Book Review: Hooked Rugs

Hooked Rugs is A Book You Can Buy From Me (I'll try to mail royalty payments to the authors).

Author: Ann Davies and Emma Tennant

Date: 1995

Publisher: Sterling

ISBN: 0-8069-1339-8

Length: 128 pages

Illustrations: many full-page color photos and charts

Quote: "The humble rag rug...[was] too lowly to figure in written records...[I]t is very difficult to trace their history."

Fortunately for rugmakers, the purpose of Hooked Rugs is not so much to trace the history of the craft as to provide outstanding examples of what can be done with it.

Davies and Tennant go on to mention that rag rugs have been made this way for hundreds of years, and some designs and terms suggest a link between British and Scandinavian rugmakers, but little has been written about them. Some rugmakers just used up one rag after another in random stripes, or made irregular patches of "crazy quilt" or "broken glass" designs. In more prosperous times, however, rugmakers could buy fabric, not necessarily worn to rags, or yarns in the colors they wanted, and create appealing texture and color patterns like the examples in this book.

By the twentieth century, rugmaking had become a color-by-numbers craft often done by children and disabled patients, who began with kits of pre-dyed, pre-cut yarn. Craft stores still sell dozens of rug kits to fill up time in schools and hospitals. Those who have worked a few precut rug kits and not completely lost interest in using their latch hooks, however, may want to try designing their own original rugs.

Hooked Rugs provides that intermediate step between blindly following a prefabricated kit and designing a completely original rug. The book contains a few dozen designs, charted in varying degrees of detail; it's up to you to copy the designs on canvas, find rags and yarns in appropriate colors, and create your own colorway for your rug (you're not likely to find exactly the same colors shown in the book).

In fact, it may be difficult to find supplies for making a totally awesome rug. British rag rugs were traditionally hooked from small scraps of worn-out clothes and blankets. Even in England, the authors admit that people aren't wearing out wool fabric at a rate that will satisfy rugmakers. The coarse acrylic "rug yarns" sold in the U.S. look like wool from a distance, but don't come in dozens of beautifully subtle color combinations, and don't have that finger-and-toe-soothing quality real wool has. (While acids and dyes used in processing wool can irritate skin, natural wool releases traces of skin-soothing lanolin whenever it's touched.)

Thick, fluffy wools marketed to knitters are delightful to handle, but are likely to be lopi, an unspun or barely-spun roving that pulls apart easily before it's been knitted or crocheted--not much fun to hook. Cotton, hemp, and jute are sturdy enough to hook but will pack down fast if the rug is actually used. You'll probably have to choose the compromise materials that work best for the intended purpose of the rug.

Despite its British origins this book contains an international sampling of rugs, with patterns that celebrate the United States, Canada, various European countries, and a bird the authors dubiously describe as "of indeterminate species" that looks like the winter coat of the Scarlet Tanager, as seen in South America, to me. (Use true black and red, look up exactly where the colors go, and it will be the Scarlet Tanager North Americans know.)

Even if you don't plan to hook a rug, this book is a treat for the eye.