I HAVE DISCOVERED CRACK!!!!!

No, no, not the street kind that makes you crazy - the kind you use when rug hooking.

I have long wanted to do a study in black and white and so it is started. Pat Wenger enlarged my design for me. I have been carrying this design around for 20 or more years. It was just on a sheet of paper 9 x 12 and in several parts. It was a matter of combining the parts and enlarging. So, here is a picture of the design. A little girl in a chair winding wool with her little brother helping her. The cat is doing "Its thing" with the wool.

I didn't want the black to be the stark black of wool "off of the bolt" so I dyed Barb Carroll's antique black. I have fallen in love with this black. Sometimes when I look at it, it is green, then another time it is blue, but never stark or uninteresting.

In this closeup, I hope you can see what I mean about the black. The cat almost looks striped altho it is all black. It gives the piece some dimension.

The challenge with the rug is to keep the figures from "Floating" off of the backing. I have been thinking about this for some time and finally came up with the idea to make a "parkay" floor as the background on the lower part of the piece. This meant drawing many small squares on the background. I decided the squares should be 1 inch by 1-1/4 inches and two shades of white. In the picture below are the tools I used to get the squares on the backing.

A yard stick, a plastic strip cut 1-1/4 inches wide and the mesh fabric is the "crack." This fabric is evenly woven which makes it easy to get things straight and is "sticky" on the back side. You lay it on your design paper and after transferring the design simply peel the paper off. Then lay the crack on your backing and press down. No pins needs. The crack won't move thus making the transfer to your backing easy, easy, easy. I know that I will never use red dot again. This is such an improvement.

This is how it looked pressed onto the linen of my design. As you can see I only put the floor grid on one half of the crack. I knew that since it was easy to get the grid on straight that I could "pick a thread" and extend the design completely across the fabric.

This closeup shows how I was able to lay it over part of the design that is already hooked. It did not pull any of the wool or its fuzz off of the already hooked portion . Also you can see that I have trouble drawing a straight line with a ruler. That is where the crack really helped me. It is woven completely straight so I could correct my pen slip with ease. I am very grateful to Linda at the Grant Street Woolworks for introducing me to this product. It also is very inexpensive. As all of you know hooking supplies have gotten very costly and to find an inexpensive product is a real bonus.

Thank you, Linda.

I'm looking forward to this week. I think I am going to have 3 days when I can stay home and hook. I also need to get into the dye pots - it just all takes time!!

Quote of the day -

A true friend is someone who reaches for your hand and touches your heart.

Anon

Have a good week everyone.

Doris