Today’s musings revolve around how to hook the edge ….I wanted more depth of colour at the edges but I wasn’t sure how to merge the corners so that the whole piece looked cohesive and didn’t draw the eye away from the central motive.
Lacking any brilliant ideas, I plunged in to see what would happen.
I gathered up some off white pieces, some pale greys and oatmeal and dyed them with golden pear to extend the range of colours I had available.

In the picture they look nicely graduated, but in reality, the gap between the lights and the darks is quite extreme. I went ahead and used it on the corners thinking I could merge back into the lighter colours but I still needed an intermediate colour to blend the two areas. I tried dyeing a darker version over natural wool, but that was too bright, and too green. 
I tried “dulling” it down….one piece with “grey”, the other with “clay”, and ended up with pieces that were just as dark as the first batch. I tried various ways of blending the light and dark, but nothing looked right. Frustrated, I hung the piece up where I could see it as I watched TV, and contemplated what to do. 
It finally hit me that the dark corners were doing exactly what I didn’t want….they were drawing my eyes away from the central motives. They had to go.
I grabbed the hooking from the wall and set to work on the “pisces” corner…..ripping out the dark and the pale outline, and then re-outling the symbol in the very lightest of the dark colours .

My plan now is to use the light colours all the way to the edge,….dye some wool a VERY light golden pear to outline the zodiac symbols (I don’t want them to stand out as much as this ) and see how I like that. My pile of worms and unusable wool from this project threatens to swamp me….but I’ll stick with it until I’m happy with the result.