Eleven Friendship Rugs
Once upon a time, eleven friends liked to have rug-hooking sleepovers at a quilting retreat venue called Minglewood Lodge. And we enjoyed each other so much that we wanted to make mementos for each other of our hooking friendship. We drew eleven identical patterns--designed by Lou Ann--with eleven open blocks, one block assigned to each hooker. Then each of us designed our block and hooked it eleven times! We hooked and we hooked! We traded rugs and hooked some more. One fine day, each of us had finally hooked one block of eleven different rugs, and we only had to complete our borders and banners. All the rugs are different, and yet they are the same in some ways. Take a look at some of our Minglewood Friendship Rugs, hooked by eleven friends, two of whom are no longer with us.
To show each friend's block, I've broken my rug into three parts: the five blocks on the left side, the four blocks on the right side, and the two blocks in the middle. Each rug hooker was responsible for designing her own block.
Clockwise from the top: we can see Holly's windmill blades with the Nebraska sandhills beyond, Lou Ann's poppies on a brilliant yellow background, Dennie's tree (because her maiden name is Baum, German for "tree"), with a creek (maybe like the one at her family ranch), Becky's coffee mug (she owned a coffee shop at the time and we all sipped a lot of coffee together), and Terri's beautiful geometric flower (it has always looked Scandinavian to me).
You might notice that Holly hooked a daytime moon into my sky--and there's meaning in that for me. In several cases, the rug hookers put something special into a block, special meaning for a friend.
The top center block is Jodi's--a different cat for each of us, some of them a little goofy!
A bird fanatic, I asked each rug hooker to tell me her favorite bird species, so I could hook it into their Minglewood rugs. Mine was a crow. For Lou Ann (above) I hooked a cardinal, because Lou Ann often reminded us that the appearance of a cardinal is a visit from a lost loved one.
I don't remember all the birds, but here are some of them:
Tammy, crow
Dennie, meadowlark
Luci, bunting
Terri, robin
Jodi, owl
Jane, heron
Karen, chickadees (the two of us)
Holly, eastern bluebird
Lou Ann, cardinal
Becky, can't remember
Mary Jo, drawing a blank
And finally, here are the four blocks on the right side of the rug, clockwise from top: Mary Jo was not well while we were hooking these rugs, but she tried to finish all of her sunflowers. As I recall, her sunflower was a symbol of Nebraska or of the Midwest. I ended up hooking a part of Mary Jo's block, and others may have too. Luci hooked the joyful dancing woman in the lower right corner of each rug--which perfectly symbolizes her consistent joyful state. I wonder now if each woman is holding a piece of wool? Jane Scott hooked the Scottie dog for each of us, and she customized it for some--but she too struggled to finish all the blocks. Karen hooked a cozy house, a cottage really. She hooked a flower box under each window.
In some cases, I didn't get a photo of the whole finished rug, but I did snap one of the bird block. So here, you can see a different cat and a different bird species--the meadowloark, beside Dennie's gorgeous tree!
I might be useful to talk about our process. Lou Ann made the big pattern, and each of us drew our own rug on linen and hooked the outline between the blocks. Most or all of us got our own blocks finished on our own rugs before handing them off to anyone else. We also tried to get going on our borders and banners--just to indicate to everyone else what our color preferences were, so that we would have a unified scheme for each rug, incorporating the rug owner's favorite colors/scheme.
Full disclosure: I hurried with Luci's bunting, so I asked her to give the rug back to me. This chirpy fellow is much better than my first attempt, and the house and fields and sky behind this bird do relate to other blocks in Luci's rug.
I'll include a few more photos below, friends, but in closing, let me say how precious it is to have something hooked by Mary Jo and by Jane, our friends who are no longer with us. And it's good to have this rug up in my wool room or out on a floor to invite memories of our five years of hooking together at the Minglewood Lodge. Those meals we cooked for each other, the chatter and laughter in the room, the hooking experiments and challenges we tried together, and the whispered conversations we had by dim lamplight in shared bedrooms under those sloped ceilings... those were the days!
Thank you for reading my Noodlings today, and I wish you happy hooking!
P.S. I found this photo right before I published. This was our first experiment or challenge on the occasion of our first visit to Minglewood Lodge. We each hooked a rug after watching a video from Deanne Fitzpatrick. We wanted to loosen up, hook something fun, and use some different fibers. There are some echoes of these rugs in the Minglewood Friendship rugs--Karen's blue house, Holly's sandhills, and I suppose, my crows. I won't even try to say who hooked which--memory fails. I took this photo of our rugs hung together at Minglewood in May of 2013.
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