Because my eldest son (unlike his brothers) stuck only to dogs as pets, I realized that I had a lot of negative space in the rug.  At first I thought I would just have more patchwork areas, but as work progressed, I wasn’t pleased with the large empty spaces.

My answer was to add text, and for several days, I envisioned various shapes, styles, and words that might work.  I finally settled on a phrase I saw on a cartoon on facebook…loved it immediately.

“Life is better with a dog”

I’m not a mathematically oriented person, so counting rows, spaces ditches etc. is not something I do naturally, but this was the time to get out the ruler.

The first step was to organize the saying itself.

I counted the letters and spaces between the words, and divided it into upper half and lower half, and found the centre of each part…..14 spaces (blocks) needed for the top, and 10 for the bottom.

Next came centering and drawing the blocks on the backing.

one inch spaces for the letters….

…tall letters 2.5 inches high…..

….small letters 1.5 inches high…and x’s drawn into the boxes between words so I remember to leave them blank…

…then using my best “primary teacher” printing for the words….

…tah dah…..Now for the fun part….the hooking.