Settle by the Sea

This excerpt was taken from the book Landscape Rug Hooking: A Painterly Approach to Creating the Landscapes You Love by Deanne Fitzpatrick, published by Schiffer Craft and available on Amazon.

When you watch the sea, you know it can go from a calm, flat bay to wild, windy waves. When you live on the sea, you know that it is powerful, temperamental, and moody. The wind will change everything about it at a moment’s notice.

Like so many people, I like being by the water. It settles me and reminds me of the infinity of the world. It makes me see myself for the small little soul that I am. I walk on the beach and listen to the waves and feel the comfort of just being, being enough. So many of us love the sea, and it is natural we would want to recreate it.

When you hook the sea, the first thing to decide is the mood of the sea. And this of course decides the mood of the rug. Is it calm and welcoming, or is it a deep, rough, cold, wavy water? This is your most important decision. What kind of sea do you want in the rug. From there you can decide the motion you want to hook it in and, of course, the colors. We cannot assume the ocean is blue.

Golden Field Under a Blue Sky, 12.5″ × 13.5″ (31.75 × 34.29 cm). A single color, gold, is used in about ten to
twelve different shades and textures to create this field of goldenrod. You can use single-ply, two-ply, and chunky yarns together in various shades of the same color to create a field of flowers

Child Who Lives in the White House, 20″ × 14″ (50.8 × 35.56 cm). This is what I would call a
dreamscape, a place that lives in the imagination more than real life. In rugs, we can create beautiful landscapes
that reflect what we love.

CREATING MIXES

Creating ocean mixes is a great activity to learn how to put different combinations together to hook a sea without actually hooking it. Take all your wools out that you find relevant to hooking a sea, and start putting together combinations that might work. When I do this, I balance out the wools—I don’t just put equal amounts of each color in the mix. For example, if the sea was going to be mostly royal blue, when I create the mix I add mostly royal, then put in the other colors (teal and many others) in the ratio that I would use them if I were hooking the sea. This practice gets us comfortable and familiar with color. As well, it makes us aware of the colors we have in our stash. It is easy to forget that we have that periwinkle in the bottom of the basket. I use this idea of creating mixes for fields, hills, trees, and sky, and it can be used for all elements of the landscape.

Golden Point, 17″ × 12″ (43.18 × 30.48 cm). In this rug, the seasons are brought together,
summer and fall together. You can see how the use of textured yarn and the wavy lines gives this sea so
much movement.

Village on the Wavy Sea, 48″ × 48″ (121.92 × 121.92 cm). Sometimes the sea is the focus. All the houses
surrounded it and are there in that place because of the sea. The wavy curls reinforce the importance of the sea in this village rug

Blue remains my main color when I hook the ocean, but I imbue it with shades of green or purple or add some black or wine if I want to. Don’t limit yourself, because there is room for any color in something so vast and so deep. When you choose your colors, always remember that you are choosing the mood of the sea. The colors you choose imply the weather of the day, and the state of the sea. You could use dark navy to imply depth. Sketch in white or creamy-yellow waves to rough up the ocean and show wind. For a gray day, try adding in some gray blues or bits of dull aqua. You can choose colors that have a graying cast to them. A sparkling sea on a sunny day needs royal blue and perhaps a bit of wool with a sparkle in it. Sometimes you might add teal, purple or turquoise just to add some interest to your waters.

Joy on the Horizon, 23.25″ × 17.5″ (81.28 × 45.72 cm). A simple way of showing a sunset is to add a stylistic sun peeking over the horizon line. This rug is a magical place with women riding the waves of life.

Don’t limit yourself to blue or to the colors that I typi-cally use. Start watching the water near where you live, or in books and on television. Take notice and you will find that your idea about the sea expands. I hook the sea that I see in my mind, and that has been influenced by what I grew up with and what I know and mostly how I see it. You will and you should see it differently. How we see things is what makes our work our own. This goes for all elements of  the landscape.

My lines to hook the sea are soft, wavy lines hooked horizontally. I start by choosing a single color that is sig-nificantly or slightly lighter or darker than the other colors I plan to use. If there is a dramatic difference in color, the water can appear rougher. I then hook slightly wavy lines all over the sea, as if these lines were the waves themselves. You can increase or decrease how wavy your lines are if you want more or less movement. You could use white if you wanted to show that they were indeed waves, and this would imply a rough sea. I move these lines all around the area of the rug that is water. This technique lets me set a foundation of movement in the water.

After these are done, I will often choose another color and underline some of the first waves I hooked, and I will extend these second lines beyond the top line. In some cas-es I will hook these bottom lines double wide so that the sea does not become too linear. Hooking two lines ends up looking like areas rather than lines, and the water becomes more natural. I am always careful not to let my hooking become too linear even in wavy lines. In rug hooking, if the lines are too linear—that is, if you can see the lines of the hooking really clearly—when the rug is completed, you won’t see the image as whole; instead, the view will be distracted by the clarity of the lines. In my rugs, I want you to see the image more than I want you to see the motion of my hooking. I want the motion or direction of the hooking to be lost in the image.

Beach Roses, 7.5″ × 29″ (19.05 × 73.66 cm). A straight line across the horizon contrasts with the bounty and fullness of the organic shapes of the rose bushes in the foreground.

Once I have underlined the initial wavy lines in some area, I will choose the main color I have chosen for the sea. I often call this the body color. Sometimes the body color is made up of two or three shades of the same color that are fairly close together. This gives me the chance to show a bit of light and reflection. I will start hooking one of the colors under one of my waves in a wavy line, but after ten to fifteen loops I will start hooking it up and down and then across.

Late Summer Promise, 18″ × 7″ (17.78 × 45.72 cm). The warm golds tell us the season is changing, but the bits of pink and red in the lower right corner inform us that it is not quite autumn yet. Sometimes the colors we use tell the story of the rug.

The Rolling Sea, 32″ × 9″ (81.28 × 22.86 cm). The use of thick and heavy lighter yarns in the foreground waves in this rug shows that the water is rough and rugged.

I will do this all around the water area, changing the main shade slightly with one of the body colors I have chosen. Essentially I am hooking big, thick, wavy areas rather than lines. And I use these areas to bring the initial lines togeth-er. When I hook these big, wavy areas, I fill in the spaces between my initial wavy lines and they become connected. At this point, I will often bring in an additional color that is similar and works with the colors I have chosen. This method means that I am hooking all over the water area and not from top to bottom or left to right.

This is very important for two reasons. First, it shows movement and energy. Second, it means that if I run out of a particular color, I can always blend in another, similar color to finish the area. I hook like this for background as well, or any large area where I need a lot of a similar color. So often I have seen people who begin an area in a solid color left to right and get to the last 3 or 4 square inches and run out of that color and not be able to match it. You do not want this to happen in your water or any area of any rug.

Mixing and blending colors is important because it allows us reactivity in our work. Suddenly it is more about painting than outlining and filling in. We can express the action in the water. We can show where the light is hitting the sea. We are going beyond a paint-by-number approach and approach ing a more creative way of painting, and we do this with our lines and marks and our color choices. We are given the freedom to explore.

Cold Blue Sea, 12″ × 13″ (30.48 × 33.02 cm). This abstract landscape uses curly locks, a boucle
yarn in the foreground, and this adds a sharpness to the icy rocks. You can use heavily textured yarns to
bring attention and focus to certain areas of your rug.

As with the sky, I also use the sea as a bit of a playground when I hook. You could sometimes hook paisleys in it or tidal pool circles and ovals in a decorative way, using the same techniques we talked about using in the sky. For years, my favorite way to add a bit of abstraction has been to hook oversized decorative waves. Often these are right in the foreground of the rug, and they change the rug from being realistic to being more of a fantasy or dreamscape. You could outline these waves in several colors so that they stand out and become decorative. These waves are a statement about the importance of the sea, both in the rug and in our lives. They take the rug to a different place. I sometimes even hook a wave in the foreground of a rug when there is no actual sea in the image. This to me is a symbol of sorts of the meaning of the sea in the lives of people where I come from. Perhaps we might not live right upon it, but we know it and we belong to it. It is part of our lives, our heritage and culture. Symbolism is an important element in designing and creating hooked rugs.

At times I have hooked large jumping fish, or net needles (a hand-carved wooden needle that was used by a fisherman to crochet nets), in the foreground of the sea. You could hook sea shells, or kelp, or whatever symbolized the sea for you in your ocean foreground, knowing of course that this will abstract your landscape. This is one of the beauties of hooked rugs, that there is no strong tradition of perspec-tive in them. You can do what you like. The shell in the foreground can be larger than the house on the edge of the ocean if you want. By using symbolism, and being free and creative with our landscape design, we can pour our own stories out onto the canvas.

CREATING MIXES

Creating ocean mixes is a great activity to learn how to put different combinations together to hook a sea without actually hooking it. Take all your wools out that you find relevant to hooking a sea, and start putting together combinations that might work. When I do this, I balance out the wools—I don’t just put equal amounts of each color in the mix. For example, if the sea was going to be mostly royal blue, when I create the mix I add mostly royal, then put in the other colors (teal and many others) in the ratio that I would use them if I were hooking the sea. This practice gets us comfortable and familiar with color. As well, it makes us aware of the colors we have in our stash. It is easy to forget that we have that periwinkle in the bottom of the basket. I use this idea of creating mixes for fields, hills, trees, and sky, and it can be used for all elements of the landscape. WLRH