Midnight Hooker

Sounds like the title to a raunchy novel doesn't it?!!  LOL!   I may just have to get on that.  My opening paragraph could be something like "It was a full moon. The old hooker had one on the frame and one on the floor she was keeping an eye on. A box of colorful wool was within reach and she wasted no time stripping..."     Then again maybe a novel isn't such a good idea right this moment! LOL!

Seriously I did do a little midnight hooking on my Maggie B. rug.  In fact it was after 2:00 am when I finally put down the hook and crawled under the covers.  

I do think I am loving the wool choices so far. My background wool is taken from a box that must have 30 different pieces of dark brown wool, some plaids, stripes, solids, over-dyed tweeds etc. I am planning on using all that I can from this box so this may be the craziest background you've ever seen on a rug in your life! 

In this photo you can see the extra border I drew around the original border and where I added the additional linen.  Jacqueline had a question in the comments on my last post about adding additional material around the border of a rug after it has been zig zagged and prepared for hooking.  This is what I emailed her:

Hi Jacqueline,

Having the zig zag stitches around the perimeter of the pattern might present a problem to add additional linen. I have never tried hooking through those zig zag stitches although one could remove them ( ugh!  Would be very tedious and you take a chance you are going to cut the threads in the linen which would not be a good thing…).  I hadn’t stitched around the pattern yet on this one but had zig zagged around the outside edge to keep the linen from fraying.  I had enough linen to add about 4 inches to my pattern.  Which was just enough.  So we shall see how binding goes as where I attached the extra piece is pretty close to where I will be sewing on the binding. Don’t you just love a good challenge?!!  LOL!!

Cathy

If any one has ever added additional material to a rug ( to make it larger)  after you already zig zagged around it we would love to hear from you!

Of course my tip for the day would be to never zig zag around the pattern until you are absolutely sure that is the size you want the rug to be.  I usually forget to zig zag stitch until after I have hooked the whole rug anyway!  That is always fun sewing on the machine especially a larger rug. 

I know some people like to sew the binding on too before they start to hook.   I never do. I am always afraid I may want to add a little more border to my rugs and very often do. 

More to come.... but just wanted to show you my progress so far.  

Cathy G