Karen Kahle

At our meeting on Saturday, Londi mentioned Karen Kahle several times in her class on color theory. She shared a couple photos that she had taken of Karen's rugs when she attended a class she took from her a few years ago. Here is a link to an online photo album showing close-ups of her work so you can see details and study her techniques for using color in her rugs. And you can see more pictures of Karen & what she makes here. Karen is one of the national teachers that we'd like to bring to Utah for a workshop!

Our Meeting

Our Guild had a meeting on Saturday and we had a really good turnout of 20 people, and that included two brand new members who joined while they were there - Yay! By all accounts the meeting was a rousing success.

We are so lucky to have Londi in our group - she  continued teaching her color theory class that was started at our last meeting - and educated us more concerning color distribution, color ratio, color saturation, and color weaving. Hopefully we can make our rugs more pleasing to the eye by using the techniques she taught us. Londi has taught this class all over the world to people who paid a lot of money to take it, and now we get to learn for free just by being members of the Guild. 

After that class, Londi explained a project that we will be working on at our Retreat in April. It was suggested that everyone purchase a stool of some sort - then we can hook a cover for it. Londi will help us paint the wood part of the footstool so that the two parts will coordinate beautifully. Since painting is her specialty she will be able to show us different techniques such as dry brushing & crackling. Shown below are some examples she brought with her so we could get ideas for what we want to do.

Then the meeting moved on to the part where we were able to learn different rug hooking techniques. These included how to hide ends, how to do random hooking, how to hook a sharp crisp point, hot to hook hit & miss, how to decide which technique to use, how to make a plaid sampler, how to do beading and coiling. Here are a couple pictures of the work some of the attendees did.

As a supplement to that, you should check out these photos. Cathy is a rug hooker and writes the blog Orange Sink. She has posted several great pictures of a rugs she made using the coiled wool techniques in a Flikr album. Looking at these will give you more ideas on how to use this technique in your own projects.

Ali Strebel authors a blog also, and calls these coils 'standing wool circles'. You can see what she does with them on this post.

Here is a YouTube video that will give you more instruction on random hooking - or pixelating as this teacher calls it.

We're excited about our upcoming retreat and hope the members of the Guild will support our efforts to organize event this by planning to attend. More information will be posted about this at a later date.