Book Review: Hooked Rugs

Just a few readers have seen this review before. It is being reposted for those who have not seen it.

Title: Hooked Rugs 

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 the beautifully subtle colors, nor 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.

Book Review: Piecework January 1998

Title: Piecework January 1998

Editor: Linda Ligon

Publisher: Interweave Press

Date: 1998

ISBN: none

Length: 80 pages

Quote: “In this issue, we explore the craft traditions of waterbound places.”

For some of the traditional handcrafts—weaving, embroidery, knitting, quilting, basketry—in some years, in our Machine Age, an industry develops. Shops and magazines are devoted entirely to the crafts that are fashionable enough to support these enterprises. Books are published. Clubs, with conventions and even competitions, are organized. Classes are taught for college credit. Meanwhile, other crafts languish in the shadows and receive little attention until the restless currents of fashion move on in search of something “new.” In the 1970s, when weaving was “in,” knitting was derided. In the 1990s, when knitting boomed, Knitter’s magazine sold widely while its publishers’ other venture, Weaver’s magazine, was never in stores. Meanwhile, does anyone else remember macramé?

Piecework magazine was the production of some people who recognized the deep silliness of these fads. If you really enjoy a craft, you continue wanting to do it whether it’s in or out of fashion. Piecework offered something for everybody. It was not a dabbler’s magazine; the articles were too scholarly and the projects too advanced. (While knitting magazines were bowing to the market for thick yarns that knitted up at 3 stitches to the inch, Piecework continued to print patterns to be knitted with traditional yarns and needles that knitted up at 8 or 9 stitches to the inch…and if you were not a specialist with serious money to spend, good luck finding those yarns.) Piecework was a magazine for serious crafters of all kinds. The magazine didn’t have room to feature every craft every month but they had something for everybody in every year.

So, in this issue, what you’ll see are gorgeous full-color photos of museum pieces and prize winners, an occasional landscape, and an occasional face, from Haiti, Australia, Greece, Guam, Wales, the Faroe Islands, the Maritime Provinces, and Japan. In the same order, the crafts featured are beading (“Sequined Flags of Haiti”), embroidery, weaving/embroidery, basketry, quilting, knitting, rug hooking, and kitemaking. What you’ll find detailed instructions for making are embroidered flower motifs, a “whole-cloth quilt” where the focus is on stitching rather than patching, a knitted shawl, and a hooked rug. Beaders, basket makers, and kite makers will have to draw their inspiration from the pictures.

Because the articles focus on craft history—usually specific stories, as, in this issue, the story of two needle artists who signed up for a twenty-year competition and competed so exclusively against each other that others petitioned to have them dropped from the group—they are evergreen. If you like reading stories about a particular craft, looking at pictures of masterpieces, and at least considering a pattern for something in that general style of your craft, you might happily collect as many as two-thirds of all the Piecework magazines ever printed. Like National Geographic or Birds and Blooms, these magazines would be perfect for waiting rooms.

If you’re more of a specialist, you might want to know: The embroidery is “shadow” embroidery, featuring effects produced by carefully stringing colored floss across sheer white fabric so that the shadow of the floss at the back shows between the stitches at the front. The quilt is worked from an elaborate design of flowers, leaves, and hearts, which you copy onto fabric, first with a pencil and then with matching thread; it’s all about textures, in white or one color. The shawl is worked at 5.5 stitches to the inch in Icelandic lace-weight wool; you could get the same gauge with a pound of Bernat “baby” acrylic yarn, and make a nice shawl for someone who refuses to own wool, but at some time in their lives everyone should get a chance to feel the softness of all-natural wool from a brown, black, or gray sheep. The rug must be made with real wool; the hooking technique used, though certainly easy and fast, relies on wool’s natural tendency to mat to hold the rug together. (Latch hooking would be more reliable, and would allow you to use mixed materials if you really wanted to; it would not be traditional, because the traditional rug hookers were turning bags of rags into something to wipe muddy boots on, so who had time to latch the loops? They had wool fabric; they let it mat together.)

The quality of the eye candy in all issues of Piecework was consistently high. The articles always left people wanting to know more…which was the point. Piecework was the bimonthly magazine of a publishing house that specialized in craft books. If you wanted more information, Linda Ligon could always recommend a book. Most books cited in Piecework were advertised in the same issue of Piecework, and some of those books may still be available in libraries or at specialized craft shops.