Free at Last!

Lucille's rug has haunted me for 2 years.  It's a simple rug -- simple design, simple colors, simple outline and fill technique -- it should have taken me a couple of weeks of part time work.  But no.  I am the world's best procrastinator.  And I hate hooking other people's designs.  The first class I took back in 1991 was at a McGown school and we were forced to buy a pattern and have a teacher dye the wool and show us where to put it.  (I'm happy to report McGown schools are much more open nowadays.) Nineteen years later and that rug is still not finished.  It may never be finished.

Anyway -- Lucille has been a little anxious about her rug.  Who wouldn't be -- especially if you are in your 80s and plan on gifting the finished rug to one of your kids?  So I got on the stick last week and finished hooking and binding and then made a nice label on the computer (which I forgot to take a picture of).  Then I surprised Lucille by knocking on her door with the completed rug.  She loved it. Thank God.

In my defense I have to say that there wasn't near enough wool to finish the rug.  And because a lot of it was as is, it was impossible to find an exact match.  I had to do quite a bit of unhooking and re-hooking to get an even placement of new wool into the pattern.  I had to devise a color plan for the border as well, and match that wool to the leaves and flowers.  Every time I put my hook down to ponder a problem, I put off solving the problem for weeks -- sometimes months.  So here I am, two years later, a little embarrassed and a lot smarter about agreeing to finish other people's works.  (Read that as "Never again!")