Making it up as I go along

Rug number four - for someone I know who likes earth colours.

First sketch...The design is very loosely based on the Shaker 'Tree of Life' .

This is it scaled up full size on paper.. He said he'd like the tree to be the colour of a cardboard tube...there followed several days of dyeing and re-dyeing white T-shirts with tea/coffee/cinnamon while I jiggled with impatience.

Finally - I could start. All sorts of fabrics in there - as each one is a different weight the tricky bit is cutting strips the right width. This is where I am making it up as I go along because I don't really know what I'm doing, but as it's not "work" there's none of the fear/ anxiety about competence...I can be blithely incompetent without it freezing me into immobility. I've a feeling there's an insight lurking in there.

 I like the look of the backs of these rugs...makes me think of a labyrinth...Minotaur, mazes, cochlea, Mayan - or is it Inca? Also of lugworm casts in the sand...

Having looked at a lot of hooked rugs on Pinterest and read a few blogs of American hookers ( that's what they call themselves) I'm thinking that like patchwork, rug hooking in the States has moved on from its origins and developed a distinctive style. It seems contemporary American makers use mostly woollen fabrics, and cloth rather than hessian for the backing, so loops and rows look much more regular.