Vintage Harry M. Fraser Model 500-1 instruction sheet

Last year, I bought a huge stash of vintage (mostly pre-1980) rug hooking supplies from a wonderful lady who was downsizing. Both she (Myrna L.) and her mother (Velma B.) had been McGown-Hookrafter-Guild-trained rug hookers, so she had boxes upon boxes of tools, books, patterns, and wool. I'm so very grateful to her, and I'm going to do my best to pay it forward by sharing the supplies with other rug hookers and sharing curiosities and treasures here on the blog. This is the second post in that series.

Among the supplies I inherited last year were four very vintage Harry M. Fraser Model 500-1 cloth slitters in various states of repair. (As teachers, Myrna and Velma had owned two each.) These classic finely-machined tools for those of use who hook using fabric are still being made (and serviced!) by the original company, and the owners have provided a history of the machine shop and their Bliss and Fraser cutters along with an image-based instruction PDF on their website. My old cutters came with a sheet of text-based instructions that likely date to the 1950s or 1960s (the model being referred to as 500 instead of 500-1 might help date them):

Fraser Model 500 cutter instructions, side 1

Fraser Model 500 cutter instructions, side 2

Adapted design: "Blue Darner and Wild Rose"

Our guild had the opportunity to exhibit our work at a local library recently, and our learning and development team decided to make it a challenge: insect rugs, about eight inches square. I decided I wanted to hook a local dragonfly species, hovering over a local flower.

After a lot of sketching, I ended up with a design that's heavily influenced by the American Arts-and-Crafts movement. The background is inspired by the abstracted square rose designed by printmaker Dard Hunter during his Roycroft period. The dragonfly in the foreground is adapted from a Dragonfly Tile by Detroit's legendary Arts-and-Crafts ceramicists Pewabic Pottery.

April 17th: I'm doing the dragonfly's wing by layering clear elastic (that stuff from the shoulders of blouses) over the cochineal-dyed wool of the rose underneath. Taking forever because it's both stretchy and slippery but it looks so cool! (The width of the elastic is identical to the width of a #6-cut wool strip.)

You can kind of see in this detail shot that I need to hook in the elastic loop high, hook in the wool loop below it, then adjust the loop heights and align them as I go. It's slow, finicky work.

May 8th: The wings with the layer of clear elastic are taking me forever, so I switched to working on the background.

May 13th: I'm switching back and forth between background and wings, because I need to know the correct values for the background before I hook in the wing. The pink is a mix of wool flannel and wool yarn dyed with cochineal, and I'm geeking out a bit about using insects to dye the materials for my insect mat.

May 14th: almost done!

May 30th: Finished and pressed**! But my beaded border went higgledy-piggledy where it's adjacent to yarn and needs persuasion to behave itself.* 'Blue Darner and Wild Rose', wool flannel, wool yarn, and polyurethane elastic on linen. Cochineal and goldenrod used to dye the background. Finished size 9.5 inches h x 9.0 inches wide. 

*In the end, I concluded that the only way to get it to behave itself would be to hook one row of fabric all around to contain the yarn, then do the beaded border outside that - but it's already bigger than the dimensions we were meant to stick with, so I left it as is.

**I carefully went around the wings when I was steaming it. I wouldn't want to melt the polyurethane after all that work to hook with it!

June 7th: My "Blue Darner and Wild Rose" is on exhibit for the month of June 2016, alongside other insect-themed rugs by members of the Edmonton Rug Hooking Guild, at the Riverbend Branch of Edmonton Public Library.

Dyeing with old Cushing's Perfection Union Dyes

Last year, I bought a huge stash of vintage (mostly pre-1980) rug hooking supplies from a wonderful lady who was downsizing. Both she (Myrna L.) and her mother (Velma B.) had been McGown-Hookrafter-Guild-trained rug hookers, so she had boxes upon boxes of tools, books, patterns, and wool. I'm so very grateful to her, and I'm going to do my best to pay it forward by sharing the supplies with other rug hookers and sharing curiosities and treasures here on the blog. This is the first post in that series.

Among the supplies I inherited from Myrna were three boxes of Cushing's Perfection Dyes, which I have just finished sorting and alphabetizing - there's at least one envelope of each colour of the Ordinary Type (union) dyes. As near as I can tell they date to the mid-1980s at the latest. The All-Fibre Type dyes (which can also be used on nylon and synthetic fabrics, and have three different styles of pakaging) have been set aside in a ziploc bag. See below for more photos of the pamphlet.

A typical Ordinary Type dye packet, although the ink and paper colours vary a little, and the interior envelope of dye is sometimes made of paper instead of foil. Notice that the instructions don't call for added vinegar, likely because there is something like citric acid in the blend to bring the pH of the solution down. Some of my packets feel a little lumpy inside, but as long as all the dye dissolves in boiling water it should work fine.

Side 1 of the undated pamphlet, printed on heavy cardstock, has more dyeing instructions. The "Perfection Plurosol" detergent they refer to is a wetting agent, like Synthrapol of Jet Dry.

Side 2 of the pamphlet gives you an idea of the colours - although many rug hookers used recipes developed by teachers in their community to mix the dyes for custom shades.

http://www.pburch.net/dyeing/dyeblog/C1405331529/E20120508131939/index.html has good advice on using vintage union dyes, and notes that it probably contains the carcinogen benzidine. So, wear gloves and a dust mask when working with it, and (as always) never ever use your dye pots for cooking.

page 124 of Maryanne Lincoln's wonderful book (I need to get my hands on a physical copy!) via Google, explains in a sidebar the history of Cushing's Perfection Dyes and how the dye formulations changed from union dyes to acid dyes in the mid-1990s.

Because they are union dyes and I want to exhaust the dyebath before disposal to protect the environment as far as possible, I need to also throw cotton into each bath. So I will also have a stack of white cotton fat quarters (for a quilt, someday) and some cotton twill binding tape on hand for that purpose, in addition to the wool I'll be dyeing.

I'll follow up with some photos of my dye results when I give these a try!

TIGHR Back To Nature friendship mat

At the last possible minute, I decided to attend this year's Triennial Conference of The International Guild of Hand-hooking Rugmakers (TIGHR) in Victoria, British Columbia (Canada). I last went in 1997 when it was held at Oak Island near Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, when the guild was much smaller. I was so excited to be in Victoria - the other attendees are all so incredibly gifted and generous with their mentorship and friendship. It was so humbling and inspiring.

I am Storifying the live tweets and instagram photos from the conference here. (They're still trickling in, the weekend after the conference.)

One of the new-to-me traditions of the guild is the exchange of small (5"x7") 'friendship mats' with other attendees. This year, the theme was "Back To Nature", and we could interpret it however we liked. My first thought was that I should use only the fabrics and yarns I've dyed in my ongoing natural-dyeing experiments.

A recent small-scale dyeing experiment with Dorr woolen fabric and (L-R) caragana, goldenrod tops, tansy tops, trembling aspen leaves, logwood chips (and a smidge of iron), and cochineal.

After dyeing, from the top: goldenrod, cochineal, horsetail, logwood (iron modifier), undyed.

My design needed to be a small, simple sampler - and needed to still look great if the materials I've dyed turn out not to be light-fast and fade to beiges and greys. I decided not to draw anything on my backing, and just make it up as I go. After piling up my materials and squinting hard at them, I decided what I had was a sunset or sunrise scene, and I went from there. (Of course, I also needed to remember that some of the experimental ones might not be fast, so I needed to keep in mind that they may fade to grey or beige over time, too. Some might see that as a flaw, but I prefer to think of it as time adding another dimension to the textile art.)

Work in progress, hooking without a drawn pattern. Unless otherwise noted, all the wool fabric is Dorr natural, was dyed without a mordant, and was cut at #6; and the wool yarn is Custom Woolen Mills (Alberta)'s Mule Spinner 2-ply, pre-stripped and alum-mordanted, hooked two loops to a hole.

Finished hooking and needs binding! From top-to-bottom: indigo, logwood (cold processed, iron modifier), red cabbage (ecoprint on 20m/m silk habotai scarf, alum mordant, hand-cut), cochineal, eucalyptus (alum mordant, ecoprinted then immersion-dyed), goldenrod, saskatoon (exhaust bath, alum mordant), saskatoon (full strength, alum mordant), black hollyhock (basic pH), black hollyhock (neutral pH). The saskatoon dye is the most likely to fade on this piece.

Sunrise Sampler #1 ('Back To Nature' TIGHR2015 friendship mat). After binding (by whip-stitching with the saskatoon-dyed yarn) and pressing.

When I was finished, I instantly decided I needed to hook another one, to keep.

Work in progress, Sunrise Sampler #2 - the colour is a bit too blue in this shot, thanks to my phone's poor camera. I imagined this as the same sunrise, framed a bit differently, taken a couple of minutes later so the sun is higher on the horizon.

Sunrise Sampler #2: from top to bottom: indigo, logwood (cold processed, iron modifier), cochineal, beet (tannin mordant), onionskin (alum mordant, ikat resist). eucalyptus (alum mordant, ecoprinted then immersion dyed), goldenrod, saskatoon (exhaust bath, alum mordant), saskatoon (full strength, alum mordant), horsetail, black hollyhock (basic pH), black hollyhock (neutral pH). I think I'll frame this one, so I can note all the materials on the mat. Saskatoon, onion, and beet are all likely not to be colourfast.

I think this is the beginning of a series - I'd love to hook more of these little landscapes using only my naturally-dyed materials.

My friendship mat among others. (Clearly I need to work on getting my natural-dyed materials darker so I can do one with a greater range of values - seeing my mat next to one with an orca in it really points out how pastel it still is.)

Traditional Rug Hooking Resources: the rug hooking FAQ, updated

Blast from the past:

Look what I found!

Yesterday, I stumbled on archived versions of the rug hooking FAQ, which I created, maintained and posted to rec.crafts.textiles.misc in the mid-1990s, when Usenet groups were still a thing and rug hooking information on the internet was hard to come by. It was archived in three places:

version 4.2 part 1 of 2 last modified 12 July 1994 at foundcollection.com 

version 4.2 part 2 of 2 last modified 12 July 1994 at foundcollection.com

version 7 part 2 of 3 last modified 31 Oct 1995 in a google archive

My goal in creating the FAQ was to make basic information about the thrift-craft-turned-textile-art and its practitioners more widely available, with the hope that more people would start rug hooking. When I finished grad school and began working full-time, I was no longer able to maintain the FAQ.

In case these archives disappear (as I thought they already had), I've copied and pasted their merged contents into this blog post, and updated it where appropriate. The care-and-repair and bibliography sections are still useful, I believe. You'll find the entire FAQ after the jump.

Deanne Fitzpatrick 'Salty Swimmers' workshop, and 'Port Greville Poppies' pillow

The timing of my family's trip to Nova Scotia last summer allowed me to take a one-day workshop at Deanne Fitzpatrick's gorgeous studio, so of course I jumped at the opportunity.

The store itself is like a candy shop for textile junkies, in a beautiful old building in downtown Amherst, NS, filled with both hooking and knitting supplies (this photo just shows one corner of the front room). The walls are hung with Deanne's inspiring work. I can't properly express what a treat it was to see art like her recent Iris In The Rough in the flesh - photos almost don't do it justice. 

I think I'd come the farthest for the class; there were hookers of all levels (including other teachers) from across the Maritimes and New England there. We were welcomed to the light-filled salon where the workshops are held, invited to pour ourselves a cuppa and grab a snack, and treated to a master class in fearlessly modifying a design to make it your own, creating personality without losing the abstraction and painterly, gestural quality that typifies the best in primitive rug design, and mixing textures to add interest to the piece. Deanne has adapted her notes from the class to create her online course "The Swimmers", and I highly recommend that you fellow rugmakers check it out! She's also written a newsletter from 2013 with tips on working with texture.

Here is my early work in progress from the class:

I'm a slow hooker, thanks to essential tremour and my early mentors belonging to the finicky-fine-shading school of hooking, so this is as much as I had finished after a couple of extra hours on the day after the workshop. As you can see from my labels, I chose to make my version of the Three Swimmers myself, my mom, and my sister. I'm especially pleased with how my wrap skirt and my sister's braid add motion to the piece, and the two extra-long loops in the centre made the perfect bow for the polka-dot bikini's halter top. By the third figure (my mom) I had finally mastered the dotted-line outlining technique that Deanne had taught - when I add the background you'll see what I mean.

A few days later in mid-August of last year, with a bit of the background in and a couple of the ribbons laid on to remind me of my colour-planning for the piece. You can really see the gorgeous sheen of the recycled sari ribbon in this shot. I should probably point out that I've exaggerated my mom's curly grey hair with my fun choice of yarn (the 'Sooty Santa' curly mohair from Encompassing Designs in Mahone Bay) - it really isn't quite that wild and woolly in real life.

I put it away for awhile, because I wasn't entirely happy with the materials I had assembled for the sea in the background - but realized that some yarn I had dyed in early July using MAIWA's indigo powder was the perfect thing to pull it all together:

In order from top to bottom: Custom Woolen Mills (AB) Mule Spinner 2-ply, scoured then given 6 dips in a chemically-reduced indigo vat; 'sexy jersey' from Deanne's shop; Mirasol Peru Pima cotton - silk blend shade 1511; Dorr wool graded swatch 6-15 blue (part of the huge stash I inherited, which I'll write about soon); slightly tweedy 2-ply wool yarn from Briggs & Little (NB). Not included is the grey sari chiffon or the blue/metallic sari ribbon that I've also used.

Work-in-progress photo I posted on my Instagram account 3 Aug 2015
I'm soooooo close to finished as I write this! Just a few rows of yarn to go.

Update: Completed rug, 10 Aug 2015. The dimensions are 12 inches x 8 inches.

This will be framed made into a cushion as a gift for my mom. (Even if she finds the curly mohair I used for her hair offensively grey. Sorry, Mom.)

Update: after consideration, Mom decided to display it on top of her antique sewing machine table. The finished mat with whipped edges can be seen on my Instagram account here.

I also couldn't resist picking up the kit for Deanne's new design 'Port Greville Poppies' while I was in the shop. My dad grew up in Port Greville, and one of his aunts had planted poppies that still volunteered year after year on the hill above the old Wagstaff & Hatfield shipyard when I was growing up, so this design really resonated with me. I'll change the colour planning somewhat from Deanne's version, to a leafy green background, but the coral-red and eggplant shades and textures included in the kit are so scrumptious that I just had to keep them. Right now I'm playing with doing a petal with the lightest colours as the flares in the petal base and grading to the darkest shades on the outside of the petal, but I may decide I'm not happy with it and pull it all out to start over.

Port Greville Poppies, on linen, work in progress.
Colour looks a bit washed-out in this photo to me.

My goal with this rug will be to hook faster and looser than I typically do - I really feel that my technique will benefit from that exercise. The hardest part of that has been resisting the temptation to fine-tune the length of every.single.loop as I go. Old habits die hard, but this is one well worth breaking.

Arleen Brown's beautiful hooked rugs

While I was home visiting family this summer, I had the pleasure of spending an afternoon with my maternal grandmother's sister, Arleen Brown, who is still hooking gorgeous mats in her nineties despite blindness in one eye. Aunt Arleen learned to hook from my great-grandmother while growing up near Lunenburg, and still closely adheres to the traditional South Shore Nova Scotian techniques (also described in the print edition of Rug Hooking magazine, in the Canadian Connections article about Leslie Langille's rugs)(Vol. XXV, No. 5, March/April/May 2014). Her designs are drawn onto burlap backing, the edges are turned under and crocheted to finish and hide them, and then the mat is stretched on a frame and the design is hooked right to the edge, perfectly even, with no backing showing, and straight lines used for the background. They are a technical tour-de-force.

Arleen showing us photos of her other rugs.

An antique pattern from the Eaton's catalogue that her mum had given her to hook as a young woman. She had me trace this onto red dot fabric so she can rehook it, now that the original backing has become brittle and started to shred.

Chickens are one of her favourite subjects.

Still hooked on rug hooking: a yarn mat and 'Just Marbelous'

I have many hooked rug projects, at various stages of completion, and the #30DaysOfMaking Challenge seemed like the perfect time to pull them out and really rekindle my passion for rug hooking.

(No, not latch hooking, you children of the 80s. I'm talking about the much older technique that uses a crochet-like hook to make a running loop stitch using fabric scraps cut into strips. It began as a thrift craft, and is carried on now as a textile art with multiple styles, from folk-art 'primitive' designs using wide cuts and reclaimed fabrics to meticulously-shaded 'traditional' designs using narrow cuts and specially-dyed new material.)

I. Hooking with wool yarn

Feb 14th, reverse side of a Cheticamp-style rug hooking kit using two-ply wool yarn on burlap. I bought this a couple of years back at Jennifers Of Nova Scotia as a gift for my daughter, to help her learn to hook, but it became mine when she became too frustrated with the slow pace of hooking in nearly every hole and the yarn loops pulling back out on her. We'll try again when she's a bit older. This piece was meant by the original (unnamed) designers to be a round mat to protect a table.

Feb 19th, showing all the kit pieces (except the hook, which was made by my father for me,
the hoop, and the stork scissors). As you can see, I modified the design quite a bit, in order to commemorate a whale watching trip to Brier Island, Nova Scotia - I took out the enormous seagulls and added a whale watching boat, a whale tail-lobbing, and a couple of brier rose bushes. It's a bit folkier and busier than I would like, and I'm not happy with the lighthouse (which was hooked exactly as drawn on the burlap). Hooking with such fine yarn can be tedious, because it takes longer to fill a motif than if you're using fabric strips, and the loops have a mind of their own, so the direction of your hooking is lost. The trick is to lose yourself in the moving meditation instead of overthinking it.

Finished and framed, on March 11th. Destined for a bathroom wall, I think.

II. "Just Marbelous"

Detail of "Just Marbelous", primarily wool fabric on cotton monkscloth, March 7th. This rug is my own design, inspired by my collection of antique handmade marbles, many of which we believe were childhood gifts from my dad's maternal grandfather to him, but the bulk of which were won during dad's childhood marbles bouts in New Glasgow. They're like miniature works of art glass, and made the perfect subject to challenge my skills in hooking circles, working with many widths of woolen fabric strips (mostly #3, #4, and #5 cuts), and working with multiple materials (the marbles also include spot-dyed and dip-dyed fabrics, a couple of types of yarn, and a metallic-laminated wool). The biggest challenge in it was the temptation to overpack, but the result of that was that a few of the marbles took on a domed appearance - a tripping hazard on the floor, but a pleasing effect in a wallhanging. It would also make a brilliant stash-busting project, although in my case the materials were leftovers given to me by friends from the Dartmouth branch of the Rug Hooking Guild of Nova Scotia, back when I began hooking.

The date on the rug is 1997, when I began it, and the reason it has taken me so long to finish is that the matte black wool that I chose for the background, to show off the bright colours of the marbles, is an absolute bitch to hook. Never again! It requires bright daylight for me to be able to see what I am doing properly, and a drum-tight stretch on the hooking frame (because I chose monkscloth as the backing). I have, however, found that the little purse-size OttLites can be clipped to the neckline of your shirt, at the point of a V-neck, if you need to shed a little light on the situation.

Here's a work-in-progress photo and a detail photo from July 30th. You can see by this time I'd added this year's date, which commits me to finishing this by the end of December. I'm determined to get this background finished before the short days of winter hit. So I brought it on vacation with me.

My work-in-progress cellphone shot from August 17th, while on vacation in Nova Scotia. In this photo you can really see the domes where I overpacked the loops early on in the process. Every bit of black background that I add makes the marbles pop more, which is so satisfying. Before I can complete the rug, I need to cut more #3 and #4 cut of my flat black to fill the remaining spaces. I also need to hook in a few more rows of the teal border. 

Hopefully the next time you see a photo of it here, I'll be celebrating its completion!

Note: This post is part of my #30DaysOfMaking Challenge. 30 nonconsecutive days, as it turns out.

Slow Pastime: Making Hand-Hooked Textiles

Once upon a time, seemingly a lifetime ago, I was an unhappy biochemistry grad student whose supervisor suggested that, since I enjoyed it so much, maybe I should hook rugs for a living instead.

"Artist at work" by Pat Kight (Creative Commons licence).

I considered it for a heartbeat - longed for it, actually. I loved rug hooking. I loved hunting for wool skirts at thrift shops, then felting the fabric to use as-is or overdye. I loved the half-science-half-alchemy of using acid dyes in a big enamelware lobster pot to alter the colour of a piece of recycled woolen fabric. I loved the moving meditation of cutting the strips with a hand-cranked cutting machine, and of hooking itself: push, hook, lift loop, repeat. I loved my hook, handmade by my great-grandfather for my maternal grandmother, a tangible reminder that I was carrying on a family tradition. I loved the challenge of getting the tension right so your finished mat wouldn't ripple or pull. I loved applying colour theory and choosing textural variations to make a pattern pop. I loved the camaraderie of hook-ins and guild meetings, loved soaking up the wisdom of the inspiring women surrounding me. I learnt to crochet and whip-stitch so I could get a professional-looking finish on the rug's edges.

Neither of these rugs are my handwork; they are antiques from my collection. The naive, coloring-book style is typical of utilitarian hooked rugs made by rural women before World War Two, although these may be later examples from Mennonite colonies where the style has persisted. I love the bold colour schemes of these rugs, and the evidence of reuse: the beiges and peaches in the blue mat are pantyhose, and the white background of the pansy rug almost certainly started its life as long woolen underwear from Stanfield's.

However. I had already done my financial homework: all the hooked rug artisans I knew were operating at a significant loss and being subsidized by significant others with day jobs or substantial retirement savings, despite busy schedules travelling to teach at camps and hook-ins, creating patterns and kits for sale through their fledgling e-businesses and basement workshops, exhibiting and selling their handwork in galleries, and writing books and magazine articles that educated the public and showcased their expertise. They continued their work purely for the love of the craft. These were not isolated stories; I knew many of the leading teacher-designers of the day. The received wisdom was that most fine crafts, like rug hooking, were expensive and time-consuming hobbies even for renowned artisans. 

I told my advisor to get real.

It was 1995, and I was the compiler of the Rug Hooking Frequently Asked Questions file posted to the Usenet rec.crafts newsgroups, editor of the WOOLGATHERINGS e-zine/newsletter, and webmistress of the HOOKED! website and the then-new website of Rug Hooking Magazine. There were no WYSIWYG editors, so coding the HTML by hand for those sites was a considerable accomplishment. My husband spent days rendering a single realistic image of a rug hook for the now primitive-looking Rug Hooking Online logo:

Much has changed in the past 15 years. I completed my degree, worked for several years in biomedical research, started collections of antique hooked rugs and antique hooks, started a family, and switched careers. Like most young rugmakers, the demands of my career and family left little time for hooking, or for maintaining websites, and I gradually drifted on to other pursuits (There is a reason that most hobbyist rug hookers are retirees). Archived versions of my articles and the FAQ  from that time were generously hosted for a few years by Rug Hooking Magazine, but gradually destroyed through server changes and editorial staff switchovers; few remnants of them remain online now. I'm sure I have the original files on floppy disks somewhere; I really should rescue them and give them new life.

The past 15 years have also brought unprecedented changes to the fine craft industry, most notably the ability to directly market and sell your work to the public through online communities like Etsy and ArtFire. Blogs abound with inspirational stories about people who quit their day jobs and followed their passions to become full-time makers. Craft itself has had an extreme image makeover, going from quaint and old-fashioned to young and hip.

Fifteen years later, I'm pleased to see small hooked items and rugmaking supplies selling quickly on Etsy - I created the treasury above to show the variety and depth of the work being sold by emerging rugmakers there.

However, I particularly want to bear witness to the success of Red Spruce, who are using the traditional rugmaking technique to create large-scale rugs with a modern colour palette and design sensibility. (That they're based in my hometown of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia gives me a completely unreasonable feeling of pride in the rave reviews of their recent exhibition at NYDC's Odegard and nomination for a Best of Year Award from Interior Design magazine. As if I was somehow responsible. Heh.) Theirs isn't just a craft success story, though; it's also a story about slow design. They chose to keep the creation of their rugs in Nova Scotia, using traditional techniques and materials. They use the word "terroir" to describe their work in their manifesto. Need I say more?

Detail of Boardwalk, by Robin Gray for Red Spruce, 

an abstracted historic map of downtown Halifax and the Citadel. 

Please go to Red Spruce's site and look at their complete portfolio.

These artists' work has me so inspired to pull out my stash of wool and start hooking again. I have several rugs close to completion, and ideas for the designs of several more. Poke me and ask me how they're coming if I haven't posted anything more about them in six months or so.