Rug Hooking With Yarn The new Knit 1 Magazine, published by Vogue, has a great advertisment for a hooked bag. It's a large bag with wonderful looking handles and is hooked with what appears to be yarns in shades of red. (It could be fabric.)

We have all the supplies in the store to hook. Meghan, the accomplished young woman who works at Woolbearers, pointed out the bag to me and we decided we would try making one.

We sell a high quality linen burlap that won't deteriorate like hemp burlap. I was surprised at the effort it took to push the hook through the burlap to catch a loop of yarn. I stapled strips of carding cloth to stretcher frames. Carding cloth is a heavy base of a rubbery material that has sharp bent wires embedded into it. The purpose of using carding cloth on the stretch frame is to secure the linen burlap to the frame so it won't slip. I must not have done it correctly, because I ended up stapling the fabric to the frame. I'll just have to remove the staples to move the fabric and restaple.

The hook is what I have been told is the usual hook for hooking! Only $3, sturdy and easy to hold.

The yarn was just stuff we had around the store; hand dyed rug yarns that I unplied, bulky thick and thin felted New Zealand wool, also hand dyed, and worsted weight silk and rayon blend for the center of the flowers. I drew sort of whimsical flowers in Sharpee pen on the linen before I stretched it. The drawing is really helping me.

I found the bulky New Zealand to be a little too bulky, but it looks really good as the flower petals. The picture looks a little like something you might see on an operating room floor, but I wanted to document my progress and will take a another photo when I've done more.