Spring Has Sprung

It's funny that after my post the other day, where I mentioned my lack of skills in color planning, I visited the Bee Line Facebook page and saw an article posted by another rug hooker about color planning.  I read the article, which was terrific, but didn't save it.  I just went to Facebook to look it up, but after scrolling through my timeline for about 10 minutes, I gave up. However, a shout-out to the universe to whomever posted that wonderful color planning article, because it made me stop and think about my Grannie's Flower Garden rug.

I actually dug through the wool I have and planned some color!  From the article I read, and from looking at the picture of a completed Grannie's Flower Garden, I'm doing some triangular formations of color.

I'm sort of winging it, but I noticed in Nola Heidbreder's hooked picture of this rug that there are definitive triangles of color... variations of blue/green, red/pink, red/orange...and they actually make the rug rather geometric.  My life seems to have so little order, it's nice to feel like maybe there is some order in my rugs!

I do notice the centers of all of these flowers are the same, which lends some consistency.  I'm rather inconsistent, so my centers don't match.  Here is what I have so far:

I have taped little bits of the wool I want to use for flowers, an idea I took from seeing other hookers do it.  It's a great way to remind myself what I planned to go together, since my memory isn't exactly the most reliable form of record!

I haven't selected a background color for the rug yet. I know it won't be light or creamy, and I like the brownish color Nola has on the photo of the hooked rug, particularly since I won't be hooking any brown flowers.  I like navy blue too, but that might blend too well with some of the colors I'm planning to use.

What methods do you use when color planning your rugs?

Tickled Pink

After a long hooking drought, I'm happy to say that I've had the opportunity to be busy hooking again in the past week, so I've been able to make a little bit of progress on Grannie's Flower Garden.  So far, I have three lovely flowers on one side:

And two new ones have bloomed on the other side:

I'm loving picking the colors for the flowers and the centers, and it's a nice Springy rug, which we will need around these parts because on Friday we're getting a cold front and maybe scattered snow showers.  WHAT!!?!?!

I did something a little different in the centers of the two new flowers - I used pinking shears to cut the wool to see if it would give it a little more texture.

I couldn't really tell on the navy blue center, but on the orange center I could tell a difference, however subtle. It created a sort of "ruffled" effect in the center of the flower. It was interesting to hook with the wool this way, because pulling it through the linen had sort of a "thunk-thunk-thunk" feel, and it was a little more resistant, but I like the final look:

And after the entire flower was done:

It made me wonder how that would have looked in my Iowa Postcard rug on the trees - in Grant Wood's painting "Stone City", some of the trees are round and puffy, and some of them are jagged.  It would have been fun to hook the postcard rug the same way, with some of the trees being rounded and some having points sticking out of them.

I looked through some of my issues of Rug Hooking Magazine, ATHA, and The Wool Street Journal, and didn't see any articles about hooking with wool strips that have the edges textured.  Have you hooked with edged wool, or seen any rugs that have been?  Would you hook with wool that has a textured edge?  I'd love to hear some thoughts from other rug hookers.