Adamstown Filly
Designed and hooked by Kris Miller
My husband and I love to antique when we are traveling and we stopped at a shop on our way to somewhere, just to see what we could find. One of the booths had a lot of equestrian items and I saw an old wooden cut out of a horse hanging on the wall. "That's a rug inspiration," I told my husband so I took a picture to refer to later. As we browsed, I kept coming back to that booth to gaze lovingly at the wooden horse. "You should just buy it or you are going to regret it later," said my husband....so I did!
(hehe, I did get his approval, didn't I?!?!)
I also love to collect other wooden architectural artifacts and I had a piece of interesting latticework that I thought would make a great border. So I began to doodle and came up with the Adamstown Filly design.
My plan was to hand-tear my wool. I had worked on another rug with hand-torn strips and I really liked the simplicity of it...just snip, rip, and hook. No cutter needed and no reason to keep getting up from your chair. I also decided that I liked the chippy paint and rough weathered boards in my old horse cut out. The best way to get that effect was to hook it in rows, straight across the horse and vary the color of my strips to look like the wood had darkened and stained. The key was to make it look more like "puddles" and not get a striped look. Just like I mentioned in my last Rug Of The Day post, I outlined around the horse with the background color. I call this a reverse outline because you are staying outside the drawn lines of the horse and working in a row of background first. Then you have a precise starting and stopping point for your horizontal rows. One other tip: start your horizontal rows in the middle of your horse and work from there...down to the bottom and then up to the top. I know it sounds a bit counter-productive but it worked for me. I may have had to alter the mane and tail a bit to accommodate the width of the hand-torn strips but that's OK too. When you are done, no one is going to know any differently!
The lattice border was fun to do and I worked on it while watching TV/movies in the evening. I hooked two rows of the blue plaid in the solid "arches" of the lattice work and then filled in the remaining spaces with a different plaid. It was sort of an ugly plaid that no one really wanted to buy...but when they saw it hooked into my border, I sold out of it quickly! Sometimes you have to turn those ugly ducklings into swans!
You can find Adamstown Filly here:
1 comment:
I remember someone in our class with you last November in Cape May was working on this pattern. Found it very interesting about the wooden horse, the lattice work and how that ugly wool made such a fantastic statement in this pattern. It's on my 'to do' list one of these days.
Post a Comment