretty and fun to play in. I don’t even mind shoveling (now and again; we had a snow blower). BUT that self-same snow is only lovely for a day or so, then it gets all nasty and brownish-gray. Out here in Albuquerque we can drive forty minutes around the Sandia Mountains and visit snow. The dog loves it.Then we get back in our car and head home where this winter it’s been mostly in the 50s and 60s. Hey, that’s not typical, and because we’ve had very little snow in the mountains, we’re back in a drought situation. Which means that there’ll be a BAD fire season. (We won’t be affected by that, but I have friends who most definitely will be.) Don’t even start me on the juniper poison pollen that’s been out since January. It’s something we never even considered when we chose a new home.
Nonetheless, yesterday a few of us from the guild were doing our usual gig demo-ing rug hooking at Albuquerque’s Botanic Garden, part of the BioPark. (We’re there the 1st and 4th Tuesdays each month except June and July when they kick us out for summer kid programs.) There was a good breeze going, and temps were in the low 50s (oddly enough lower than the norm), so it was a slow day in the park. I figure folks are waiting till it hits 70 tomorrow and Friday.
A shot of the Heritage Farm farmhouse. The tulips are sucking up the sunshine. It’ll truely be spring when we go back on the 27th.
It was a good time to wander outside and look for spring.
AWAG demos at the Rio Grande Heritage Farm, a section of the Botanic Garden. The farm’s a reproduction representing a New Mexican farm circa somewhere between 1925 and 1935. We hang in the farmhouse or out on the porch in rocking chairs when it’s nice. Out back there’s an apple orchard. They’ve got a vineyard too! And then there’s the barn with its requisite farm animals. Fun times, though not with one of the sheep yesterday. 🙁
The chicks and hens are enjoying the warmth. See the green in her center?
I thought I’d share some of the signs of early spring at “our” farm. Enjoy!
Fresh chives! Now all I need is a baked potato.
One of the churro sheep(I think it’s one of the churros) is having NOTHING to do with me. She (?) posed this way. Cold!
The turkey was far more accommodating.
Goats are by far the friendliest of the farm animals.Then the goat got his (???) churro buddy to pose. Nice!
The leaves were just coming out on the lilac. (I was so happy to find lilacs out here. There’s even one in our yard. Their scent says SPRING’S ARRIVED.)
The Heritage Farm barn at Albuquerque’s BioPark. Looks like a movie set, no? If you get a chance, come visit. The Botanic Garden’s been rated one of the best in the country.
Tynan’s back! He very enthusiastically presents (given the presence of the doggie beef jerky treat) this week’s “What’s on the frame.” It’ll be a happy sunflower table runner hooked in upcycled t-shirt that’ll be available at the Albuquerque Recycled Art Fair April 14 and 15. Will we see you there?
Meanwhile back at the Salamy homestead, Tynan’s back with “What’s on the frame.”
“The First Boucherouite” hooked from old bed sheets and a little t-shirt added in. I loved this rug, even considered keeping it for my own house.
How many of you have fallen in love with a style of rug or a theme or design or what-have-you, enough that you feel a pressing need to hook more and more of them? I find myself feeling like that with the whole Boucherouite thing. For those not familiar with the Moroccan rugs, check out this fabulous article dealing with the history of the rugs and the Berber peoples who make them. I warn you, you’ll start seeing these types of rugs in every home magazine and website you frequent.
Certainly, I’ve written about the Boucherouites before, when I hooked my first one last year. Yes, mine are hooked; I don’t weave them. I fell in love with these rag rugs with their seemingly haphazard designs and color schemes when they started showing up in my Pinterest feed. The pics made it difficult initially to discern whether they were hooked, woven, or made in some other way. The fact that the weavers create them out of old textiles – like I hook my rugs! – made it impossible for me not to try my hand at one. Again, hooking, not weaving.
And so it begins. A pile of bedsheet strips. Color, it’s all about the color. And using what’s available – even if I have to head off to Saversto get it.
I found that my own sense of design, despite my best efforts, didn’t allow me to create a rug as “irregular” as the true Boucherouites. That’s okay; it’s how inspiration works. It’s not about copying. After I hooked (and sold!) the first one, I knew that I was going to do another sooner than later. And that it would be BIG.
Fast forward to this winter. The BIG Boucherouite’s time has come. I drew it up on a piece of monks’ cloth and sewed on the rug binding. Prior posts have shown that. Currently, I’m in the midst of cutting sheets into strips. I’d recycled old bedsheets for the “First Boucherouite” and loved the effect. That plus the high we get here at High on Hooking when we up-cycle made it a winner. I’m not completely sure how the colors will work on this new rug, it’s a fluid thing, but I’ll need to have strips at the ready. It’s a LOT of hand-cutting for me and the scissors.
So, you see the theme running here. It gets better. Last week, the Mystery Rug finally finished and off to the framers, I needed to start hooking pieces for this year’s selling season. Specifically, I have Albuquerque’s Recycled Art Fair coming up in April. I decided to start with a double mug rug because…they tend to sell pretty quickly. I took out a couple of OD green mugs I’d found at Savers and stared at them, waiting for them to channel an idea into my brain. And I waited. And I waited. In the meantime, I was sewing up the BIG Boucherouite. Ooh! Got it! Thus the “Baby Boucherouite” was born. I know, I know, I risk becoming boring. But they’re fun!
Keeping true to the theme, now we have the “Baby Boucherouite.” Also hooked from old sheets with some t-shirt thrown in. It’s about 7″x14″. Wouldn’t it make a great magic carpet for Barbie?
Okay, it’s not much to look at right now, but it’ll be pretty as a posy later this week. BTW, if you’re looking for Tynan, he’ll be back next week. Tom took him out for a walk. And left the house all to me!
In the meantime, before I can finally hook the BIG rug, this is what’s on the frame today. No, it’s not part of the Boucherouite theme, but it is another double mug rug. T-shirt, bathing suit, nightie, and an old blouse ensure that I can use it at the Recycling Fair which requires 70 or 75% of items offered for sale be constructed of recycled materials. I can do that, no prob.
What about you? Have you ever found yourself obsessed by a particular theme or design or even a color when you’ve been hooking? Tell us about it.
