CORNER BROOK — Austin White gets some strange looks when people see him rug hooking.
While the activity is kind of new for him to be doing, he doesn’t think it out of the ordinary for a man to partake in such a traditional craft.
He was a little more surprised when he first came to that realization back in the late 1970s, when he took a job as a summer student in a logging camp.
“We’d finish work, have supper and go sit around a campfire,” he recalled. “Then five of the seven men there would take out their knitting needles and start making socks for the next week.”
So, when his wife Molly took up rug hooking in 2002 after doing a beginner’s class with Joan Foster of the Rug Hookers Guild of Newfoundland and Labrador, White thought nothing of it when she asked him to transpose some of his sketches onto some rug-hooking burlap. That was a few years ago, after Molly had started up her own rug-hooking business, Molly Made.
“I gave it a shot and, as fast as we could do them, they were sold,” said White. “I was right into it then.”
Molly Made, which is based out of Woody Point, still sells rug-hooked mats, but its big sellers are the rug-hooking kits. They come with all the materials and tools — including hooks and frames made by Austin himself and hand-dyed yarn from Molly — needed to complete a piece of work.
This past year, Molly Made has won two awards from the Craft Council of Newfoundland and Labrador, one for best new product and one for preserving a traditional craft.
“People give you a strange look at first,” said White as he hooked a rug at the council’s West Coast Craft Fair in Corner Brook Saturday.
“But once you start explaining what you’re doing and how to do it, they kind of inch into it.”
Recalling an old man bedridden with cancer once telling him how rug hooking helped get him through the ordeal, White said there is something therapeutic about being immersed in craft-making.
“It’s almost like meditation,” he said. “Once you get into it, your mind concentrates on it and nothing else.”
Check out Molly Made's website, they offer classes http://www.mollymade.ca/