Pumpkin Progress

I've made some progress on my pumpkin I bought as a kit from Wicked Wool - it's amazing how much hooking I can get done on a road trip!  I love to read, and sometimes I get carsick when I'm reading, but apparently I can hook without too much trouble, so that's a plus.  My husband and three kids, ages 14, 12 and 8, made a 13-hour drive to Atlanta a couple of weeks ago, and in between cleaning up a car sickness issue with my youngest daughter (yes, it really happened) and determining how much time was left in the van before we arrived in Atlanta, I hooked.

I found that I like hooked pumpkins better than real ones.  They are easily managed and far less messy.

I started out with a couple of rows around the outline of my pumpkin, but I made a rookie mistake and used the brownish wool to do it.  After I had those first two rows, I started filling in ridges with some of the orange wool, and I realized that if indeed I was going to make this an orange pumpkin, I would need to put some orange around the outside.  I wish I would've followed Beth's example with the green pumpkin and hooked my ridges from the top to the bottom, but instead I did the outline first.  Then I added that extra row of orange, so it was starting to resemble a sweet potato more than a pumpkin.  I did the orange, but it took me a good row outside of my pattern.

I then filled in the areas between the ridges with the other wool in the kit.  There were some fun colors in there, and I was really happy with my finished pumpkin:

This is a little far away, but you can see the ridges in it.

This is a little closer to see the colors.  The kit had a neat burgundy plaid in it, and also some strips that are green.  I might not have selected those colors myself, but I like the effect in the finished pumpkin.  This has been a fun discovery in my hooking - taking strips of dyed wool and seeing the finished look when hooked.  I'm always amazed at how different a hooked strip looks from the original piece, and the different dimension the colors and patterns bring to the project.

I've discovered this is the truth-teller - the back of the project.  You can see the areas where I skipped or twisted the wool, and you can see how close I got to the sewn outline.  It's nice to have smaller projects like this so I can experiment with my hooking and get some practice in before I hit a bigger project.  I want to make a number of pumpkins in different colors and styles, but I don't know of a seller of linen or monk's cloth in my area.  There is a terrific store in Williamsburg, The Woolen Needle, also a distributor of Bee Line-Townsend products, but they are about an hour and a half away from me, and it's hard to get out that way often, so I need to find a supplier in the Quad Cities, or stock up at Sauder Village!!

My next step on my pumpkin is to cut around the edge, and sew the fabric on the back of it.  Then I fill it with rice or popcorn kernels, get the stem in and finish it off!  I also like this project because I won't be doing any binding.  Yay!  I have to admit, binding is my least favorite part.

I'm off to make this pumpkin 3-D.  I hope that's as easy as hooking it was!  I'm interested in other 3-D hooking projects - I have a sculpture of a pomegranate that I purchased from an artist friend of mine. 

It's about a foot tall, and now I'm dying to hook it.  It would be a fun one to do because of the variation in color in the reds, and I'm interested in dyeing.  Looks like I need to pop some popcorn and watch Gene Shepherd's dye videos at Internet Rug Camp!

But first, I have a pumpkin to finish.