Breathe
The day I pulled the last loop on Andy’s Rug, I began to sob. My “grief or mourning” rug was done but my grief was not. I had spent 5 1/2 years on Andy’s Rug and was sure the grief would be finished when my rug was, but this was not the case. I was taken back to the early days after Andy died and remembered how my body would not remember, on it’s own, to breathe. I would become very dizzy… I actually had to remind myself to breathe, to take each breath sometimes many times throughout the day.
Therefore, the Breathe rug was born. I immediately took out a paper and pencil and designed the word and put it on backing. I had no idea what the background would be, but I knew I had to start with the word. I decided it needed to go from dark to light, like a breath does. A breath comes from deep inside us and comes out to enter the light without the heaviness that it began with. Since breath is full of moisture, I envision the color of a breath as blue…so that is where I began, hooking the “B” with the darkest value of blue, moving to the lightest value of blue throughout the word.
The background was a longer time in coming to me. I had finished the hooking of the word in October and began thinking about what the background should be, what I wanted it to convey. My life got busy and it was put on the pile until I attended a 3 day weekend in February at Sauder Village. I pulled the rug out and knew the background needed to convey the difficulty of breathing after the death of my son. I had lost my father 10 months before my son, and I lost my mother a few years later. During the interim, we lost many other extended family members, aunts, uncles, cousins…. and breathing, taking the next breath became my mantra.
“Breathe, just breathe. It is all that is required of you in this moment.”
I began thinking about how hard it was to keep breathing and what that breathing felt like. I kept imagining boxes and being stuck in them. I began to draw boxes and then move them to open up as they progressed behind the letters of the word. They also began with all 8 values of a Pro Chem color called Grasshopper. I love how this dye breaks from yellow to yellow-green in the middle values. I continued moving to the right, causing my lines to break away from the ridged boxes on the left to the flowing lines on the right. The background also begins to drop the darker values on the right. Occasionally, a box shows up on the right signifying there are still those times when breathing becomes difficult for me. Instructions for creating this background or one like it in your chosen cut size is included with pattern purchase.
The binding of the rug also uses the movement of values through the wool used to bind. The left side of the rug is bound in the darkest value of the grasshopper wool and I move the binding through the values ending up with the lightest on the right side.
Thanks for coming on this journey with me through all the symbolism contained in the color and line of this rug.
I do offer the pattern and wools if you, too, would like to create your own “Breathe” rug. Below you will find some photos of others who have been moved to hook this rug.
Breathe Pattern
