Rug hooking
Wool strips ranging in size from 3/32 to 10/32 of an inch (2 to 8 mm) in width are often used to create hooked rugs or wall hangings.
The author William Winthrop Kent believed that the earliest forebears of hooked rugs were the floor mats made in Yorkshire, England, during the early part of the 19th century.
Workers in weaving mills were allowed to collect thrums, pieces of yarn that ran 9 inches (23 cm) long.
To add to this there are sound examples at the Folk Museum in Guernsey, Channel Islands, that early rag rugs made in the same manner were produced off the coast of France as well.
Rug hooking as we know it today may have developed in North America, specifically along the Eastern Seaboard in New England in the United States, the Canadian Maritimes, and Newfoundland and Labrador.
Girls from wealthy families were sent to school to learn embroidery and quilting; fashioning floor rugs and mats was never part of the curriculum.
[1]: 13 At about the same time, Edward Sands Frost of Maine developed a successful rug kit making business catering to women in Northern New England.
The industrial revolution was providing people with more free time to read about hooking and other past-times in magazines and catalogs, and to enjoy engaging in them.
Pearl McGown,[2] working at first under the tutelage of Caroline Saunders in the 1930s, has been credited with saving the craft from disappearing in the United States.
McGown popularized guidelines for fine shading with wool using various dye methods, and formalized the study of rug hooking.
This tradition lives on through the Pearl K. McGown Teacher Certification and Workshop Program, now sponsored by Honey Bee Hive Rug Hooking Patterns & Supplies.
In 1939, Ernst Thomsen of Hjørring invented a handheld tool which sped up the hooking process [4] making it possible to create large carpets in a reasonable length of time.
Designs of the fine-cut hooking genre use more fine shading accomplished by overdyeing wool in graduated color swatches.
Today's great Modern Folk Rug Hookers include; Norma Batastini, NJ; Cheryl Bollenbach, CO; Maggie Bonanomi, MO; Barbara Carroll, PA; Gail Dufresne, NJ;Carla Fortney, CA; Sally Van Nuys OH; Jayne Hester, NY; Cynthia Norwood, TX; Deanne Fitzpatrick, NS; Cindi Gay, Pemberville, OH; etc.
ATHA, The Association of Traditional Hooking Artists, was formed by a group of women who felt the rules of the McGown Workshops (I.e. only original designs, McGown Patterns, CHARCO & PRIMCO DESIGNS are allowed at the workshop rug show), too restrictive and chose to form an alternative.
In recent years, ATHA's leadership reflects the importance of bringing together the most interested and dedicated people to encourage and support advanced creative efforts.
The McGown Program allows for instructors to form a solid basis to move on to creating at the level that is seen consistently in the pages of the newly revamped ATHA Newsletter.
In the 1980s, Canadian artist Nancy Edell, discovered rug-hooking after moving to Nova Scotia, located on Canada's east coast.
The heyday of latch-hooking with yarn in Britain was just after the second World War and dominated by several companies based near the textile mills in the north of England.
In the 1970s and 1980s, synthetic yarns and wool/synthetic blends became popular, but rug-making was entering a decline due to the availability of cheap imported rugs and to decreasing leisure time.
Patons and Baldwin invented the rotary "Patwin" wool cutter, but Readicut went a stage further and sold their yarn in pre-cut bundles.
