Bright Side, Dark Side

The dark side to this infernal coughing is that I've been unable to sleep for the umpteenth night in a row. Within ten minutes of my head hitting the pillow, I start coughing. If it doesn't abate within ten minutes, I get up so that I don't wake Hubby (and Piper, who would think it was morning and therefore would go find a tennis ball).

There is a bright side, however. I'm finding it oddly peaceful, being up all night. I'm sure that when school starts and I go back to work, this new schedule of mine will not be at all conducive to productive employment, but hopefully by then it will be back to normal.

So what do I do all night? Well, for the last few, I've been hooking.

As you can see, the hooking on the project I'm now referring to as "Hester's Hat" is complete. The next step is to press it, then trim it to about an inch of unhooked linen all the way around. Then I zig-zag stitch the edges, and then I'll mount it on another piece of fabric to make the frame cover.

Why "Hester's Hat?", you ask. Well, it's a cover for my rughooking frame which has strips of really sharp little barbs (gripper strips) along the edges to pull the fabric taut while I'm hooking. The cover is so that I won't mortally wound anyone with it if I'm carrying it around.

I'm the sort of person who names inanimate objects. In the 80s, my ghetto blaster's name was George. I had a typewriter named Simon. My car, of course, is Betsy. So when I got my rughooking frame, I decided it needed a name, too. (I only name objects that are really precious to me.) Since it's a Puritan-brand frame, I decided to name it "Hester", of The Scarlet Letter fame. And, of course, since this project will be covering "Hester", I decided to call it "Hester's Hat".

I have a few ideas of how I'm going to finish it up, but one logistical thing I'm still working out is what sort of covering to put on the back of the rug itself. It kind of defeats the purpose of hooking it if the gripper strips that I'm trying to cover in the first place grab hold of the back of the rug and pull all of the loops out.

Stay tuned!