Deb Merriam

@debmerriam.bsky.social

1571 Followers 3349 Following

DebMerriam on all other SM. Ex-academic bluenoser in Treaty 6, past chair of the Local Good (YEG), fibre artist, solarpunk, earth-centred inclusive beliefs. She/they,🏳️‍⚧️parent, mom friend, trying to make a difference.

Detail of a hooked rag-rug depicting a fantasy arrangement of realistically-shaded flowers, in a different orientation than the prior photo. The upper right corner of the rug is mostly unhooked linen backing. The watermelon-pink lily is now complete, and all of a yellow daffodil and yellow-edged crimson tulip can also be seen, as well as part of a red-violet throated flower, the upper corner of a blue-violet pansy, and some other leaves and petals on a medium-to-light indigo background. The oak handle of a hand-turned rug hook is laying on top of the rug (with its metal hook just out of frame).
Work in progress photo, detail of a realistically-shaded floral hooked rug using 3/32-inch wool flannel strips worked in a fingering technique. The lily at the centre of the photo is being hooked (for the 4th time sighhhh) in watermelon pink and is surrounded to left and below by bare linen with a bit of medium indigo-blue background hooked in; to right of the lily you can see part of a yellow daffodil, and above you can see a yellow-edged crimson tulip and a red-violet throated flower (sorry I forget right now its name). The top right of the photo shows 4 (of 6) shades of pink wool strips draped over the edge of my work.
Photo, with lens flare, of two juvenile crows, one on a wooden patio's railing, the other perched on the tail of a whale-shaped planter atop the same rail. Behind them in the garden is an apple tree bowing under the weight of its fruit, the cedar fence, and the borrowed view of trees in the neighbours' yards under a slightly hazy blue sky. You'll have to take my word for it that the crow-lings are almost as big as their dad, with glossier feathers.
Threehalves, the seven foot tall robot centaur, standing outside a glass door, with a speech bubble clumsily added
Incoming thunderstorm, looking due west from MacTaggart in YEG
Sunny photo of a booth full of hooked artworks with demonstration supples at the front table and two of my friends smiling happily at the camera.
A small roughly-triangular grey stone (basalt?) with lots of little orange crystals (chabazite) and a few larger white ones (quartz) in it, including in a hole that goes all the way through. Specimen from Port Greville, NS, Canada.
Suki, a medium-sized elder dog with Australian shepherd and beagle among the many things in her genetic background, sploots on a violet carpet on the living room floor. She has longish black fur with white spotted socks, a white stripe on her chest and between her eyes, and a grey muzzle. She is looking happily through cloudy eyes toward the camera with an open-mouthed smile.
Poster for Edmonton #RugHooking Guild's annual pop-up Spring Tea and Rug Show, with an image of a hooked blue-and-white polkadot vase holding multicoloured funky daisies. The event is being held today, Thursday May 7th 2026, from 11am to 2pm at Pleasantview Community League 10869 57 Avenue NW. Everyone is welcome! The $5 admission includes tea, coffee, delicious homemade snacks, and a huge show of beautiful rugs (many by award-winning textile artists).
Meme from Reddit that I saved to my phone about 6 years ago, showing a very cute lime green Ouroboros with rosy cheeks sucking its own tail, labelled "UwUbOwOs". (Apologies, AI has destroyed internet searches so I can't tell if redditor leeds2007 who posted this is the original artist.)
Screenshot from Merlin bird call ID app, for a 26:43min recording started 11:24am on April 11th 2026: blue jay, black-billed magpie, house sparrow, bohemian waxwing, american crow, american robin, purple finch (flagged yellow), house finch, dark-eyed junco, (not shown offscreen) California gull (flagged yellow).
Merlin screenshot, April 5 11:41am for 10:51min, (southwest) Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Ring-billed gull, Redpoll, Blue Jay, Canada Goose, American Crow, House Finch,... (continued on next screenshot)
Merlin bird call identification app screenshot, April 3, (southwest) Edmonton AB, 8:11 minute recording, listing house finch, blue jay, american crow, redpoll, american robin, canada goose, black billed magpie - started at 7:00am sharp
Merlin screenshot, 27 March 2026, 8:49am, southwest Edmonton AB, weather sunny and cool: house finch, black-billed magpie, american crow, house sparrow, blue jay
Screenshot of today's mass propaganda text from the Alberta UCP; my response, "Stop funding grifters building private schools instead of public education. Never text me again." Maybe next time I will have something eloquent prepared about them being separatist traitors or stealing my pension or gerrymandering or denying my kid's human rights.
Merlin screenshot, March 21, Edmonton AB, 12:34pm, 26:46 recording identifying calls of Canada goose, house sparrow, and black-billed magpie
Screenshot from Facebook of promotional poster: Edmonton Seedy Sunday March 22, 2026 Gardening event for all ages & capabilities ...something for everyone! Seed vendors info booths Free seed exchange Children's craft Concessionm Free magazine & book exchange Free speakers Admission by donation 10:00am - 4:00pm Alberta Avenue Hall 9210 118 Ave Edmonton Www.EdmontonSeedySunday.org
The background image to look for on the HeyCafe "rug hooking and punch hooking" group is a detail of an antique hit-or-miss geometric hooked rag mrug from my collection. Midcentury, anonymous. A grid of diamonds outlined in black and black faded to green has been filled with stripes of randomly-chosen multicoloured fabric strips
The Dune font generation meme making the rounds today, with the eye background; it says "Oh hey Old Man" with the subtitle "It's not even Wednesday"
Rose, designed by my instructor Heather Fox, hooked entirely using vintage Dorr Mill Store 6-value graduated swatches cut to 3/32-inch wide. The rose is hooked with 'bittersweet', a very early 1980s rusty coral, with leaves in 1970s avocado green. Compared with the previous photo in the series: the grey background is now hooked in! Almost finished!!
Merlin screenshot, March 17: chickadees, house sparrows and magpies all have visual confirmation, not sure about the house finch ID
Rose, designed by my instructor Heather Fox, hooked entirely using vintage Dorr Mill Store 6-value graduated swatches cut to 3/32-inch wide. The rose is hooked with 'bittersweet', a very early 1980s rusty coral, with leaves in 1970s avocado green. Compared with the previous photo in the series, there's now a wide stripe of pale greys echoing the shape of the rose, which is floating over a linear border of pale turquoise and pale-to-medium values of grey. (Aside: all these colours are in an oriental-style rug currently being sold at Ikea, so they're back in fashion!)
Rug hooked work in progress (same one as in the quoted post) of a realistically-shaded rose using vintage six-value graduated swatches from Dorr Woolen Mills. The rust-red rose ('Bittersweet') and four leaves (mock-shaded in avocado greens), and a pinstripe of pale aqua for a border, are all hooked now, along with some background in two values of grey. Still a few tweaks to do, and the unhooked linen to fill with greys, and then whipstitching the edges. Traditional rug hooking uses a hand hook (shown in quoted) to create a knotless looped pile from cut strips of woolen flannel, in this case 3/32-inch wide.
View of the Atlantic Ocean taken around low tide at Lawrencetown Beach, NS today. Winter storms have piled the rocks near the boardwalk stairs over the dunes, so at low tide there's a bit more exposed sand in the foreground than during my walks there in recent years. The sand is wet with some pebbles strewn in it; the ocean is mostly calm and the sun is reflecting off offshore waves creating a cluster of sparkles on the sea at centre of frame.
A screenshot from the Province of Nova Scotia's interactive map showing Horseshoe Road and a fictitious access road to a protected beach that someone is treating as a private driveway IRL. Map URL = https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/87a91c432fe7403e8f3ca4bc7631b9b6/
View from the gallery at St George's Round Church (Halifax, Nova Scotia) of the nave. 200+ years old, restored impeccably after a fire, with exquisite acoustics thanks to the round shape and domed ceiling visible above the brass chandelier.
A broad expanse of frozen pond, covered in snow, features a large kid-made(?) snow sculpture of a person with branches for arms and pine foliage for hair and a goofy grin of gravel. On the other side of the ice you can see another footpath and wooden bench. Taken in Shubie Park, Dartmouth, Halifax Regional Municipality, Nova Scotia.
An egg-shaped ball of linen thread for lacemaking that my mom keeps in my childhood bedroom for some reason. I might need to steal it to use in a project. It's big enough to fill my palm.
Bluesky screenshot of anti-Indigenous user Big Chungu55
Rug hooked work in progress of a realistically-shaded rose using vintage six-value graduated swatches from Dorr Woolen Mills. A large petal to the right is mostly outlined and so-called 'fingers' of the darkest value have been hooked at the petal's base. A palm and pencil hook, both made from scratch by my father, rest on the unhooked linen.
Photo of the downtown Halifax skyline at night from across the harbour in The Wooden Monkey restaurant in the feery terminal, obscured a bit by the patio railing and interior reflections off the glass
My work in progress, as of this afternoon, is a portrait of my dog started Feb 2024 in a #rughooking workshop with Laurie Wiles. The design is adapted from the second photo in this post. The linen background around the subject bears a few lines in black ink to guide me, my initials, the year started, and the dog's name, Suki Q Wookiie. The dog is being hooked in a mix of greys, blacks, and colours meant to depict glossy black fur without actually using black.
Looking southwest from the same spot as in the previous photo in the thread, over a snowy field, a collector road, and a freeway, at the pinks and purples reflected from the sunrise off feathery bands of clouds to the west. There’s hardly any grey in these clouds; below them, the sky is a deep blue, and above them, a very pale blue. A glass building on the other side of the freeway is reflecting bright yellow sunshine, as if lit from within.
I just missed the best blaze of dawn because I was driving. Sunrise sky, with bands of slate grey clouds in the distance lit from below in bright pink, peach, and yellow as the sun peeks over the Prairie horizon. A poplar forest lines the horizon and a snowy field interrupted by two electrical transmission towers sits in the foreground. The snow looks pale grey because it’s still twilight. Taken from just south of the Freson Brothers grocery store on Rabbit Hill Road, Edmonton.
The Gävlebocken before it fell (screenshot from the live feed linked in previous post)
A collection of little ceramic houses and other holiday trinkets on our faux-mahogany fireplace mantle. L-R: a white saltbox with leaf shapes impressed on it, a ceramic Christmas tree, a creamy round cob-cottage with cone-shaped lime roof, a straw JulbĂśk (like the Gavle goat), a black townhouse with white bottlebrush shrubs, a silver bottlebrush tree, a little red schoolhouse, a white bottlebrush tree, one of those wood robot guys that fold into a cube. Between the townhouse and school a tile made by one of my kids of a raven flying in a snowy sky rests against the beige stone fireplace surround.
Rug hooked work in progress of hand-dyed wool flannel fabric strips, sari silk ribbon, twine and wool roving on linen backing, depicting a flat rural Prairie road with crop fields on each side (beige and yellow-green with a teal slough), a treeline (darker blue- greens) with a white barn on the horizon, and the distant sky filled with a huge grey-and-violet cumulonimbus cloud that's dumping rain. Techniques used include the standard rug hooking loop stitch, reverse brick stitch, tambour stitch, couching, satin stitch, rip-and-wrinkle, quilling, stitched standing wool, and clear elastic overlay.
A hand-hooked running-loop-stitch work in progress, playing with the tumbling-blocks pattern (where 3 diamond shapes are placed together to form a cube, and shading of the cube’s sides give an illusion of movement). At its centre where 6 diamond points meet, is a colour wheel of bright saturated primary and secondary colours, shaded lightest at its centre and darkest at the edges of the star-shaped wheel. Diamonds in the tertiary colours turn the star into a hexagon, and diamonds in the quaternary colours are being started around the edges. Each stitch is a loop of hand-dyed wool fabric, with some silk, paper, and yarn added for textural effects. There are also embroidered and felted embellishments and buttons added. The edges are unfinished, with lots of the linen foundation fabric still left unhooked. “Colour Is Its Own Reward”, adapted from a traditional quilting/tiling pattern and hooked by Deb Merriam, started in a workshop with Gail Becker.
Work in progress, “Suki Q Wookiee”, started in Feb 2024. The bleached linen foundation fabric with sketched lines in black Sharpie ink is visible around the mostly hooked* form of a australian shepherd - beagle mix with big brown eyes who is sitting on a set of stairs and open-mouth smiling at the viewer. She has a red heart shaped dogtag, and her fur is hooked* predominantly in greys, purples, blues, and greens. *Rug hooking is a knotless rugmaking method in which fabric strips (in this case, wool flannel) are pulled up through an even-weave base to form a looped pile. It uses a hand-hook to produce the same running-loop-stitch as the related punch-needle method.
A cast iron frying pan, painted with a Pennsylvania Dutch style ‘hex’ sign derived from barn-stars and compass roses, using acrylic paint and paint pens. The central circle has a red daisy, and sits atop a yellow-and-white 8-pointed star, which sits atop a 16-petaled daisy with blue and red-black petals, all inside a green and blue scalloped border. The spaces between the petals have the word WILKOM (welcome) centred at the top, and the rest of the spaces contain small red hearts.
A photograph from the guild’s supply-shop desk (where I always am seated) in the corner of a large meeting hall of a business meeting in progress. Mostly you see the backs of people’s heads, but the photo gives a sense of the size of our local #RugHooking community.
Folk-arty colourful rug-hooked self-portrait, untitled, edges as yet unfinished, 12 inches x 16 inches. A woman with a pale complexion, round glasses, and long brown hair streaked with grey faces the viewer. Her body, seen from mid-thigh up, is filled with a rainbow of colours representing an energy centre visualization (the simplified western-yoga version of chakras). A blue ‘evil eye’ motif sits over her forehead, and a ring of violet and cream emanates from her crown. The background of mixed shades of black is filled with an ‘aura’ of streaks of colour echoing those in her body. The edges are being finished with multiple rows of whip-stitching over cord and it’s taking me forever. Once that’s done, surface embroidery and maybe some beading will be added. This piece was started in Cec Caswell’s “Funky Faces” and Meryl Cook’s “Chakra Colours” classes in Sept 2024.
A 10-inch circular birch-plywood frame holds a round hand-hooked rug of wool flannel fabric strips on a linen foundation fabric. The centre of the design is a traditional MĂŠtis floral medallion, with crimson-red petals, pink buds, and grass-green leaves and tendrils; the background colour is sapphire blue; it is surrounded by a border of four white infinity symbols. The ergonomic rug hook I used to hook this piece lays beside it on a white tabletop.
A charcoal grey tshirt with Woody, the Talking Christmas Tree, depicted with fangs and the words “Shop all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die.”
Bittersweet nightshade growing up through one of my MIL’s shrubs. It has glossy leaves just starting to turn blue and lots of delicious-looking-but-inedible scarlet berries.
Paper take-out box containing a lobster roll, french fries, and homemade ketchup
A photo taken at Rainbow Haven Beach, Cole Harbour, NS of a purple jellyfish (an Aurelia species, probably) and some bits of seaweed stranded on beige sand by the outgoing tide.
Looking down from the balcony at the cafe’s order desk, you can see a glass display case containing 5 uncut cheesecakes and a selection of bottled drinks; a geometric brass chandelier is reflected in its surface. Not shown is the long line snaking its way to the door.
An (attempted) photorealistic rug hooked portrait of a toddler in 2- and 3-cut wool flannel on linen backing. The two tools I was hooking with are laid alongside the completed face.
Work in progress: a hand-hooked rug using a narrow cut to depict a (hopefully soon) photorealistic face of a pale-skinned toddler with green eyes and sandy-blonde hair. Only parts of the face are hooked so far, and there is bare linen showing around the child’s mouth, forehead, and inside the hairline.
My pal Ruth is working on a colourful stripey rug made with a hand hook, wool flannel strips and linen backing in a hoop frame. In the background you can see our guild’s promotional banner and some other rugs.
Folk-arty colourful rug-hooked self-portrait, untitled, edges as yet unfinished, 12 inches x 16 inches. A woman with a pale complexion, round glasses, and long brown hair streaked with grey faces the viewer. Her body, seen from mid-thigh up, is filled with a rainbow of colours representing an energy centre visualization (the simplified western-yoga version of chakras). A blue ‘evil eye’ motif sits over her forehead, and a ring of violet and cream emanates from her crown. The background of mixed shades of black is filled with an ‘aura’ of streaks of colour echoing those in her body. This piece was started in Cec Caswell’s “Funky Faces” and Meryl Cook’s “Chakra Colours” classes in Sept 2024.
The same colourful hooked self-portrait as in the prior image, still incomplete, now with an aura of bright lines radiating from the body and a background of very dark green (a.k.a. antique black), very dark burgundy (a.k.a. antique red), and true black.
A photo of a photo of the newlyweds. Young me smiles broadly, facing the camera in a white wedding gown with puffed sleeves snatched waist and a pearl-embroidered skirt, henna-red hair, mom’s pearls, braided faux-pearls around my bun and veil blowing in the breeze, holding a bouquet of white roses tied with forest-green ribbon. My husband in his rented tuxedo is standing behind me with his hand on my arm. We’re in front of the gazebo in the Dartmouth Commons with Halifax Harbour visible in the background.
A reused box with red plastic liner designed for a dozen grocery store peaches, containing approximately four dozen small greenish-yellow pears. (We’ve previously learnt to our chagrine that if we wait until they’re yellow to pick, they are rotten inside.)
A small white moth, photographed from the inside of the glass, has landed on a window. It has one leg lifted above its head as if it’s waving hello.
Zoomed out map showing the southern half of SK, Radville and Weyburn are just west of a line of intense storm activity
A screenshot of the ‘map’ page on the WeatherCAN app showing several severe thunderstorms in the Saskatoon SK region
An oval dish of Pork Menudo, a rich Philippine stew that’s served over steamed rice. Diced pork, carrot coins, waffle-cut potatoes, and red, orange, and green oeppers in a thick sauce with spices I can’t identify - freaking delicious!
A table under a pop-up tent covered in small hooked rugs in various styles. One frame in the foreground has linen labeled “Give rug hooking a try! 😃” with our guild’s website. Another is my work-in-progress, a tumbling-blocks geometric pattern hooked as a colour wheel with added decorative stitches.