How I’ve been spending my days. Damn, I forgot to put a cough drop or twelve in the photo.
So, it’s not the flu, but I’ve been coughing for days. Much like many of you. There’s a virus out there, people, and it ain’t pretty! All I can do to combat it is to mainline coffee and cough drops. Okay, not coffee. I said that because I like how it sounds. I’m a tea girl through and through. Copious quantities of the stuff: green tea, white tea, Sleepy Time Sinus Soother, Sleepy Time Peach, Sleepy Time Echinacae Complete Care. Celestial Seasonings should be paying me, I’m drinking so much of their stuff.
The upside of not feeling well is that you can tell people, No, I’m sorry, but for your own good, I have to stay home. I do not wish to share my personal plague with you, when you really wanted to stay home all along. You people-pleasers out there, you know what I’m talking about. And when you stay home, you can get a fair amount of hooking done on a rug that needs to be completed and photographed for submission by February 25*.
And that’s what I’ve done. Saturday afternoon I hooked and watched a couple of shows that had been taking up space on my DVR. Sunday’s Superbowl helped too even if my Patriotsdidn’t finish the job this year. I willingly admit that Philly was the better team. Sunday. Only Sunday. And all you green Eagles should enjoy your win. This year. Only this year.
Do you have a favorite brew when the germs come crawling your way? Please share here!
Tynan presents “What’s on the frame” this week. The mystery rug is coming along. Finally, I can use more color. The drab nature of much of this rug is killing me. I’m starting to dream of a new and more color-full rug. And fibers other than plastic bag.
The Mystery Rug! Still a long way from finished. (Tynan says to tell you that he’ll be back next week. He was at the groomer getting coiffed.)
By now many of you have caught sight of my “mystery rug.” And some have even figured out that it’s being hooked out of plastic bags. The ultimate in up-cycling! The ultimate, too, in cheap, rug raw materials. Though, the reality is, that by choosing sed materials, I’m limiting myself. See the black lines between the “cells”? I didn’t necessarily want to use black; brown would’ve worked better. But that’s the challenge of restricting myself to a specific material. Even though friends (thank you especially, Mary Ramsey!) provided me with their used plastic bags, and I saved my own, nowhere did I find a really brown plastic bag, never mind the several that I need for this particular application. But when one of the imperatives for your little work of art is that it’s to be made out of plastic bags, typically something we throw away after that trip to Walmart or even Savers, you use “what you got.” So I hooked those borders in black.
I suppose you’re wondering what exactly it is that I’m hooking, what the mystery rug is all about. Not telling! It’s enough right now that you know what it’s being hooked from. I’m still working the design, hoping desperately that it’ll be a fair representation of what’s going on inside my head. And that it’ll fit the requirements of a couple of shows that I aim to enter. More on them later.
Close-up of the Mystery Rug. Like pretty much everything I do, it’s being hooked on monks’ cloth.
This is new to me, sharing as I go something that I’m not sure of. But so many of you are brave enough to do just that on Facebook and in your blogs, that I decided to let you in on this project.
Constance Old’s rug “Sea of Blue: Plastic Floats Forever”: 2010; mixed paper and plastic on linen; 52″x42″. This rug is still so very timely with it’s obvious message regarding plastic pollution.
I’ve worked in “limited” plastic bag before. Liking how the strips pulled and in the interests of recycling and trying something new-ish (back in 2014 I saw one of Constance Old‘s plastic bag rug in an exhibit in Connecticut), I decided to hook a mat comprised of nothing but plastic bag. I will advise you that, if you choose to do one yourself, do NOT do it in winter. The static electricity will kill you! Very annoying. There are now (and perhaps forever?) little pieces of plastic bag all over my living room-hallway-kitchen. They even make their way into the bedroom! Static Guard is the only answer.
As High on Hooking, I’ve made a “career” out of using alternative and less-than-traditional materials to hook my rugs. Have you gone out of your comfort zone to try something other than wool strips? Buffalo or wolf yarn? (Yes, they sell that out here in New Mexico.) T-shirts? Silk saris? Sari yarn is probably my favorite to hook with. Something really weird? Come one, tell us. Here at High on Hooking we do NOT judge. It’s only in stretching that the art of rug hooking will grow.
