I spent Saturday afternoon and evening hooking and watching the Canadian championship curling  (YEA!!! Glen Howard won both games and was in the final Sunday night..(when he lost to Manitoba).Glen is the skip of the Ontario rink and plays out of Coldwater…a little town just 15 miles up the road. 

I completed both cheeks (the blush part) and tweeked the nose several times (I’m sure it will get more) but I’m not  happy with the outcome. My colours are still bothering me.

 I finally came to this conclusion. My experience and information comes from a face in which using multiple colours is an essential part of the concept..I’m trying to translate that to a face which is essentially monochromatic….”ain’t workin”.

SOOOOO… I went to my catalogue of Rug Hooking magazines, and spent an hour searching for articles on faces. (I’m fortunate enough to be housing June Baker’s RHM copies) Wouldn’t you know it…the first two I found…I didn’t have that copy of the magazine. But eventually I found an article by Victoria Hart Ingalls in the Jan/Feb 1996 copy. It’s entitled ‘How to Hook Human Faces’. Much of the information corroborates the information I have, there is really helpful new info on highlights, and essentially…i think I have to go back to the dye pot yet again (is this 3 or 4 times?) and come up with much more closely related swatches. (I’ll have yards of oops-wool available to overdye for the background)….actually I think I’ve come full circle…I started this way and wasn’t pleased with the lack of contrast…Oh MY!!

…Monday morning…. wrote this in the evening when the light was poor. but yesterday morning, in good daylight, felt better about the colours I had. I just did a quick dyeing yesterday…putting the two darkest pieces in a bath of 1/64th tsp of sand pink to ‘pink it up’ a bit. (I’m nothing if not inconsistent !!!)

Perhaps the most helpful bit of information gleaned from the Ingalls article has to do with the eyebrows. I drew them based on how big they were in the painting. The article cautioned that they must be kept small, or will produce a scowling face. I hooked them therefore about 1/2 the original size, and she still looked very angry, so I reduced each one to only one line of hooking.

What a difference! (sorry I didn’t take a picture of the scowling Adele!….She wouldn’t like to be seen that way! )