It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!

Hello all! 

It has been over a month since I blogged, and I am quite remiss in that this rookie hooker has learned a TON in the last month!

I have finished my pumpkin top, but need to sew the back on.  I know another hooker, one of our Bee Line-Townsend cutter customers, who has made a virtual pumpkin patch from the Wicked Wool kit.  Jo Wick is the creater of the fabuloso pumpkins here:

And these:

And my favorite:

Seeing Jo's adorable pumpkins all done is a GREAT motivator for me to get my rear in gear and get hooking!  I have a few episodes of Project Runway to catch up on, so maybe it's time to start the DVR and get some pumpkins on the vine.

I love how Jo personalized these pumpkins with using the sticks as stems.  The pattern from Wicked Wool comes like this:

And your canvas is truly blank, so you can hook it however you like.  I'm going to finish off the backs of my pumpkins (I AM, really!), and try to do a few more, and then I am going to try to put ears on it and make a black cat head.  Beth Kovich at Wicked Wool has a bunch of variations on the pumpkins on her website - http://www.wickedwool.com/ - where you can also purchase the pumpkin kit.

So I'm off to make The Great Pumpkin.  I went to Sauder Village last month and LOVED IT, and I learned so much.  I'll be posting about Sauder and some of the amazing rugs I saw on Wednesday.

Have a great week, hookers!

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.



And The Project Is....PUMPKINS!

Even though I already have the pattern for a new rug, circles within squares, I've been distracted by something a little more fun...

Pumpkins!!

Aren't they cute!?  I bought my pattern from Wicked Wool online, and just started hooking it today.  Beth, the owner of Wicked Wool in the Seattle area, showed me a darling green one that she hooked, and I'm starting the orange one.  Mine will not have the adorable face, I will be lucky to have a nice solid orange pumpkin and save the face for the next one, but the kit I bought has the different shades of orange and a cinnamon stick for the stem.  I'm loving the white Cinderella pumpkin, and the spider is very cool.  Beth has a fun and funky website, I love visiting Wicked Wool!

I met a local hooker, the lovely Julie Bohl, for coffee and some hooking.  It's funny, we drank coffee and talked about rug camps and this is how much hooking I did:

At this rate, I'll be done by Halloween 2012.

 

So the lesson here is that I need to teach myself how to drink coffee, hook, and talk at the same time.  I know it's possible, I see you all do it at Hook-Ins, but I don't see a video on Gene Shepherd's Internet Rug Camp about this topic, so I might be on my own here.  Gene?  It's time to get the camera out.

 

Here is the kit that arrived from Wicked Wool with my darling pumpkin in it:

 

 

It has a veriety of orange wool strips, the pattern, the instructions, some nice pictures, and a cinnamon stick for the stem.  It's looks very easy, and the pictures are really cute.  Here is what Beth's pumpkin looks like when hooked:

 

 

So cute!

I'm hoping for the same effect in orange.  I will be so thrilled if mine turns out anything like hers, but I might be in luck because I am a Bona Fide Packer, and this project loves packers!

Now I need the video of Beth making this pumpkin while talking to people, drinking coffee, and maybe refereeing fights over which kid gets the remote.  Actually, if there is a video about refereeing which kid gets the remote, I might need that one too.  Now I need TWO videos.  Or two remotes.  It depends on how much trouble I want.

I'll post my pumpkin when I'm ready to move on to the next stage.  Not sure how much more hooking I'll get done this week, my family leaves on Friday for a week in Atlanta and Nashville.  If anyone can recommend a video on how to have a calm, happy 13-hour ride in a minivan across the country in the heat of July with three kids and a cranky husband, I'm all ears.