Dad, Dorr Wool, and "The Right Way"
Dear Friends, this post is connected to a rug, of course, but it begins and ends with sort of a eulogy.
Yesterday, I thought a lot about my Dad. It was the fourth anniversary of his death at 90 years old, and I happen to be staying in one of his favorite places, the family cabin, where he always had a project going. I like to remember the days when our family would often be aware of him in the next room or in the basement, wearing his tool belt, at work fixing something, and singing. "To dream the impossible dream..." That was one of his favorites.
Dad had a saying that we came to dread: "There's a right way to do it." He didn't believe in short-cuts, and he would get a certain look on his face if we gave something less than our best effort. He just thought that if you're doing it, then you ought to do it right.
What does my dad have to do with Dorr Wool? I promise, I'm getting there.
When Dad died, Mom gave each of us a lovely gift, a framed photo of Dad at 25, right after they were married. He was standing against a weird mid-century wallpaper, but he was young and handsome, and Mom wanted each of us to see him that way. I decided that I wanted to adapt it to a hooked rug.
This portrait was different for me in a couple of ways: 1) it's smaller than other family portraits I've hooked, and 2) I used only two complementary colors, blue and orange. (Usually, I use three or four colors in a portrait.) I left out the wallpaper and I added branches and trees. I associate my dad with the bur oak trees that were in our yard and in our woods the whole time we were growing up. He hung birdhouses. Come fall, he raked endlessly and burned leaves. He built us a treehouse in the woods, and built himself a workshop out under the trees at the edge of the woods. He loved that our house sat under the oak trees. Once when one of them was badly damaged by an ice storm, he had to take it down. He was using the chainsaw, and (to shorten the story) his wedding band saved his hand. The saw struck the ring and bounced off. He bled, but he kept his fingers! Mom wears that ring on her index finger, and you can feel the little notch the chainsaw made.
Now for the wool part of this post. Notice the little row of trees in the distance behind Dad. It's always been a challenge for me to hook trees in the distance, because of the intricacy of the twigs and foliage and sky color, and so on. But after using Dorr Glen Plaid for something else, I realized it was the solution to this problem.
Anita White dyes Dorr Glen Plaid for me in various colors, and in this case, it's in those soft oranges and blues of a sunrise.
The wool has open rectangles of white (or the dye color), and areas with dense black lines, with lighter black dashes and brown dashes... in short, it offers the patterning that we need to hook foliage. I think it works best if you hook a dark trunk and a main branch or two, and then hook the Glen Plaid in a higgledy-piggledy fashion in the shape of the tree's canopy.
I hope I'll find other uses for it too, and if I do, I'll let you know!
So that's Dad and Dorr Glen Plaid, but what about "The Right Way"?
Confession: I got in a hurry on this important rug. I wanted something to break up the blue on the right side, and so I created some simple
stalks--something you might see here at the cabin, perhaps. The stalks were a quick and easy way to finish, so that the rug could be part of a show at the local arts center.
But I keep hearing these words... if it's worth doing, it's worth doing right. I need to do better, and if you've read my posts, you'll know that revision is not uncommon for me, even after a rug has hung on the wall for a while.
So, when the show comes down in September and "Dad at 25" comes home to my house, I'm pulling out those stalks. I'll definitely share the next version with you here.
I don't mean that I hear my dad scolding me about this rug. I actually think he would like it. If there's a heaven, he's busy on a step ladder with his Phillips screwdriver. But he'd smile at me, down here worrying about my rug, probably with a couple drywall screws between his lips.
We lost a good guy on August 9th of 2022, and I'll be remembering him and hooking him now and then for a long time to come! Thank you for reading my Noodlings, and happy hooking!
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