User:Angela Jorge/sandbox

Deanne Fitzpatrick

So many times I have heard people say that rug hooking changed them. As they started rug hooking they began to see the world differently, started noticing beauty around them. Hooking rugs allowed them to express themselves, to use their time wisely and creatively, and opened up a whole new community of people to them.

Deanne grew up in Freshwater, Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, the youngest of seven children. Her mother and both of her grandmothers hooked rugs as a past time, and as a chore of necessity. By the time Deanne was born both her grandmothers had died and her mother had long since abandoned rug hooking as a chore of poverty. In Newfoundland in the late sixties and early seventies, very few people were hooking, though there was still a scattered mat hanging about people’s back doors.

For the most part it was out with the old and in with the new. Deanne can still see Rita Murphy, her friend’s mother, sitting in her back room, hooking away on her mats. Her floors were a carpet of many multicoloured hooked rugs. At the time it seemed an old fashioned thing. Little did she know that she would spend years doing exactly the same as she learned to hook rugs because she wanted them for an old farmhouse where she had settled. It began as a purely practical craft and later turned into an art.

Though she did not know how to hook, it was something she had always been familiar with. As a teenager, sheI began seeing rugs for what they were. She marvelled that a woman’s hand had pulled up every loop in a rug that lay on the floor of her sister’s farmhouse. In her mid twenties, she went to an annual meeting of The Rug Hooking Guild of Nova Scotia, where Marion Kennedy taught her the basics, how to cut your wool, and how to pull up a loop, then she told here to get to it. As soon as she started hooking rugs she knew it was for her.

It was a simple technique, where she could see progress. She finished her first little stamped pattern within a week and so it began. For Deanne, Marion was the right teacher. She gave her the supplies, showed her the basic stitch, and said, “Now do it, finish the rug.” Her simple style of teaching made a huge difference in Deanne's learning. She did not try to direct, but let her learn as she hooked. She learned that I could tell stories, and express myself through rug hooking. This is what really got her involved with it. Each time she makes a rug, she creates a new design. In many of her pieces she tells stories or express ideas about the world. In her work the thing that matters most is making great rugs. She hooks nearly every day. She cannot stop herself, she likes the feel of wool slipping through her fingers.

She have learned that craft and handmade can totally change the way you view the world. She believes that she has helped as many people by teaching them how to hook rugs and embrace their own creativity, as she would have as a therapist, a career she began in my twenties. Her style of rug hooking, with its meditative qualities, and its freedom from rules, adds beauty to our world and is therapeutic on its own. It is joyful, powerful and transformative. It is not about being perfect, it is about creating beauty everyday.

In addition to hooking rugs, she loves to write. She has written seven books about rug hooking and creativity and is currently working on another featuring daily meditation for rug hookers.

She loves land, especially fields. She finds that a bunch of scrub and brush are beautiful things. It changes all day long with the light and she loves to depict this in her work.

She wants to hang onto as simple a life as she possibly can, but she does not find that easy because there are so many charms that are like a ruby to a crow. But it is her goal to live simply, and make hooked rugs that are unmistakably art.