Rug Hooking

Cut jute burlap or monk's cloth 400 x 300 mm plus 75 mm spare all round. The weave must be open enough for a hook to pass between threads without cutting them.

Turn and stitch the edges, or tape them. Burlap unravels continuously as you work and an unbound edge loses the outer rows of loops.

Stretch the backing on a frame until it is taut. Tension is what keeps the loop height even — a slack backing gives long loops in the sag and short ones at the edges.

Mark the design straight onto the backing with a marker. Keep the shapes simple and bold; fine detail disappears entirely into a loop pile.

Cut wool cloth into strips 6 mm wide, along the grain, as long as you can manage. Even width matters more than the colour: uneven strips give a lumpy, uneven pile.

Wool holds a loop, resists dirt and wears for decades. Cotton and synthetics flatten and go limp. Traditional rugs used whatever the household had, but wool is what survives in museums.

Sit with the frame in your lap, hook above the backing and the strip held below in your other hand. The lower hand feeds; it never pushes.

Push the hook down, catch the end of the strip and pull the tail all the way up to the surface. Both ends of every strip finish on top and are trimmed level later — never left dangling underneath.

Go down through the next hole and pull up a loop about 6 mm high. Aim for loop height roughly equal to strip width — that ratio gives a pile that stands upright instead of leaning.

Work into every second hole rather than every one. Loops packed into adjacent holes force the backing threads apart and the finished rug buckles like a bowl.

Turn the frame over occasionally. The back should show flat, tight strip with no loops and no crossings. Loops on the back mean you are pulling too much strip through.

Hook the outline of each shape, then fill inward following the shape's own contour rather than in straight rows. Contour filling is what makes a hooked shape read as a form rather than a patch.

Cut all the standing tails down to the height of the loops. Done properly, you cannot find where one strip ended and the next began.

Turn the spare backing under, whip the edge with wool yarn and stitch it down. A hooked rug fails at the edge first, every time.

Put it on the floor and walk on it for a week, then look for loops working loose. Any that pull out mark places where the spacing was too generous — and that is information for the next rug.

Where and when. Rug hooking as it is now practised developed along the eastern seaboard of North America in the nineteenth century — New England, the Canadian Maritimes, Newfoundland and Labrador, and French Quebec — with most authorities putting the earliest hooked rugs around 1840.

It ran on free materials. Jute burlap reached Europe from India around 1820 and arrived in North American households as grain and feed sacking. Washed, stretched and sometimes pieced together, those sacks became the backing; worn-out clothing became the strips; hooks were made from bent nails, forks and wire. Early rugs were also hooked on linen, which is closer woven. Hooked rugs were called the craft of the poor, and that is straightforwardly what they were — floor coverings made by people who could not buy the machine-woven carpets being imported from England.

Old burlap tells on itself. Nineteenth-century backing is coarse and uneven, and printed sack branding often shows through on the reverse. It is one of the ways a genuinely old hooked rug is distinguished from a later revival piece — the evidence of poverty is now the evidence of authenticity, which is a strange turn for an object to take.

Why loops and not knots. A knotted pile rug is far more durable and takes many times longer. Hooking is fast, needs one simple tool, requires no loom, and can be picked up and put down between other work. It trades longevity for accessibility — and enough of the rugs survived anyway that museums now collect them as folk art.

The revival changed what it is for. From the early twentieth century, rug hooking was taken up as a craft rather than a necessity, with commercial patterns, dyed wool sold by the yard, and cut strips of standardised width. The technique is unchanged. What changed is that the materials stopped being free — which is worth noticing, because it is the same arc that runs through nearly every craft that started as thrift.