Rug Hooking Diary...Wonderland is Close!

I just returned from the Wine Country Rug Hooker’s annual retreat at Irish Beach….what fun we had. I wish you all could have been there. We took walks to the beach, did a lot of hooking, ate too much good food, laughed a bunch and had some tasty Margaritas!
I managed to get quite a bit of work done on Wonderland and it feels like it's getting close to completion.
I've decided to make one small change to the pattern as drawn. It has little crosses drawn in for the stars and, after hooking a couple of them, it's just not working for me. They look wonderful in Martina's original piece but I've pulled them out and plan to hook in a few stars at the end.

The biggest challenge, so far, has been bringing the trees into the foreground. A little story about this..... I meet once a month with a group of textile friends at a little tea shop on the island of Alameda; we sit outside in the patio/garden and hook, knit, embroider, and have good talks. At the end of one of our recent meetings, I held this piece up and mentioned that I was finding the trees to be a challenge. My lovely friend, Andrine, spoke up and said, "What trees? I didn't realize there were any trees!" Humbled, I went back to the studio & spent two hours tweaking the trees and roof lines.....a little strip here and a little strip there.
It's good to have friends who are honest with you and let you know when you can't see the forest for the snow!

Rug Hooking Diary... Value Study

I just wrote about this in response to a topic on Rug Hooking Daily & decided it was a good comment to add here.

Tools for evaluating light and color.....I keep a color wheel and a value finder with my rug hooking tools and find them to be invaluable. I have another color wheel that I keep tacked up next to my dye cabinet. It gets used constantly!

Sometimes I use the "squint" method for evaluating value but my favorite tool for evaluating values is my camera. I take a photograph of the area in question & convert it to black & white. It's easy to see at a glance when a value needs changing.

In this value study, I can see immediately in the B & W photo that I might want to change the value of the gold in the window pane of the blue door. The values of the gold & blue are almost the same & the pane disappears. In this particular case I probably won't change it because I like the overall quiet and cozy feel of the little cabin so far.

As you can see, it's a little slow-going on Wonderland right now.....I've worked very hard at getting the trees to stand out and I've mades several small changes to the rooflines to (hopefully!) give them some dimension.