Sauder Rug Show Report

 

The rug show at Sauder Village was absolutely wonderful. There were between 300 and 800 rugs there! I’ve limited myself to just showing you a few of the highlights. Well, the highlights for me 🙂

I thought this was a wonderful piece of art. An original design by Donna Brunner from Alberta Canada. These are jack pines in her yard and she wanted to capture the sun setting behind them. She also did something unusual by stuffing the trunks and adding dimension to the piece. (Trapunto in quilting, but a lot harder in rug hooking!)

This rug was right next to my rug. I loved all the details in it. Its done by Janice Ricker, and obviously, its her own family’s lobster company!

This next exhibit was so fun. All the rugs were hooked by Nancy Stower and Anne Bond, and they are re-creations of original art by Vickie Sawyer.

There was a special exhibit of braided rugs. I don’t ever plan to get into braided rugs (but you never know!) This very special exhibit of these pictorial braided rugs by a woman who did them in the 1930’s blew my mind. Just amazing artwork.

Here’s a little article about the artist, Jessie C. Kinsley.

And this exhibit! Brought tears to my eyes. I was able to listen to a lecture/slide show by the woman who started this cooperative. These Maya women are very poor, and in general, women are not encouraged to go to school or work. One of the stories told about a young woman whose husband made three or four dollars A DAY driving a taxi. After she learned to hook rugs, she was able to add on a little room to their house and purchase a fridge. They don’t use the traditional wool that most rug hookers use. They use t-shirts that they purchase from a thrift store! (The founder explained that places like Goodwill, after they can’t sell things in thrift stores here, and after they can’t sell them in their warehouses wholesale, they send the leftovers to impoverished countries. Isn’t it amazing that the women can still hook such vibrant rugs from the dregs of our society.)

The story behind this rug was very touching. A young woman’s husband was diagnosed with liver cancer, with only 4-6 months to live. One day, about six weeks after the diagnosis, she was crying and said to her husband, “what am I going to do without you?” And he replied, “Don’t worry. I’ll always be with you. I’ll be on the bottom star of the Big Dipper.” The young woman was so worried that she would never remember that. And that night she dreamed of a rug. And that’s how this rug came to be!

This tiger might have been my favorite rug in the show. It was done by Judy Carter, who has done other wonderful animal rugs. But I heard her explain that many people said they could never do what she did, because she used such small cuts (in rug hooking, small cuts are #3 and #4, which means they are 3/32″ and 4/32″.) So she did this whole rug in #8 cuts (which is 8/32″ or 1/4″ if you do the math.) The shading in it is just beautiful.

If you are interested in learning more about rug hooking, you might purchase the magazine Rug Hooking, or buy the Celebrations book for this year Celebration of Hand Hooked Rugs 28 (I can’t find it on Amazon, it’ll probably be there in a few weeks.) Or you can go to YouTube and watch some of Gene Shepherd’s videos for free! 

After Ohio

Here I am in Ohio next to my quilt He Holds All Creation Together:

Okay, I will do another post on the marvelous rug show at Sauder Village later this week. But first I have to tell you what I did when I got home.

I had left my big PEACE quilt almost finished. I needed to quilt around the big letters PEACE. So I started in on that Monday morning. It all went well, EXCEPT I changed bobbins, and put a little oil on there like I always do, and then when I started back in (AND I SWEAR THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE) an oil stain appeared with the first few stitches. EEEEEEEEEK!!! I finished the quilting and was still so enthusiastic that I spent a lot of time putting on the binding. And then it was time to soak it. Oh, but first I water sprayed all the blue lines on it, which were just direction lines to remind me where I wanted to do horizontal lines or vertical lines. And then I soaked it in COLD water. But first I put a TON of Shout stain remover on that grease stain. And to be honest, I forgot about the grease stain until just now (I checked, and its gone) because when I took the huge quilt out of the washing machine, there were red and magenta stains ALL OVER IT. I mostly used commercial fabrics in this quilt, but I used just a bit of red and magenta hand dyed fabric. And this all happened in COLD water.

At that point I swore that I would NEVER AGAIN USE HAND DYED FABRIC. And then I pulled up Vickie Walsh’s EXCELLENT directions for removing dye stains from a quilt. Bless her over and over. She made me use my bath tub, because the large quilt needs to float freely in the hot water and Dawn dish detergent. I soaked it for a couple of hours, and then drained the water, put in new hot water and soaked it overnight.

And can you believe it, all the stains are GONE!!! I am so pleased with how this quilt came out. You can see the big word PEACE, and there are 12 verses that speak about peace scattered around the quilt. Here are some of my favorites:

Do all that you can to live in PEACE with everyone.

Search for peace, and work to maintain it.

Those who are peacemakers will plant seeds of peace.

I will try to get a rug show report up by Friday. There were so many beautiful rugs there, I might have to do two reports to share it with you.

Black and Batting

Black fabric and batting. These two things do not belong together. They shouldn’t even be in the same room! And I’m not even going to talk about black fabric and TWO PUGS  THAT NEVER STOP SHEDDING. Anyway, for some reason I seem drawn to black recently, and its been a trial. I do have a large stockpile of those sticky rollers to remove lint from black fabric, and I’ve gone through quite a few of them in the past month or so.

Anyway, here’s what I did with that “garage photo” that I liked so much.  (scroll down for the description of the garage photo) First of all, I realized after the fact that I liked mine upside down from what the original artist did. Second of all, I gathered a nice collection of neutral threads and I planned to embroider all the marks and scars on the original garage doors. I kept staring at the picture, and that did not sound very fun to me at all. So I drew a little sketch filling it up with circles, and that appealed to me (of course.) The colors of the cloth were so bright that the neutral threads looked great on them. It was hard for me to stick with the neutral threads through the whole thing. And I did try to explore as many ways of embroidering circles as I could think of. Here’s the end result.

Then, I found this very sparkly gold fabric at Joann’s. I had seen it several times but passed it up because what was I going to do with it? Then, on my last visit, I thought, hey, what if I embroidered on it? So then I drew another sketch and made a grid. I put a few white squares in my sketch, but when I went looking for fabric, I found this bird print that I really like, so that’s what I included in the grid. I’m taking a trip soon, so this will be my travel project. I’m pretty excited about it.

Choosing the thread colors is the best part of any project:

I am going to Ohio for Sauder Village Rug Week. My rug, “He Holds All Creation Together” was chosen to be one of the Celebration rugs. I have wanted to go to Sauder for several years, so this was as good an excuse as any to go. Maybe when I come back I’ll get back to my rug hooking projects!