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Saturday morning was our last full day, and the final day for spending time with our buddies. Everyone took full advantage in the morning, working hard together with their buddy to plan the remainder of their rug. I really wanted my project to reflect Zoila, so we dumped out the whole garbage bag of used clothing (that we purchased earlier in the week at the Pacas), and started picking and choosing. Along the way, we added some details to the design, incorporating some repeating motifs and also mixed up the colour placement a bit to balance the colours (mostly having opposite corners matching) over the rug, but still allowing more variety.
One benefit of using inexpensive materials like the tshirts (cost in US$ ended up being less than a quarter per item), is that you can feel a bit more care-free and cut odd shapes to 'test' your plan prior to hooking. Knowing that it was impossible for me to hook all of our ideas, we cut out shapes of the various colours to make a mock-up.....
Knowing that I didn't want to fill precious luggage space with all of the old clothes....I cut strips of all of the various colours for the motifs. Hopefully I made good guesses about how much I will end up needing, but only time will tell. I did not bring anything home for the background....but I am sure I will be able to find something suitable and similar here.
...and everyone packed up their stuff to head home.....
And after lunch, it was time to 'hit the road'. I was pretty photoed out.....and only took a handful of snaps on the drive back to Antigua. This is one of them....still shocking to see after a week of similar sights.....
Although we didn't leave until the next day, fittingly this next snap ended up being the last photo I took with my camera....
(Elaine and I had both just woken up right before I took the snap - we were all down for the count.... ;-) )
It is hard to believe that I have been back now for seven weeks already. Everything is still so fresh in my mind, it could easily have been just last week that I came home. It was truly an amazing, life-changing experience....and I sincerely hope that the changes I have noticed that it has made in me last indefinitely.
