"Those two/too people are in love"

My rug is done and I am happy with it. When I registered for the class it was not my first choice but I was still strangely excited about it. The idea of sitting in front of a loom and just sending yarns back and forth seemed like a relaxing prospect when compared with carting heavy steel up and down stairs and back and forth between buildings. And for the first three hours of weaving it is relaxing...and then the back aches begin. Despite the aches, I fell in love with weaving. My furniture designs have really set aside issues of color and pattern in favor of texture and form and it was challenging to address a different set of concerns.

The design of my rug is based on two of my favorite books The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon and The Case of the Dancing Men by Arthur Conan Doyle. The colors and style of the rug are taken (with a few tweaks) from the jacket cover of the prior. The embroidered figures are an alphabet based on a Sherlock Holmes' short story and they spell out "Those two people are in love," a line from Chabon's Pulitzer Prize winning work.



The rug is somewhere between eight and nine feet long by two feet wide. The end borders are a two-colored rib weave and the main body of the rug is a satin weave. The dancing men were embroidered onto the rug after it was removed from the loom.

A note on the title: Like all things handmade there are various imperfections throughout the rug. While stitching the men, I accidentally added a single arm to one of the figures turning the word "two" into "too". Funny, huh!