After a short hiatus (does 3 years count as a short hiatus?) I am back to blogging with a renewed commitment. So here goes......
Pictured below is my rug done at the Pris Buttler class held in April here at the store. We have been having some really marvelous classes here and I will try to show you the rugs I have been making at them.
A few years ago, Pris Buttler taught a Klimt class here at the store. Those rugs were seen in an article in Rug Hooking Magazine. This time, Pris was inspired by the work of Jan Theodore Toorop. She drew this long, willowy woman on a canvas for each of us. Then with her help, each student made the rug her own. The woman told our own story. Colleen Cochrane did a great Irish themed rug with a castle and thistles. Trisha Skinner had a beach theme. Lucy Bolding told her story with music, friends and Kansas in her rug. All of the 14 students in the class made marvelously unique rugs.
Of course, my story is about my lifelong love affair with horses and a particular horse that I had for 30 years. Some of you have seen Blackie in my other rugs. He is the subject of my GHOST HORSE rug that is a finalist in this year's CELEBRATION. My mother bought Blackie for me when I was in college, I was just 19 years old and he was a yearling. He was a grey horse, but grey horses are born black and lighten with age. As a yearling he was black with little flecks of white. I called him Blackie, which often confused people in his later life as a grey horse. I trained and showed Blackie and he later became a very well known team roping horse and placed at the World Championship Quarter Horse Show under the guidance of my kids' dad. Both my children had their first horse ride on Blackie. He was not just a horse, he was family. As he aged, he never lost his youthful zest for life. He could open any latch and when I would find him in the morning in the barn aisle, he would have rearranged everything in the barn and made nocturnal visits to all the other horses. All you could say was "That BLACKIE!!" I was with Blackie when he died at age 31, of a stroke. Moments before, I saw him carrying a stick, like a dog would do, trying to get one of the other horses to play tug-of-war with him.
He was a clown and a character to the end. He is buried here and is never far from my thoughts. My story rug shows a young horse and a young woman, who grew old together and lived and loved a lifetime.
OK, better quit for today, gotta go find a kleenex. Check back tomorrow. I am going to show off some great new antiques I got in.
By for now,
Janice
