not a lazy suzen

So, rather than stressing myself out any further with things that clearly do not need stressing about, I’ve moved on to something completely different. I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately. Historical and scientific stuff about icebergs and tidal waves. It’s super fascinating stuff. Here are some iceberg facts that I can whip out at the top of my head:

• By the time an iceberg reaches the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, it has been travelling for over three years.
• Icebergs can founder unexpectedly making them pretty dangerous things to be around.
• Icebergs are made up of fresh water that is up to 15,000 years old which means that its the purest water around (and great for making vodka!)
• A growler, the smallest of the iceberg categories, is often the same size as a grand piano.
• Icebergs can travel 48km per day while a glacier travels about 7km per year.
• When an iceberg breaks from a glacier they call it “calving”.

I guess my interest in icebergs right now is linked to my general infatuation with loose foundations and home. Icebergs break off from large glaciers, spend years drifting into coves and harbours, sometimes getting grounded into place but most times they drift along with the current toward warmer water where they melt and shift and break apart. They visit but they never stay because it is geologically impossible for them to. It would be a little cheesy to say “I am like an iceberg” so I’m not going to make that my official statement. I will say that I am fascinated with the image of a house bolted onto an iceberg and wonder often what living on a berg would be like. It’d be a constant state of tension, I think, between the serenity of floating in the sea on your own private island and the anxiety of flipping over at any moment. My stomach is in knots just thinking about it.

This imagery is fairly new to me–a house on a berg. I have to do a bit more drawing to figure all the details out but the bare bones you see above is essentially what I’m envisioning. I have this inclination to translate this imagery into hooked mats, irregularly shaped and maybe even with other non-hooked elements. I am working on a test piece right now just to see if the imagery will work in this format. I have a pretty good feeling it will but want to be sure before I bite off way more than I can chew.

For this test piece I am working over an old piece of burlap left over from last semester when I was teaching myself how to hook. As a result, pretend the heart shape isn’t there. And also pretend that it is flipped to the left 90º and has a house latched onto it. Since this photo was taken a lot of things have been drawn and added to it. It’s like a big jumbly mess of Sharpie lines that will all make some kind of sense in the end.

Last week I ordered a new rug hooking frame. I’ve been dreaming of this frame for months now and I cannot wait to add it to my collection of studio equipment. No longer will I have to struggle with large wooden embroidery hoops that have the potential to destroy the rug as I am working on it. No longer will I have to keep screwing up my posture to balance the frame between my stomach and the edge of the table in order to work. Soon I will be free to make as irregular shape a rug as I want! Boo-ya!

In the meantime, however, I’m stuck with the hoop until I get that lovely box in the mail.

hooking from suzen green on Vimeo.

See, the thing about hooking a mat is that it appeals to my obsessive side. It’s a lot like eating those free baskets of homemade potato chips at the Hotel lounge on Rue de la Montagne off Ste. Catherine: the saltiness and creepy onion taste makes you want to drink more which in turn makes you want to eat more chips.  A vicious and highly dehydrating cycle that won’t stop until some outside/uncontrollable force makes it stop. In the case of those hotel lounge chips, usually the end of Happy Hour means no more chips and no more cheap drinks so everyone heads home. When it comes to hooking a mat, the only thing that has been forcing me to stop are my hands as they kink up over the stress of holding a rug hook for five hours straight.

Needless to say, I think I am becoming a hooker. Ahem. Everything about this process has been so exciting for me because it’s coming to me as easily as knitting (but with a much shorter learning curve, thank goodness!). I’ve always been able to produce exactly what I want with knitting. I get an idea, do a little sketch, and start knitting. When everything is done, it looks pretty much exactly the way I was expecting. For me, knitting is a given. What really excites me is that mat hooking is going along that same path. I think I have found another way to work (and another way to totally destroy my hands with repetitive stress injuries…sigh).

Anyway. Even though I’m so excited about hooking a mat, I’ve decided to step away from it for just a little while. I have a lot of other things to do and mat hooking has become a pretty good diversion from more pressing matters. Like working on a presentation/paper about Liza Lou and Janet Morton. One of the easy things about this presentation topic is that I did a lot of research/writing about these ladies in undergrad, I just have to come up with a more critical approach to reading the work (my biggest struggle). The fun part with that is I’m crocheting cookies for the potluck part of the presentation, continuing my pattern of bringing in food that people can’t eat. Heh.

I think the main reason this is taking so long is because I’m making a lot of decisions along the way. Having never hooked a mat before, I’m learning as I go. Like how high to make the pile so I don’t accidentally pull the whole thing out. And how to blend colours to give the illusion of perspective. The most difficult thing has been figuring out how to detail drawn shapes so forms don’t look like giant blobs. As expected, I’m getting better at it the more I do it. The whole process reminds me a little of tapestry weaving, in that I’m constantly working in a grid format with little “pixels”. However, it’s a hell of a lot easier for me to control my shapes with this than it ever was with tapestry.

It’s amazing how true to the sketch I can get with hooking. I wasn’t really expecting it to be this forgiving even though I am using yarns instead of fabric so my gauge is a lot finer. And, the fact that I’m using yarns instead of fabric means that I have a total shag carpet thing going on but I’m okay with that.

The back of the mat is pretty great. In some respects I actually prefer it to the front and I’m considering different ways of display so the back can be seen. Yet, I do like the idea of having a little secret hidden, a little surprise for the viewer if he/she ever decided to flip the thing around. Maybe in the future I’ll experiment more with the right side/wrong side of the mat, in effort to mix it up completely so the mat would be completely reversible.

So, now that the house is complete, I’m moving on to more picky things in the design. Last night, as I was working the little “Suzen Army”, I had to pull the wools out half a dozen times because I couldn’t get it exactly right. Even now I’m not quite settled on what I’ve come up with.

The trick with this part of the mat is to forget the original photos these figures are based on and focus on what will be good for the overall mat. This means softening edges/forms into fairly simple shapes, changing colours and adding details that may not be in the original image. For instance, I’m aware that my little figures have a case of Carrot Top but it will work in the long run. And my army doesn’t wear glasses because it would be too big of a pain in the ass to try to hook them in.

At this point I’m realizing how valuable it is to have an array of yarns at my disposal. Thankfully, I have a lot of random bits of this and that but I know I’ll have to start gathering up more stuff if I plan on continuing to work in this way. I think overdyeing would be incredibly useful in this instance, especially when working with a whack of found wools. Having a multitude of blues, greens, yellows and reds would definitely make a more rich mat.

Anyway, I’m having a lot of fun working on this because it is different from knitting. It’s not any faster but it is a different kind of movement, a different way of thinking. On the downside of this, I can’t bring it home with me because it’s just far too large given all the materials I need to have on hand while I’m working. This means that while I am home on a self-prescribed sick day, I can’t hook my mat even though that’s all I really want to do. Oh well!