Dragon Day 10

It's getting there. One more corner and then all the border bands on 3 sides and all done except for the binding and finishing--yeah!!! I'm still not that great at doing the binding edging, Have to root around and see if I have any gold yarns. May end up over dyeing some yellow sports weight I have on hand. I know I have gold acrylic close in color to border golds but I'm going rug purist and stay with the wool yarns for whipping the edges.

One thing I have managed to do with this rug that I haven't before is get nice straight almost uniform rows of hooking on the border bands. They probably would have been even more uniform and neat if my strips had been machine and not hand cut and not varied in sizes. This outer border part I have been hooking off hoop which has actually worked better and I am not packing my strips as tight as I was using the hoop for the center part. What I am doing is laying the mat on a flat surface and picking up the edge I am working on and hooking at a sort of left angle towards me. My rug is laying a lot flatter than my other ones have done and I can get my hoops uniform and in a straight line. This bears more experimenting with. It has been very frustrating hooking some of my larger rugs on frames and trying hook in the center of them. This is Nantucket style hooking as you wrap your mat around your legs, using your legs as a hoop. I have no idea what I am doing is called but for now it's working to get the outer border parts done and with no hooking hassles.

Here are a few of the colors I will be using for the Hopes and Dreams mat. I need to take some pictures of the red plaids, but these are some of my tie dyed pieces. I love my sky blues and am really curious how they will hook up.