5 little Caswells in a row!

I had a narrow piece of linen left from the bolt; so I decided to try hooking a few Caswell Impressions in a small 8×8″ format.  In the original Caswell Impressions project, I just hooked ’em as I liked… and asked everyone involved with the project to do the same.  Now I realized, I would have to colour coordinate all 5 squares!  Over the years, I’ve inherited many fine cut noodles… in various colours and values.  With such tiny motifs, these fine noodles will finally be of use.  In all the inherited noodles, I set aside a few bundles of yellow, pink and orange… so beautiful together, I would use them for the flowers and some dark blue for outlining, thru out.  Now I had my challenges and started struggling right away!

The yellow, pink and orange noodles turned out to all be the same, more or less, value;  which makes it hard to shade flowers.  An orange spot and dirty yellow where really messing me up… so I introduced white and light blue, and used more of the light yellow from my ‘beautiful bunch’!

Now, I had an incredible ‘swatch’ of greens from Lynne Howard; she loves to dye and we both teach at Rockaway and attend Teachers’ Workshop in Eugene.  I usually have to buy some of her wool… just cause!  This swatch is from an old Prisms dye book and goes from intense yellow green to wowwy blue green!  I knew I wanted some of it for the peahen, so I started putting it into each square.  I like intense and wowwy colour, but I need to tone it down.  For me, colours need balancing… and I started to think about a background for all.  Would it be my ‘Green Shadow’ or a version of ‘Dirty Purple’?

yes… a little dirty purple works well.  the peahen is looking beautiful in her turquoise!  I decided that the foliage was crowding our lady, so I eliminated it; meanwhile, I love the orange ground.

The peahen has a dark tail feathers and I decided to use black!  I seldom use black, and was surprised at how rich it seemed.  And so… the blue bird became a black bird with red shoulders and will need lighter outlining.  The blank background behind the lady was too boring, so I’ll replace the foliage, while our gentleman changed his pants, his hair colour and grew a mustache!  I need to iron his mustache and the top flower.

Almost finished… a few more tweaks, some foliage and a bit more background; then the frame.  I’m thinking about using brown and beige recycled wool, to sort of imitate a wood frame, but in a ‘hit & miss’ approach.  We shall see…

It’s been such a long time since I’ve shared my rugs with you…  it’s good to be back!