Rug Hooking in Chatelaine Magazine

Well, we at WOOL-TYME Kingston always knew that we were right in with the latest trends, but this is the first time that we were firmly ahead of the pack. Chatelaine's August 2007 edition claims that the the artful rugs that can be easily created by hooking may lure knitters away from their traditional needles. Last spring, Rhonda Kellett gave the first rug hooking class at the WOOL-TYME Kingston store and introduced us all to the great world of burlap and wool.

Those of you who saw us at the Sheep Dog Trials on the weekend would have seen Rhonda hooking a beautiful rug using 4ply Briggs and Little yarn. This was to show that not all rug hooking needs to be done with cut fabric. The picture here shows the glorious grading of colours that can be achieved using fabric strips or yarn that you can get at the WOOL-TYME Kingston store.

Today I've just spent some time on the phone with different suppliers to assure our new "hooking" customers and our regular knitters and crocheters who are interested in taking Rhonda's class in September (click on the class info in the list of Coming Events at the top of this page) that we will have a good supply of hoops, hooks, backing fabric and yarns to create your own hooked masterpieces.

Rhonda, who is a wonderful designer in her own right, (come and see her glorious wall rug on display in the store) has agreed to provide us with pre-drawn designs on burlap that will be ready for those of us who are a little nervous about creating our own outlines.

On the cyberspace front: It's a good thing that I don't have a weak heart. THose of you who are familiar with blogs will recognize that each of our sites has a counter that keeps a running tab on how many people have visited the site today, in total and how many pages they have clicked to. I look at this tally every now and then and have been so pleased to see people from all over the world visiting the sites (both this one and our free pattern site.) The pattern site used to get under 10 visitors a day but it was nice to see that it was being used and our customers can download their own patterns instead of having to ask us to email them.
Well, on August 4th, it would appear that Knitting Pattern Central http://www.knittingpatterncentral.com/new_patterns.php listed our free patterns on their directory and the total visitors per day went into the hundreds with the latest tally being at 10, 766 as I write this. It reminded me of the story that Stephanie Pearl-McPhee tells of when she posted her "good idea" about knitting a special project during the Olympics and came back to her computer 3 hours later to over 1,000 comments. At least I don't have to respond to everyone who visits my site as Stephanie had promised to do.