For April, Ania thought we could get into the spirit of spring. This month’s “Rug of the Month” is her “Forsythia” rug. This rug marked the first time Ania designed her own pattern, and she completed it in #4 and #5 strips and yarns. Read on to learn about the process behind hooking this pattern:
What was your inspiration in designing this rug?
My inspiration was the forsythia bush in my neighbor’s yard. Every spring the bush would be the first thing to bloom, and it was so beautiful, I’d feel so inspired.
There is a period between winter and spring when the snow is ugly with encrusted dirt and it’s muddy and mucky out doors and the trees are just beginning to open up their leaf buds. The first real transition I see where I can finally say “spring is here,” is when the Forsythia bush blooms. With each year when spring would begin, I loved to imagine what it would be like to lay underneath the bush, stare up at the yellow blossoms, and watch the sky move above me. It seemed like it would be a great way to pass the time!
How did you plan this project?
This is the first rug I designed on my own. In order to draw the pattern, the first step I took was to bead forsythia branches to use as models for my pattern. It took me a couple of weekends to finish beading the branch using seed beads.
The process of color planning was for the most part pretty straightforward. Forysthia’s are yellow and the branches are brown – there wasn’t too much planning around color needed there. I spent the most of my time deciding on what colors to use in the sky. An important part of my inspiration for hooking this rug was imagining myself looking up at the sky through the branches of the bush – and so for me the sky felt like a critical part of this project. So I spent time (months!) observing the sky while I was driving to and from work (and because I wasn’t about to actually run over to my neighbors yard and lie under their bush – that would have been a little bit weird). I then looked at my wool stash and picked colors that I saw in the sky. I was very much struck by how fleeting the shapes and colors were in the sky. The clouds were continually moving and morphing shapes and shades of color.
What was most difficult about this rug?
The most difficult part of this rug was hooking the clouds. What I envisioned was a series of very whispy clouds – but that’s hard to convey in hooking. Wool strips alone weren’t quite working out the way I wanted them to. Eventually, I turned to alternative fibers (this is the first time I ever hooked with fibers other than strips of wool). I pulled yarns and feathery textured fibers with touches of silver to get the effect that I was really looking for.
Overall, this is a rug I’m very happy with – I really feel like I could spend all day looking at this rug the way I could spend all day looking at the sky! Fotunately my neighborswon’t find me laying undertheir forsythia in the forseeable future!
Feel free to let Ania know your thoughts and comments below!
My Mother's a Hooker 