Creation and Expansion - A Visual Journal

Are you interested in creating a visual reference book ?
A highly personal one.
I will suggest topics on a bi-weekly basis for you to explore.
There is no deadline. There is no one checking over your shoulder, just you using visual references to
describe my suggestions.

You can use anything you can see and manipulate into a journal to do this.

This is a rich way to find new things to hook. Or bring to the surface ideas you might already be mulling over.

If you wish to share these pages with the other readers that would be most enriching.


The first topic is SPACE.
Let this mean whatever you want it to.
Outer, inner, room, whatever.
Go to it.

Woolgathering Program

At this Fall Woolgathering we are going to bring the first rug we built and talk about how we began hooking. It should be fun to see what we made then and what we are making now. I plan to take lots of pictures with people's kind permission and post them here. If you are coming be sure to bring your very first rug.

I hope to see you there.

The last pictures from the Owen Sound Luncheon Hook in

Some delightful Owen Sound Hookers


Hookers from Wiarton, Owen Sound, voted the laughingest(?) table


On the way home I dragged my hookers out on a tear and took them to the Women's Institute Commemorative Park. Look at that sky , look at the sculpture, look at the way Marge almost got blown off the cliff.

Three sets of Primaries

I'm giving an on line dye class right now. One assignment I handed out was to choose three primaries and make four distinctly different colours from them.
They were:

Red Blue Yellow

Turquoise Magenta Yellow

Orange Purple Green

Inspired by this to spot dye a pan full of nylons in each set I was amazed by the range of colours created from three.
Here is a pair from each pan.



Left to Right Orange Purple Green/ Turquoise Magenta Yellow / Red Blue Yellow

More Scrappy Talk

I recently bought a magazine, La Vie Claire.
It is a beautiful magazine.
It often contains quotes, this one is from Henri Matisse.

" It is not quantity that counts with colours but choice and organization."

Nothing could be truer. For me though I want a good quantity of colours to pick and organize from also.
Someone said creativity is a series of decisions and I feel that way about using scraps.

Honing in on what you have that will work , choosing what will go where, how to expand the parameters of what colour should do. It is all the stuff of wonder and the pleasure you get from using stuff up is an added bonus.

In the last week I've done a ton of dyeing and so much so I couldn't set time apart to write about it.
I frankly can't even remember what I dyed colour wise but do know it was several bolts and boxes and skeins full.


And my shelves look their glorious fat and fulsome selves again.

I have a wonderful Friend

I have many wonderful friends but this particular person is a source of wonderful inspiration to me every time we connect.

When she read of our scrappy workshop she let me know of her travels in the scrap basket.
Thanks for sending it to me dear ! Here is what she said:

Hi Wanda,
This isn't an "inquiry" but I read in your blog how your class were using up their leftovers hooking an oriental. I thought you might like to see a picture of my "Out of the Basket" personal challenge. These pieces are everything I have hooked using only leftover strips put into a huge basket probably for the last ten years. Students were encouraged to take anything they needed but still it grew so last spring I decided to hook a piece using only strips from the basket, and also on a scrap piece of backing. That was the long narrow one. And like the strips in the basket it just grew from there until last week when I finished piece #8 which is self explantory. And the basket is still half full.
I hope your students enjoy and learn from their projects as much as I did.
Marilyn

These are Marilyn's results:

WHAT ? OCT 16TH ? Already ?

I'm surprised to find the month half over. Where did it go ? I would be happy to tell you I was productive but that's a lie.
Now I did many interesting things, but I didn't really make anything myself. I feel a lack from that.
I gave a class today in scrappy orientals, it was wonderful to see this old stand by in rug hooking look so powerfully and wonderfully different.

Last week I had a terrific group of dyers visit from Michigan for my Be Your Own Dyeing Guru workshop and we did many amazing things. I'm always gratified to see the leaps people can make when you show them the cliff is only half a foot high. It only looks scary.

I also just finished my column for Rug Hooking, it was also about scraps of wool and how to make them useful. Although this seems like careful planning on my part it was just happenstance. I know about two years ahead what I'll be writing about. I want to do this so I might have plenty of time to think about all possible angles. I found it hard to focus because Using It Up is a topic that is RICH. I realized I could write a whole new article about using up dyes. Perhaps that will be squeezed onto the list soon. The next article I'll be writing is about greens which I am calling One Man's Poison. I'm going to explore some new green ideas. BTW One part bottle green and one part moss green make a lovely combo.

About a month ago I attended a delightful hook-in in Owen Sound where they served us a perfect lunch. As many desserts and entrees !
Here are a few photos of what I saw. More to come.