Ripley, WV _ McGown Teacher Training 2019, Day 3

We start each day at the Assembly Hall where we hear an inspirational saying, get a presentation from someone who has been assigned a rug for Show and Tell (they have the year to hook it, and then do a presentation on it). We bid on the privilege to get first choice of the classes offered that day (called Queen for the Day) and then the 3 classes are described by their teachers. Today was all about Crewel. Then we line up to choose which of the 3 classes we want to take. We each have a coloured dot on our nametag and each day a different colour goes first.

First in line today (which means tomorrow my colour will be last) I got my first choice. Tina Cole is a Canadian teacher and greeted us with the Canadian flag.

She had strips of

crewel fabrics hanging around the classroom.

She had asked Charlotte Price to hook her interpretation of the pattern

and Tina had hooked one herself as well as

one to show the difference a dark vs light background makes

If you are not careful you lose the darkest values of the swatch against the dark background

and the lightest values of the swatch against the light background.

We talked and played with colours and dark and light backgrounds for a while as Tina's approach was not only to teach the hooking of the piece but she also did a lot of work with  us on how to teach students, help them colour plan, work with their colour choices.

Tina's piece had 3 colours (a primary, secondary and tertiary) and a green and a brown, but I already have a traditional crewel on my bedroom floor that I hooked years ago, so wanted to do something different. I was drawn to this piece of fabric

which had just 3 colours; blue, gold and green

against a dark brown background. That would be more of a challenge.

Obviously Tina's swatches are different from the fabric but I have  green, gold/brown and blue swatches. The green is my primary, blue my secondary and gold/brown my tertiary.

It was a thoroughly enjoyable class but a "thinking class" and a "thinking" piece of rug hooking so after a quick dinner of pizza Jennifer and I both returned to hooking on our Ladies from the previous day.