17 December: A rug - and yet another hat

Winter time is just right for making a rug - thick and heavy spread over your lap as you work. Even after my attempts to use up all my stash of rug wool, there was an awful lot left; perhaps something to do with my carrying home an enormous bag full of old Durham Carpets yarn from the Guild one day. They acquired a lot of carpet yarn when the factory closed, and I liked some of the colours.

It's made by hooking lengths of wool into knots on rug canvas, using a latchet hook. Each knot is worked individually. There are 23 rows of 6 sections, and each section is 20 stitches wide and 5 rows deep. Each knot has 2 strands of wool, which have to be cut from the ball or cone. It took nearly 3 weeks to make (not a lot worth watching on TV lately).

The design is simple, based on a couple of carpets seen recently. One was sampler in John Lewis, showing all the available colours in one carpet range, and the other was seen in a shop window in York when we were having coffee in the cafe opposite. My version is 3 feet each way.


There's another hat, too. This one is the Joined Up Thinking hat - it needed a lot of thought (and many pages of squared paper) to work out how the design would carry into the top shaping.


It's come out rather small, though.