Welcome to our first blog post of the autumn season! To mark the beginning of fall, Ania has chosen a project full of autumnal colors, a rug aptly named “Oh Joyful Color.” The pattern is a Honey Beehive Pattern, and was created by Jane McGown Flynn. It is 16″ by 20″, and was hooked with #4 strips of wool.
Take a look below to see images of this month’s Rug of the Month, and read Ania’s comments on creating it:
Why did you decide to take on this project?
This pattern was created for the 60th anniversary of the Northern McGown Teacher’s Workshop. I received it at that workshop, as a part of a class I took, for color planning.
How did you decide on a color plan for this project?
The color planning class was interesting – the teacher was Dorothy Huse, and she focused on the harmonies of color and color theory. This started with the basics of a color wheel, and moved forward with primary, secondary, and tertiary colors, and how these colors all work together.
Many times when I hook a rug, there’s a game I play with myself. For example, in this rug, there is a bird and plants, so there is fauna and flora. There is a color scheme for the fauna and a color scheme for the flora. The fauna is warm colors and the flora is cool colors. Cool colors recede, and warm colors come forward, which helps make the bird come forward as the focal point.
For the border of the rug, I intentionally hooked it in red, yellow, and blue, which are primary colors – those are the three colors that every other color is made of.
What are you most proud of in this rug?
I really like how the bird turned out with the really warm colors, and the super fluorescent green placed throughout the rug allows the viewers eye to travel across the rug. This rug also only uses colors from my stash, and there was no dyeing done for it at all.
The very basic premise of the rug was flora is cool, fauna is warm. When I hold up this rug and ask if there is a visible pattern, people see that premise: the bird is all warm colors and the plants are all cool colors.
What was the most difficult part of this project?
I don’t think there was anything too challenging in this rug, which is great.
Is there anything else you’d like to say about this rug?
The pattern is very folk art like, which I don’t usually gravitate towards. However, the simplicity of the pattern was fun to work with. The sense of whimsy in the rug really made it fun.
Feel free to comment below if you have any thoughts you’d like to share with Ania on this project or post!
My Mother's a Hooker 