Just a Saturday

Not much happening so far today. I've spent most of day going through my bookmarks and links to add all the blog and website links to this blog. It's a real mix of international crafting sites for rug hooking, felting, knitting, crochet, spinning, mixed mediums in fiber and whatever else looked interesting.

My "bug" came back full force this morning. It's a little better now. but I still feel lousy and my head isn't working that great. I had to send my son over to get some of my rug hooking wools from over at my daughter's house so I could start cutting strips for the dragon basket mat. So this evening instead of hooking I'm going to be cutting very finer than normal strips. Most of the main part of the design I think is going to be somewhere between a #3 cut to a #5 cut. The cuts are not going to be very precise as this will have to be all hand cut. I don't foresee getting a cutter until sometime this Spring if I am very, very lucky because money is so tight and other things need to be bought before an expensive cutter.

For me anything over $50.00 is expensive and I don't make that much off of my Ebay FanXstitch cross stitch patterns. Hopefully when I am feeling better and can afford some more monk's cloth and linen I will try to offer rug canvases for sale. Or if anyone wants me to design something for them and will pay for materials just let me know by email at fanxstitch@yahoo.com. Nothing is too off the wall design wise and strange is more fun to do than something normal. I do like primitive type designs, animals, fantasy, landscapes, scenes, but I really don't like doing flowers, or portraits but like doing people and figures. I had some very bad experiences painting children's portraits a couple of years ago so I'm trying to avoid doing them, adults are okay, especially TV or movie personalities. You want a rug of David Tennant or John Barryman from Doctor Who and Torchwood--no problem and I'd fun doing it.

New Blog

I'll get the hang of this blog yet. I'm currently into rug hooking and got started when friends in both Wales and in Iowa encouraged me to design some rug hooking canvases for them. I started my first rug in Nov '06 for my grandson that was born February 28, 2007.



I didn't get back into hooking until this fall when my friend in Iowa had me do some more canvases and I started doing 2 rugs I had started in '07, a cat rug and my Greenman rug. The cat got finished by the end of October and I'm still working on the Greenman. He's being done in dyed fleece with a fine hook on Heatherfield cross stitch fabric.





At the end of November I designed and started a new rug for my family based on everyone's Chinese horoscope characters for their year. I designed 28 different characters and arranged them primitive barnyard style on a piece of 44 x 72 burlap. The figures are being hooked in dyed fleece while the background is in dyed recycled wool fabric strips hand cut because I don't have a cutter yet.



I'm also working on a set of 8" dancing stars, tribal sun and moon squares that I will figure out what they're going to be when I get done. I just finished an international trivet swap on Rughookers Yahoo Group and sent my swap mate Elise in the Netherlands a dragon trivet. It was done in my handspun yarns on Aida cloth.



I'm going to be in on Gene Shepherd's hook-in on his blog. Wednesday he showed off all three of the design alternatives I sent him. I was not wild about the original design and had to come up with designs I would hook. http://geneshepherd.com/blog1/?p=1531

Today I'm going through fabrics to use. I think I'll be doing the dragon in a basket first. Yesterday I went to the thrift stores and got about 15 jackets, and skirts to dissemble. Found three great brown plaids for basket--it's hopefully going to look like a pine needle basket, 3 solid creams, 2 light cream plaids, 2 very cheerful red plaids, a solid red, a green wool sweater and black watch plaid. The creams I think are going in the main inner background, while I am still debating on what the outer background is going to be. The greens I got yesterday may or may not go in this piece as I have a bunch of really good dragon greens and leaf colors all ready to go. I think my flowers are either daisies or Sunflowers. Yellows I already have. But kind of low on pinks, purples or blues as they are being held out for other projects.