a new hobby

maybe

so now that it is new years =^__^= I might start to learn something new, one should always learn one new thing every year. This year latch hooking is the new one thing for me.
I was pretty surpised to find out that latch hooking is what I'm about to do, I thought it was knotting, because in german more or less everything that can create a rug is called "knotting". But obviously the english language has a name for every different way of knotting depending on the tool you will use - I will use a latch hook and I want to make a new bath rug. Some weeks ago I crocheted a mat for my bath room and it turned very pretty but doesn't do the job that well. The spaces between the flowers are a little too big and I get cold feet, not to mention I always fear I might slip when coming out of the shower.
So I thought I might "knot" me a rug. The idea popped into my head when I was in a fan board looking at all the cool things fans have made. If you follow this blog for a while you might know that I'm a huge fan of Prince and even though I never was one to decorate my room with posters and such things I liked the Prince themed stuff I saw on a german based fan site (prince-web.de). I found coasters and lamps and little lights for your car and many more cool things and I got the feeling I might like at least one thing in my apartment, why not a bath rug?
I started to experiment with Prince's famous symbol but didn't really like what I could come up with, so I had a look at what other "symbols" were related to Prince. One of them (he has quite a few) was the one from an early album called Around the world in a day. On that cover he has a paisley shaped symbol formed by the words paisley park.


I liked the yin yang aspect of it, when you put two of them together, and also that it could be mistaken by fish, especially when found in a bath room. . .
I started to love the idea and also what I could come up with.


So I bought a hook, and fabric and ordered yarn.
After realizing how expensive rug yarn is and the fact that I might not like latch hooking very much and therefore possibly not finishing this rug plus the fact that is supposed to be for a wet room I choose acrylic yarn. The yarn looks good and will be very good for the bath room, but working with it is ugghh! It's very scratchy but the hooking itself is quite nice, it's a completely new way to use my hands and I would call it 'hand aerobics'.


I started by drawing the "pattern" onto the smyrna (the stiff fabric) but soon realized I might not see very well where to make a knot and where not so I made a gridded picture of my pattern to start hooking (to find the correct grid size was a bit of a pain but after three or four mistakes I finally found the right size and could start)