Rug of the Month: December 2015

December is here, and it’s time for a new rug of the month! This rug is off of a pattern called “Quaint” by Jane McGown Flynn. Ania used striped and plaid wools (in #6 cut strips), embroidery floss, and stuffing. That’s right, she used stuffing (polyfil)! That’s because this rug isn’t just any old rug, it’s a pillow!

Take a look below to see Ania’s pillow, and to read about her inspiration in creating it:

Here is Ania’s completed “Quaint” pillow!

What convinced you that you wanted to hook this pattern? 

I wanted to use different textures, like plaids,  and see what they looked like when they were hooked. Specifically, I wanted to look at the systematic repetition of colors as they appeared in loops when hooked. I had questions like, depending on how I cut the wool how will it look in the finished product?

How did you approach elements like color planning for this project?

The way I picked the wool for this project was by selecting different styles of plaids and a striped pattern. I picked very different colors from one another, so that the differences in their appearances would be immediately obvious. I also actively tried to chose vibrant colors.

I wanted to organize the colors I used so that you could immediately tell which appliqued wool patch corresponded with which hooked patch. I used only one solid color in this rug, and I tried to use subtle patterns like a yellow plaid, alongside bolder plaids.

The yellow plaid wool, which you can see in its entirety in the picture below, is used in the center yellow hooked patch. The orange hooked patch on the left corresponds with the orange plaid on the bottom right.

What was the most difficult aspect to complete?

I struggled with working out the symmetry on the four corners, and how to rotate the colors throughout the pillow without having any of the colors touch the fabric it originated from.

I struggled initially with the back, but ultimately I had fun making choices while deciding how to finish it. In the end, I decided to use the four wools that I had chosen originally that were not solids. I also purposefully made the pillow look more rustic by having just a running stitch on the back, and uneven stitches on the front.

 

 

Here is the pillow’s back. The yellow plaid on the bottom left is the same wool used in the center patch on the pillow’s front! See if you can find the other wools pictured here in the hooked patches on the pillow’s front…

What makes this rug different from the others you’ve hooked? 

This was the first time I worked with textures, and this was the first time  I appliqued the material I used to hook onto the pillow itself. I used that technique so that this pillow could be a representative sampler of how different wools appear in patterns as hooked.

I had some interesting revelations: for plaids it doesn’t matter how you cut them because it’s a square pattern, but with stripes you can drastically change its appearance and get an array of colors from one fabric. In the striped wool I chose, I purposefully cut parallel to the stripes in the fabric so that every strip I had was different!

The brown hooked patch seen at the bottom of this picture is the result of using the striped wool when cut parallel to the stripes! Very cool results.

Do you have any other comments about this rug?

I hooked this rug in a class with Laura Kenyon, and it was a great class with a great teacher. It was a fast and easy rug to hook.

Let Ania know what you think of her pillow, below in the comments! We hope you enjoyed this post 🙂