The Valley Forge Rug Braiding Guild
2017 The Four Seasons
Kris McDermet’s “Trees Please.” This piece has trees of all four seasons with hooking, quilling, and other embellishments, surrounded by braids.
Bobbi Mahler created this mounted quartet of the seasons. I like the “cubist” quality to the images created in braids.
Pam Landry chose to represent the four seasons in the colors of each of the bands in this rug. There is a spring flower center, a summer leafy green, autumn oranges and browns, followed by a snowy outer band for winter.
Pam Rowan’s braided box has needle-felted images of the seasons on all sides. The images are based on a children’s book that she reads to her grandchildren.
Delsie Hoyt’s spring willow tree is exquisite! The center is created with two continuous ovals in her signature landscape style, then the edges are butted rows
Carol Young’s Snowman has velvet braids making his face and top hat. The features are embellished with buttons, a stuffed carrot nose, and a jaunty scarf.
Kelly Filo’s rug shows the four seasons of southwestern New York, where she lives: snowy center, moving to light spring colors, rich summer colors, and then to the rusts and browns of fall. The background is a soft gray… the usual color of her lake-effect sky.
Jen Kiarsis taught a class on quillies, so it’s only fitting that her multi-circle rug has attached quillies for each of the seasons. I particularly like the US flag for the summer season.
PeggyAnn Watts made this collection of baskets to show the four seasons. From left to right: Winter, with its basket of candy canes and a pattern created by 4-strand braids; Spring, with an Easter Egg of velvet and a wool flower; Summer, with a 4th of July picnic in Red White and Blue, and Fall, with a beautiful footed basket of autumnal colors and filled with braided Indian Corn (a class PeggyAnn taught at the braid in).
Dianne Tobias made a beautiful autumn leaf with rug hooked, hand-dyed velvet, then surrounded the leaf with raised basket edges of velvet braids. A small braid makes the stem of the leaf.
Rose Robertson-Smith made a delightful rug of “Cotton Pickin Season,” which is every season where she grew up in Texas. The long rectangular rug has a bale of cotton at the end of a long row of fluffy-yarned cotton pulled up in loops through the braid. She had to experiment with several yarns to get the right effect.
Lucinda Harrison-Cox has a set of four chairs, for which she is braiding chair pads with colors of the four seasons. The chair seat’s shape was traced onto brown paper and used as a guide for braiding the first chair pad in spring colors. They will be lovely!
Myra Jane Ober’s all-butted oval has the joyous colors of a sunny summe
Mary Hibbard’s Four Seasons Rug features a pretty series of butted patterns and a multistrand braid that is striking. The rug took her “fours seasons to make.”
Sandy Kub made this lovely rug showing the four seasons in small rug-hooked vignettes surrounded by coordinating colors in braids. Notice the use of both back-and-forth triple corner braids, and picot braids, to create a lacy effect. Just beautiful!
What a dramatic rug made by PeggyAnn Watts. The orange and black patterned braids that look like Halloween are interspersed with softer colors of fallen leaves.
Simple, Creative Winter Tree by Marjorie Kauffman.
