Snapshots in Wool

Me and My Violin (#6 in the Nine series), 7" x 7", #6-cut wool on linen. Designed and hooked by April D. DeConick, Houston, Texas, 2013.

Do you have boxes of cut wool strips, gorgeous leftovers from projects long finished? Do you store them under your bed? In your clothes closet? In the nooks and crannies of your attic? If you are anything like me, you cannot bear the thought of discarding them and have promised yourself that you will use them in a scrap rug very soon. Yet, very soon never seems to come soon enough because that big scrap rug is just too time-consuming to actually start while working on other rugs.

That was my dilemma a year ago when I faced the fact that I no longer had the room to store all my scraps. Something had to be done—and quickly—but I didn’t want to spend my time hooking rows of wool into a large scrap rug.

So, I decided to try my hand hooking very small mats, photo-sized, with all my beautiful wool leftovers. My subjects would be my favorite family photos, but instead of enlarging my photos to a massive scale as I usually do when I design a portrait rug, I would keep them snapshot size. This project would be a challenge of diminutive scale.

This article is from the June/July/August 2014 issue. For more information on our issues, check out our issues page.