Turning down the next row

So my Palette Constellation is a BIG rug, although Alexander has grown taller than it is high.  At least it is the biggest rug I have ever tried to hook.  It is going to end up about 9 feet long and 4 feet wide. 

I am measuring my progress by the rows I finish and I am now working down the 8th row.  That means that I am almost 3/4ths finished. What holds up the show is when I come upon a color that I don't have dyed in my stash anymore.  So I dyed a couple of colors last night and will work on a few more in between other commitments this week. 

On the dyeing front, I have started to dye up a second palette which I am going to be using as my Starter Palette for my dye classes.  The recipes will integrate into my primary palette, so that means I am creating a subsidiary palette that will give me another full range of colors to complement the 67 I already have.  These are the basic Starter recipes that I included in the Revised Edition of my book, The Wool Palette.  I have quite a bit of yardage of the Starter Palette to prepare for my Sauder dye class this August, so I am starting on it already with a yard of 201, my Starter Red.  I liked how it turned out; just took it out of the pot so will post pictures another day.

Just for the record. It is fascinating hooking the Palette Constellation rug because I am getting to double check all my colors.  When I see something off in the progression of color, I am going back and redyeing to see if something was off the first time around.  What I am finding is that when the dry dyes go into solution, that blue dyes are unstable.  If they sit in solution much longer than a week (and then they need to be refrigerated) they turn gray.  When you go to use the old solution, the blue dye has turned into something else.  So this means that any recipe that uses a blue dye of any sort is vulnerable.  I have not found this to be the case with any other color which all seem to last quite a long time (not refrigerated) in stable solution. 

Glorious Color Caddy

FRONTBACKI know my posts have been infrequent last month.  I got really busy at work, and then got sick.  My rug hooking slowed down, but didn't cease.  The one thing I accomplished last month was designing and hooking a sample of a caddy for the Palette Dyeing class that I will be teaching this coming August at Sauder.  I thought it would be fun while the dye pots are simmering in the class, to be learning about color theory and hooking a caddy as a handy reference to that theory. 

I think it turned out cute.  It is made from one piece of linen, even including the handles, with minimal sewing.  In fact, the sewing can even be done by hand if a machine is not available.  The overall size is 20"by 14"by 6".  So it holds lots of stuff, even my cutter and supplies.  In the picture I stuffed it with skeins of yarn.

The link to my workshop is on the Sauder Village website, and it just went live today.  Registration for the Sauder retreat and all the workshops and classes begins on Wednesday, November 9 at 10 am EST.

Dyeing in the heat

I'm running out of wool.  So what have I been doing.  Been out back in the 90 degree heat dyeing wool.  I'm trying to get ready for the Kirby Midsummer Hook In on June 25th where I will be vending.  So I have some work to do!

Here is one of the pretty neutrals I dyed today: Hubbard Fig 119.  The 8-value packs are on the top and the dapple fat quarter is on the bottom.

Been dyeing

So work has been intense lately, with starting the new semester and writing and getting my seminar on death underway.  But while I was home cooking this weekend, I did manage to dye up two batches of wool so I can continue hooking All in the Family. 

I am on the third column which is the Orange color family.  In this column, I will be hooking the twelve colors on the wheel mixed with my orange dye (Jacky Lantern 103).  The first in the column will be Finnigan Flame 102, followed by Bittersweet Red 162, Jacky Lantern 103, Peter Pumpkin 163, Somerset Sunset 104, etc.  The dyed wools pictured here are Bittersweet Red 162 (top) and Somerset Sunset 104 (bottom).  I can't wait to get this column started after school today.

All in the Family: Progress Report 1

I have been going to town on All in the Family.  I have about 10th of it completed at this point.  I have been dyeing a few colors that I need to work down the first two family rows (red-left column; red-orange-right column).  I am hooking this in a 9 which is the widest I have ever hooked before.

I thought that hooking linear rows was going to bore me to death because I have always found it tough to hook geometrics, the same pattern over and over.  But this hasn't turned out to be the case.  Hooking this mat has been wonderful so far.  I get excited each time I open a new pack of wool and hook in the new color.  I am now able to see a color progression which I surmised was there because of the way in which I have developed my dye process.  But now I can see it!

I have made two alterations to my design so far.  First, I couldn't figure out how to hook the pattern with curved lines.  I started out with curved lines and it just became a mess very fast.  So I went to straight rows, and I think it achieves what I want in a very powerful way.

Second, I quickly saw that I needed some kind of menu for the rug, something that told the story about what was happening with the color progression.  So I decided to hook a color wheel around the border.  The color in the top border shows the dye used to create all the colors in that column.  The color in the side border shows the color that was used to create all the colors in that row.  In other words, I am hooking a color chart.  If you take the color at the top of the column and mix it with the color in the side of the row, you get the color at that intersection.

Today as I hook it is cold and rainy.  I have a fire in the fireplace.  Wade is grading papers.  Alexander is playing.  And I have three pots of wool dyeing in the garage.  Couldn't be better!

Five more wools

From right to left: Nightshade Berry 160; Tanglewood 148; Fiddlehead 164; Ring 'O Rosie 161; Briar Rose 159. Phew!

I'm coming down the home track with my colors - only 7 more to go. It looks like when I make all the mixtures on the color wheel, I will end up with 68 colors in 8 values each, making 544 color options! There are vibrant colors, subdued colors, primitive colors, country colors, modern colors, all the result of various combinations of my three main dye formulas. I am so excited that this experiment is working out so well. And that it is a simple process no more difficult than mixing paints on a palette.

In the meantime I have discovered that the colors are falling into twelve color families, which will take the guessing out color planning for my rugs! I can't wait to continue hooking my palette rugs - the Kirby Hooking Circle's Celestial Challenge will be my next.

More photos of new colors

Four new colors to post (from top to bottom): Twinkle Periwinkle 156; Nymph Green 155; Sun Kissed Gold 157; Red Oak 144.

Camera battery is recharging

I've been taking so many pictures of my woolens lately, that my camera battery died this afternoon just as I was going to take a picture of the two latest wools I dyed. So tomorrow I'll post them and the two I worked on creating today. So check back tomorrow if you want to see pictures.

Also, I got tired of hand sewing my labels on. So I bought this niffy label gun that shoots plastic t-pins through the layers. It creates very secure labels, and is quite a bit quicker than hand sewing, except when it doesn't work and shoots big holes in my labels!

More colors

Some of you have commented that you like the pictures of the dyed wool I have been taking. Thanks because it is all I have right now. I can't get this intensive dyeing done and hook at the same time. So the next few weeks are going to continue to be mainly dye posts. I promise to get back to other items soon!

Here is Violet Twilight 132, and Red Oak 144.

Dyeing up a storm

More woolens from my dye pot. Meet Crab Apple, 135; Will 'O Wisp 158; Rosewood, 138; Russet Red, 143 (Photo: top to bottom).

Dyeing on Mother's Day?!

Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers out there!

We are enjoying our AC. Good to have it back and better. We are thrilled that we have gone GREEN. Our AC, thanks to President Obama, will get us a $1500 tax credit this year because it is a 16 SEER energy efficient unit that doesn't use freon. So we aren't hurting the ozone anymore, and since our old unit was only a 10 SEER and thirty years old, we are going to be using about 1/2 the power to run heat and air. For those of you in the north (and I used to be one of you), AC in Houston is like heat in Michigan or Ontario. I always thought of AC as a not-so-necessary luxury because I never lived in a hot climate before until moving to Houston. Now I know different. A week without air in May is barely bearable. In July and August, well, heat exhaustion and heat stroke would be a serious threat.

My garage dye kitchen is working well. Four more colors produced this weekend: Spanish Moss 140; Mackinaw Lilac (MY FAVORITE SO FAR) 133; Pink Iris 134; and Rosehip (named by Alexander) 145.

I have also been working on creating Kinship Color Palette Collections, to take the guess work out of color planning for rugs. I'm having SO much fun.

I want to also mention that my sister Tiffany is on this same adventure with me. She is dyeing her entire palette too. It is great to compare notes daily, to see how our different primaries are effecting the color mixing process.

All of this I am working into a book called The Wool Palette which I hope to have available in hard cover and paperback by midsummer.

White Tiger Beauty is finished

I finished White Tiger Beauty last night and bound it today. I tried something different with the binding. I used wool strips 1 1/2 inches wide that I folded over the edge and bound off as normal. But after pressing the rug flat, I got the idea to frame it in, so I went back over the edge holding the steam iron about 1/4" above the wool. Then I rolled the wool in toward the rug. It created a 3D wool frame that looks neat.

White Tiger Beauty. 2010. 17" by 17". 4-cut. Original design. Designed, dyed and hooked by April DeConick. Red Jack Rugs Palette dyes: Rosy Cheeks 113,Sand Castle 114, Milk Weed 115, Stormy Sea 120, Antique Black, White; #7 & #8 values of Alexander Blue 109, English Lavender 110, Sugar Plum 111, Raspberry Wine 112; tints and tones of Raspberry Wine 112 and Sugar Plum 111; Textures Stormy Sea 120. Hooked using VIP method (Value Intense Palette).

White Tiger Beauty: Second Evening

His face is developing. I continued hooking per my last post description. I moved down into the bridge of the nose with a combination of mediums, including over dyed textures, and a few random lights.

I decided to give pointillism a try after reading about it in an abstract art book. I learned from that reading yesterday that neo-impressionists painted by distributing dots of paint around the canvas and when you stand back from the painting you will see a form emerge.

So I gave it a try on Beauty's nose because I am in an area of coat that is varied in value, like salt and pepper. If I feel it is successful overall and don't reverse hook, I will use pointillism in the cheeks and ears too.

How to do it? I hooked vertically down the bridge of his nose in random descent. I didn't hook a straight or a curved line, but bounced around. This means that the back of the piece looks bad because there are crossovers. But it is the result of the pointillism technique and can't be avoided.

Going Gray with 'White Tiger Beauty'

I have been concentrating on developing a number of neutrals for my wool palette by combining complimentary colors in my palette. These produced three outstanding neutrals pictured here. The procedure and my color theory are all laid out on the PALETTE DYEING rug camp, so I refer you to that discussion in order to track what I'm doing here (left to right: AD 114 Sand Castle; AD 115 Milk Week; AD113 Rosy Cheeks).

I have gone on to produce grays, and yesterday came up with a fantastic gray by combining equal portions of two of my tertiary colors: 8=Green-Blue and 10=Blue-Purple. This produced a cool gray I'm calling Stormy Seas. I need to combine 4=Orange-Yellow and 6=Yellow-Green which should produce a warm gray, but I ran out of some of my dyes so this will have to wait until another weekend. I decided to go ahead and over-dye some plaids with Stormy Seas so that I have some textures in this color to use, and dappled dyed a couple of pieces too.

So what to hook with these neutrals to give them a try? I am inspired to hook a white tiger after going to the Houston Aquarium last weekend with Alexander and his grandparents. They have four white tigers there, and they are stunning.

Where to start? First, I am going to continue my pursuit of value hooking. So I'm not going to hook by trying to match colors to a photo. I'm going to hook by focusing on my light, medium and dark values. I am going to use all my neutrals pictured above.

I went on the web and found several pictures of white tigers, printed them and pasted them in my hooking journal for inspiration. As for design, I will just hook a full face and I will put my own markings on the animal so I can be freer to design as I go. So here is my red dot sketch and my rough pattern transferred.

Since I'm value hooking, I need a black and white image. So I xeroxed an image to use as a guide and made a black and white photo of another image in iphoto. I like to use the xerox and the black and white option in iphoto because it darkens the image and increases the contrast, so I can see really well where my lights and darks are and where my medium values are. In this case, the medium values are running down his forehead and down his nose, so in these areas I am going to use #3-6 values and textures I over dyed. The whiter areas I will hook with #1-2 values of my neutrals. The darker areas will get #7-8 values of my neutrals, and I am going to add in for fun some of the #7 and 8 values of my 10=Blue-Purple, 11=Purple, 12=Purple-Red, since the gray I am using is a cool gray made from my #8 and #10 dyes.

I am going to start with his eyes, which will be blue, so here I will use my 9=Blue. I am choosing to go with #4 cut because I want to increase my detail. But this piece is measuring about 15" by 17" so I could easily have used a #6 cut too. First I hooked the black outlines of his eyelids, using two different darks, one on the top and the other on the bottom. Then I hooked the blue eyes, using several small bits of #1, 2, 3, 4, and 8 values of 9=Blue, with dark black in the center. A loop and two tails (pulled in the same hole) of white finishes the eye by adding the light sparkle.

Next I hooked some of the dark markings with a variety of my #7 and #8 values of my neutrals and my 10=Blue-Purple, 11=Purple, 12=Purple-Red. Then I hooked some of the lightest areas with my #1 and 2 values of my neutrals. This is what 'White Tiger Beauty' looks like after one evening of hooking.

Created a new neutral

This weekend, I mixed my 9=BLUE and 3=ORANGE and got another wonderful neutral which I'm calling 'Milk Weed'. The bottom wool strip pictured is the result of my dapple dye procedure.

Rug retrospective 2009: Dyeing

The biggest thing that has impacted my rug hooking this year is the creation of a full palette of colors and the development of the Palette Dyeing technique. The idea is to have a full range of colors that are all related to each other like the paints on an artist's palette. Beginning with the creation of three "primary" colors (red, yellow, blue: left photo), I blended these formulas to create the secondary (orange, green, purple: middle photo) and tertiary colors (red-orange, orange-yellow, yellow-green, green-blue, blue-purple, purple-red: right photo) on the color wheel.

In the end, I had twelve colors in my color wheel, all dyed in eight graduations. I discovered that the first two graduations are really tints (color plus white) and the other six are graduations of the pure color. When I added black to the color, I ended up with shades (of red: left photo), and when I added gray to the color, I ended up with tones (of orange-yellow: middle photo). When I combined complimentary colors in my dye formulas, I ended with with fantastic neutrals (right photo).

My process is laid out on Rug Hooking Daily in a rug camp called Palette Dyeing. We have 78 campers, and I am hoping in the new year that more and more of the campers will post pictures of their palettes and hooked color wheels. When I spoke to my sister Tiffany, she said that she has created three primary colors that she loves and has dyed her secondary colors which have turned out just right for her. She wants to finish her tertiary colors over the rest of the break. I will probably return to the dye pot tomorrow, since I need to create one more neutral and then redye some of the colors I have already used up in my hooking.

Saint Nicholas 2009: Fourth and Fifth Eves

Finished except for the binding!

A note about the background black. I pulled some old black wool I had in my wool closet to use and it just didn't "go" with my palette. Can you believe that a black can be the wrong color black?! I didn't. But there it was staring at me all wrong.

So I took out my crock pot late this afternoon when I got home from work, measured in one tablespoon of dye per 6" by 15" strip of black wool. I had six pieces, so I used 3 tablespoons of my 10=BLUE-PURPLE and three tablespoons of my 12=PURPLE-RED which were two of the dyes I used in Santa's coat. I figured that I could 'marry' my icky black with my palette this way. And wow did it work!

By the way, I have to say it again: I LOVE my crock pot. I just put the dye in warm water with a squirt of synthrapol, added the black strips, put on the lid and turned it on high for 1 1/2 hours. At 30 minutes I added 1/2 cup of vinegar. Then I took Alexander across the street to "Christmas in the Village" where he petted reindeer and watched the children play carols on their violins and played in the slush pile the Villagers make to treat the children to snowballs (remember we're in Houston). When I got home I processed the wool in my washer and dryer, and hooked it in the background this evening.

So if you don't know what to ask Santa to bring you this Christmas, and if you don't have a crock pot for dyeing, ask for a 6 1/2 quart with a timer and porcelain insert. It will change your outlook on dyeing because it is so darn simple and about as mess free as you are going to get. And what fabulous results!

Saint Nicholas 2009: First Eve

Santa's face is already emerging after one evening of hooking. I'm using 6-cut, and even with this width I am able to get incredible detail. I am amazed how Palette Dyeing has transformed my rug hooking. I finally have at my hand every color of the rainbow in six values, two tints, two tones, and two shades.

The result is that I can hook anything by studying the values of a black and white photo of my inspiration picture (the lightness and darkness) and hooking accordingly without worry about color since all my colors are created from the same three dye formulas. All my wools automatically look great together! I am so glad that I had that conversation this summer with Sondra when the light bulb went on in my head about needing to create an artist's palette of wool.

Needless to say, I'm having fun! I've hooked his face - I always start with the eyes, and put in the lightest values in the hair and beard.

Saint Nicholas 2009

I am starting Saint Nicholas 2009. My intent is to make a pocket pack out of it. Its outside measurements will be 10" by 15", so a little bigger than those 10" by 10" pocket packs I hooked this summer. I need a bit more room for all the stuff I carry around with me!

Here is the picture that inspired me and the sketch I made of it on my linen backing. Since I will be hooking by value, I made a black and white copy of the color picture so I can watch my lights and darks, hooking lighter values in the light areas and darker values in the darker areas. This will allow me to not worry so much about what colors I am hooking, but concentrate on values which will cause the face to emerge more creatively.

I probably won't hook the same colors because I'm a purple person and Christmas is purple and white for me. So I have to use some shades of purple. I am using the wool palette I dyed this season as I have been teaching the Palette Dyeing rug camp on Rug Hooking Daily (join the group for details). So first the neutrals. These are the two neutrals I am going to use. In lefthand photo: the wool on the left I created by mixing half and half of my recipes for 11=PURPLE and 5=YELLOW; the wool on the right I created by mixing half and half of my recipes for 1=RED and 6=Green. In the righthand photo, these are the other hues I will use (from left to right): my 6=GREEN; my 11=PURPLE; my 12=PURPLE-RED.

Creating neutrals

For the Palette Dyeing rug camp, I have been working on creating neutrals which aren't part of the color wheel, but are necessary for our rugs. Neutrals are made by mixing complementary colors on the color chart. The opposite colors tend to neutralize each other and you end up with some form of brown. So far I have mixed even amounts of my red and green palette dyes, and my yellow and purple. I ended up with a burgundy brown (red-green) and a creamy brown (yellow/purple). This week I will mix my final neutral with my orange and blue and I will post the results so you can see the different range of neutrals I got from this process.

I have decided to use a complimentary color scheme on my Monthly Reflections Rug, using my palette dyed wools: 11=PURPLE and 5=YELLOW plus the neutral created from their combination. I am going to alternate blocks, one purple, the next yellow, and so forth. The borders will be hooked with the neutral wool.

I am off to Kinko's to enlarge the patterns I have drawn for my first two blocks (September and October) for my Monthly Reflections Rug. Once I get it drawn on, I will get to work hooking them, so I can get caught up and be ready for November's theme when it comes in the church newsletter. It is not too late for others to join the five of us who are creating Monthly Reflections Rugs. Just come on over to Rug Hooking Daily and join our group and the challenge creating a rug month-by-month!