Gene’s Rug Hooking Blog

My friends, Marny and Dale, stopped by late yesterday afternoon for a short visit.  Regular readers may find it odd that I am showing a photo of them in front of my neighbor’s house. After all, they came to visit me, not my neighbor.  However, all of us – me, my friends and my neighbors – are connected.  

Although Marny was one of the first rug hookers I met when I started hooking in 1998, she and Dale were not connected to my neighborhood until they bought my rug Fog.  Since this rug hangs in their living room, I guess one could say they live with what I live with as all the design elements come from the immediate neighborhood.   (The blog program “scrunched” the rug to make it fit in this space when it was inserted into today’s post – it’s longer than it appears in this photo and I do not know how to correct it.  It’s printed properly in the Rug Hooker’s Bible if you are interested.)  If you take the time to scroll back to the first photo you can see that this house was what I used for the center house in the rug.  This was Dale’s first visit to Anaheim and it was fun showing him all the things I used as my background inspiration when designing this rug.

Fog was designed and made because some wool I had dyed for another project (the Parakeet Rug) just did not work.  It was too dull … too … well, fog-like.  The poem popped into my mind and I immediately “set” it in my neighborhood.   Although I live in the historic district of Anaheim, the 10 houses in the section where I live were all saved from other areas in town and moved in to create 2 new streets.  Of these 10 houses, I used my favorite 5 to design the street I wanted for the rug.   From left to right, this is the first house in the hooked street.

This is house #2.  Although I love the date palms, they complicated the design – too many cats!

Other design elements in the neighborhood, like the lamp posts, were also used in prominent ways.  (I have two of these in my yard alone.)  

While it’s not too evident in this shot of house #4 (mine, although green now instead of yellow) a few of the tall skinny palm trees that stretch alone the outside edge of this whole section are visible.  In reality, they are not behind all the houses as they aren’t situated the way they are in the rug … but the palms are visible from  all the historic houses.  I can count 45 from my yard.

The last house I used in the design belonged to my friend Margaret.  She found out I was a rug hooker shortly after I moved to the area and immediately started hooking.  Yes, yes, I left out the dormer on this design.  Its called artistic license.  If it’s OK to have cats cavorting all over the place, then it’s OK to take out a dormer.

Rugs are always more interesting, I think, when one knows the background story.  While Dale knew Fog was based on actual places, the tour gave him an entirely different perspective on the piece after he saw all those places.  Because that is true for every rug, I will close with one other association-

Marny is the original designer of Big Momma.  Although I tweaked it a bit to condense it from 14′ to 6′ she was the one who drew it for her friend (and mine) Kate …  When will these background stories ever end?   Hopefully, never!

***I am dealing with a bunch of upgrades from my host site … upgrades which affect the way the photos look.  What was a significant distortion in the Fog rug is a minor distortion in most of the house photos.  I will try to figure out the problem and fix it.  In the mean time, please forgive the perspective.