Those Blasted Blessed TULIPS!

I’ve been wanting to make a Tulip Penny Rug for YEARS.  Yes, YEARS!

It’s just one of those things, like Roosters and Butterflies, that I know I will design and make eventually, but there is just never enough time and I put it off.

Our Tulips are starting to spring up around the house now so the other day I thought, “it’s now or never time”.  I should be working on summer designs … I MUST start working on summer designs but I’m going to get this Tulip picture out of my head and done with!

 

A lot of time consuming work goes into creating an original penny rug design.  Sometimes, it comes really easily … I know exactly how it needs to look and exactly what colors I want it to be.  I sketch it out, then I fine tune it to get it to fit exactly in the space that it needs to be in.

But sometimes, it’s just not quite as clear in my head what I want it to look like.  It’s that trial and error, time consuming work that makes me more determined than ever to complete it and get it right.

The Tulips have taken quite a considerable amount of time to design, because I never was much good at flower arranging.  I knew basically how I wanted it to look but sitting down and drawing it was really difficult for me.

I rough sketched it with just the tulip positioning.  It wasn’t quite what I wanted, but for now, until I had the wools dyed in the colors that I wanted, it would do.

So here’s the original version:

When I design something, I always have to keep in mind how easy it will be to fit the design onto a standard size piece of paper so that it will easily convert to a paper pattern.  So I am limited somewhat with creating because of this.

But these tulips, although really pretty, just weren’t what I had pictured in my head.  I wanted BIG, SPLASHY and in your face kinda tulips.

So it was back to the drawing board AND back to the dye pots because these wool colors just weren’t splashy enough!

With two standard sheets of paper taped together, this is the rough sketch of the design. THIS is more like what I had pictured in my head.

After I re-dyed all my wool colors, I was very pleased with the results and the wool snippets went flying everywhere as I cut out my tulip petals, leaves and stems.

It’s not quite finished but I’m very pleased so far with the results. 
The instructions for the pattern on this will be a bear to write and the pattern layout guide that I always put in with my patterns will have to be oversized paper, but if I get a positive response, I’ll have the pattern ready to sell in a week or so. 

Let me know what you think!

 

Happy Day everyone!