Cat 116: Hooked Rug Cat

Most time-intensive project yet. Almost 2 months to make this. Finally my first hooked rug is done!

I am happy and relieved and a little sad.

Voila! Finished rug.

I’m happy it’s finally done because I’ve been pushing myself to finish it “quickly” for weeks. Relieved because it really is done!! And a little sad because working on one project that is simple, manual work without much thought after it’s started is, as Mary put it on her blog, meditative. It also was easy to do during a work meeting, and I watched a lot of anime and TV while doing this, which is an uncommon treat. So I’ll miss the “easy”-ness of this. At the same time, I’ve been chomping at the bit, wishing it was done for weeks.

Every time I sat down to work on this, Chaos climbed up on the rug. What a helpful boy.

I bought it as a kit on e-bay and began hooking it 15 February 2012. I did take a week off to do the cut paper project. Finally finished it tonight, 5 April 2012. So, 7 and 1/2 weeks to finish.

This is where I ran out of black wool and worked on cut paper Cat 115 for about a week.

The e-bay vendor was great and sent me more black wool to complete the project.

When I finished all the hooking and took it out of the hoop, I had to resist the urge to call it finished and move on to the next project… but I know myself. I would never get back to it and it would bug me being half done. Better to finish it all up now.

Fresh out of the quilting hoop without a binding yet.

So I found this great tutorial on binding rugs and followed her technique. I started binding on 30 March and it took 7 days to bind it. Apparently I am much slower than the woman who wrote that great blog post!

A rare event: a real lunch break! I made it down to the Hudson River on a beautiful day and started binding the rug.

Binding in process (didn't have pins with me for the corners & used extra needles instead).

Finally the twill is all whipstitched and the rug is complete!

View from the back. Binding is finished.

White was a poor choice. I may rip this out and just stitch "GG April 2012" right onto the black twill with some upholstery thread.. or not.

Hooked rug... or new cat bed? Chaos makes his opinion known as I take photos for the blog.

Thanks to folks who “voted” and gave me feedback on the last post! Asante sana. I had my own preference before I posted, but I really was curious what y’all thought. My preference? Final projects. But if everyone voted the opposite, I would take that into consideration and ponder why I’m making my choices. I haven’t closed the voting, but at the moment there are 4 votes for “final projects only,” 3 votes for “process info along the way,” and 3 votes for “other”: 1) post finished projects with accompanying process photos, 2) post about other activities (Thanks for the suggestion. I do post little random life events on Twitter so you can check that out if you’re interested. The bulk of the rest of my life is spent working which I really can’t blog about), and 3) do whatever I want… which I planned to do anyway! :)  So it kind ends up 6 votes for “final projects only.” We have a winner. And it’s a winner I like.  Thank you again for your input!

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