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.