The Quest

Do you as an artist feel like one day you will be There? You will have achieved your goals and your work will be perfect? I seriously doubt that there is one of you out there who answers yes to that question. I am sure that even the teachers among you will be the first to tell me that they never stop learning. 

Since I started my journey into rug hooking three years ago a whole new world to express myself has opened up. I fell in love. Rug hooking gives me a creative outlet where I need to slow down. I have to pace myself, think about my visual goals and how I can achieve them. And oh boy, is there much to learn.

I wanna tell you about my biggest learning experience in 2012, which at first sight may seem minor, but  makes a world of difference. check out the two pumpkins, ignore the different frames. Anything click?

Omg - first go (above) I hooked a solid brown stem. Nice enough. Teacher told me it does not work, because I have a dimensional pumpkin, so I pulled out just a few loops, added some checkered brown (below) and 'bam' - there it was, my biggest "yes, I get it!" of the year - such small changes lead to making it right - wow! Can you tell that I am still in awe..?!

(yes, this is one of my UFOs and I will transform the pumpkin soon into a little pillow!)

At times I knit, spin and sew more, but the urge to pull some loops is great and grows with time. The internet feeds to that. When you browse the blogworld, you see so many beautiful creations that inspire, just look at my bloglist on the side!

 The other day I threw all of my three unfinished rugs on the floor so that every time I walked by I got the visual input and was reminded to think about where I wanna take them.

In the end I focused on the large rug with my kids drawings. I dyed up blue woolens for the background. Not sure if the color would work I started working around my first finished motives.

 This morning in our small rug hooking group we discussed it, because I just wasn't sure.

 Turned out my blues were too busy, as a background too distractive from the kids designs.

So we jumped into action and went from piles of woolen blues, some white and a tad bit of green...

 ....... to the dye pots...

...and got this!

 Shades of a more uniform lighter blue!

I ended up "marrying" all my blues and yes, I did pull out what I had previously hooked.

Now I am not-patiently-at-all waiting for my new colors to dry so I can pull the blues!

What are you learning these days?