Gendered mat designs

Unlike today, during the 1920s and 1930s, some children’s mat designs were also intended for either girls or boys. Sunbonnet Sue, butterflies, kittens and roses were deemed appropriate for girls while flying ducks, ships and deer tended to be subjects associated with boys. Sometimes there were images associated with childhood stories like Little Red Riding Hood or The Three Bears that were suitable for either gender.

Small scale designers, big influence

In the early 1900’s, Pegi Nicol MacLeod (1904-1949), teacher, war artist, activist, began designing mats to sell at Madge Smith’s shop in Fredericton. From New York, where she and her husband and daughter lived most of the time, she would send Maggie, as she called her, patterns to have hooked by other New Brunswick women, among them a Mrs. White, often creating fiddlehead designs, a key symbol of NB as she called them.

Grace Helen Mowat, known throughout the county and province for her cottage industry, Cottage Craft , started off as a small-scale designer. Her designs would set the stage for all the mat hookers working for her, as they embarked on their own design adventures with her support.

Currently, because of the increased interest in mat hooking, more resources on hooking are becoming available worldwide. In the Maritimes there are many artisan shops developing and producing their own designs.

The designer of a mat may be its hooker, a friend or a commercial designer. However, designs are sometimes influenced by a curator, influencer or member of the family. In a home where the hooker creates a piece that ties to her everyday life, family members, already participating in the mat’s making by taking clothing apart, cutting strips and perhaps helping with the dyeing and hooking process, often gave their input. The mat became a family affair.

Influencers like Grace Helen Mowat and Marie-Louise Allard Blanchard guided their designers in the creation of their mats. So did Miss Luther through her subtle palette and local interest designs in her work for the Grenfell Mission of Newfoundland and Labrador. Yvonne Dupuis and Francis Coutellier sometimes worked together choosing colours and fabrics for his mats. And artist Lilian Burke was brought to Cheticamp to help talented hookers choose colours that would be more appealing to tourists or buyers in the United States. Larry Dubord, antiques dealer and mat importer for the Gagetown Hookers worked with Raymond and Lydia Scott on the choice of materials to make their mats. The tasks of hooking and designing in all their aspects often involve more than one perspective. Dr Elizabeth McLeod, professor of the Mount Allison Applied Arts program, guided her students in design and colour and the local women who hooked these designs.

For example, hearth mats were often a semi-circle with a design only meant to be viewed from in front of the fireplace. Others were meant to be seen from all sides, and pictorials or story mats were often seen from one side, although some very creative borders shatter that rule.

The design should be appealing to the hooker, to keep them interested. Mat hooking is a slow and meditative art, the process should be enjoyable. Choosing a nice pattern, enjoyable fabrics and colours and making sure one is comfortable are essential. As Frost liked to say, “working on a dull mat is tedious”.

Hooks

The mat hooker needs very few, yet quintessential tools, to create her mats. Firstly, the hook. Early accounts explain that hooks were derived from the hooks sailors used for rope-work, a marlinspike tool, and consisted of a nail stuck into a handle of some sort – an old utensil handle, a worked bone, or more often wood. The nail was then filed to a soft point and a notch was put in it to grasp the fabric and pull it up in a loop. This hook was the main tool for most hookers for decades. These tools were often made by the man of the house or by the local blacksmith, yet another way men contributed to mat hooking’s history.

In 1886, Ebenezer Ross of Toledo, Ohio invented an automatic punch hook to increase the speed at which a mat could be created. Like a manual hand-mixer with a hook at the end, the tool could be used from the back of the mat to punch the wool material through the design. Garrett’s Bluenose hook was another automatic handheld punch hook. Available via catalogue, both inventors boosted their mat pattern sales through the hook and their hook sales through their mat designs.

Punch hooking is a similar technique to hooking which yields the same type of mat once finished. Today, the Oxford punch needle is the most popular design amongst hookers. Available with short or long shanks for short or high loops and in various diameters to accommodate different yarn sizes and even fabric strips, it helps the maker create a very even pile height. The key to a punch hooked mat: mirroring the design before transferring it to what will be the back of the mat. When Doreen Wright was going through the patterns she had purchased from Garrett , she and her buyers noticed some traditional patterns were backwards. This can be explained by the fact that some patterns were made for punch hooking and others for mat hooking.

Today, New Brunswick mat hookers have access to beautifully crafted hooks made by local wood turners, mostly men, who are sometimes guided by their spouse to make comfortable and usable hooks. The mat maker can choose between very short to pencil-length handles, straight or angled hook ends, chunky or thin handles, local or exotic wood or even resin handles. Hookers are also very ingenious, and they know what they like. Some will choose a crochet hook and craft a comfortable handle out of sculpting clay or even wrap a premade handle with duct tape to fit their needs. Antique hooks are still available at flea markets but are becoming quite scarce.

Over the decades, more frame designs became available. The Cheticamp-type frame is a floor frame. Two sets of legs hold two rollers that can be adjusted to make the backing taut. If the mat is longer than the frame, the hooker can start hooking at the bottom, move the rollers up, and continue hooking the mat one section at a time. This type of frame is still widely used and available.

The floor frame can also be affixed to a pedestal mounted like some embroidery hoops. This setup works well with a solid round or oval embroidery hoop as well as with a rectangular mat hooking frame. They can be used with push pins holding the backing onto the frame, carpet strips or gripper strips. Some more elaborate designs boast a tightening mechanism, making the task of taking the mat on and off the frame much easier. Smaller frames are still often used to make larger mats. Instead of rolling the mat up along the rollers of a floor frame, the mat can be moved on and off the gripper strips and repositioned for working on a different section. Some even offer swivel tops so the hooker can adjust the angle of the frame to suit her more comfortably. Some frames have a saddle-type seat the hooker must straddle while hooking to keep the frame still and at the right height. Finally, travel frames are also available, usually made light and compact, they are easy to take along to hook-ins or on trips.

The type of frame does not matter as long as the hooker is comfortable. Four pieces of wood attached together and held on the lap or even loose backing for some is all they need. Regardless of the chosen frame, ergonomics must be taken into consideration, and the hooker will choose a frame that suits her or him.

Cutting Tools

In the early days of mat hooking, most women would have used scissors to cut their material into strips the right width. Over time, new inventions made cutting an easier and quicker task. Harry Fraser of the M. Harry Fraser Company in Connecticut, founded in 1947, had extensive experience with small machinery and took a friend’s challenge to heart; he decided to make a cutting machine for mat hooking. Small rotary cutting heads made to cut multiple strips of fabric at once are turned with a handle, much like a manual pasta maker would do for fettuccini. The Fraser Company now offers more than one model and other companies like Bee Line Townsend of Iowa also offer cutters. The Bolivar Fabric Cutter designed (1993) and manufactured in Nova Scotia are highly prized.

Another alternative to scissors is the rotary cutter. Originally made for quilting, it is a smaller handheld tool with a circular blade. To cut the strips, it is run over the fabric, usually along a ruler and on a self-healing mat.

Whichever cutting tool is employed, the hooker should choose a width that fits the backing, the thickness of the material used, the design and the desired effects. Smaller cuts of fabric or yarns are often used for fine shading and wider cuts of fabric or thicker yarns for texture.

Tools and Blacksmiths

It was common for men, women and children to work on crafts during long winter evenings. Very often, it was men who made the tools needed to create the mats. They fashioned hooks by bending and hammering a nail or cutting a notch into its shaft then inserting it into a homemade handle, usually a whittled piece of wood. Sometimes they might even transform an old knife into a hook.

In the early days, a hooking frame was made by attaching four pieces of wood together with clamps; essentially, a smaller version of the quilting frame. Sets of four clamps were needed and often they were made by local blacksmiths. As time went on, many different frames were designed, making them adjustable or able to accommodate larger mats. It was likely men who assembled the frames, a task associated with then typical gendered roles; women did the housework and lighter farm work while men worked outdoors and built what was needed.

Backing

Early mat hookers might use homespun linen or canvas, though the tighter weave would have made it hard to pull rag strips through it. Traditionally, the most common backing has been burlap (also known as hessian), a woven textile made of jute. Burlap, originally produced in India, was exported in massive quantities to the West beginning in the late 1700s. Once burlap was introduced and widely available in North America, around 1850, hookers had a material they could afford and work with happily. The more modest households would have had access to burlap through the bags or sacks used to store and transport livestock feed or even potato bags. This form of burlap was always available, especially so during the First World War, Depression and Second World War, when other materials were scarce or expensive. In fact, resourcefulness came to the rescue again and a parallel can be made between feed bags for hooking, such as Gabrielle Savoie-Robichaud used, and printed cotton flour and sugar bags for quilting. Many stories are told of woman and children ripping out the seams of the burlap sack and using the non-printed side to transfer a mat pattern. This explains why many mats are roughly the same size; they are the dimensions of a standard feed bag.

Jute also played a role as a hooking material, since Canadian makers would unravel the burlap sack strand by strand, sometimes dye them and then hook them into a mat.

Though linen textile was available in New Brunswick and Canada, it only became a popular backing much later, when monk’s cloth, a more loosely woven version, became available. Many hookers now choose it or cotton monk’s cloth, either for durability or because they don’t produce as much dust as the traditional burlap, but the burlap hasn’t lost its status as the workhorse of mat backing. Many commercial patterns are still printed on burlap. Other backings include rug warp, a heavier cotton cloth with less stretch than monk’s cloth, often used for punch hooking.

Fibre

At first, hooking materials in New Brunswick were mostly recycled or spun at home, a very labour-intensive process. Those who had them would shear their sheep, wash the raw wool and card it with hand cards or comb it for worsted yarn (made using the long, smooth parallel fibres) and then spin it on their spinning wheel, or send the raw wool to woolen mills to do one or more of those steps. They then dyed the yarn with natural dyes prepared at home, or after the 1850s, with commercially made powdered dyes, among them Diamond Dyes by Wells, Richardson & Co., available through catalogues across the country.

Acadians often used “défesures”, unravelled sweaters that were cut up and re-carded (sometimes new wool was added for strength) to make new yarn. This technique was widespread, and many elders recall the process involved.

But one technique often makes a Canadian mat stand out: the use of mixed, recycled clothing and blankets in a mat. Until fairly recently, no one threw anything away, including used clothing. Often, clothing that was beyond repair or use was kept, stitches unpicked and then cut into strips ready for dyeing and hooking.

More affluent households could buy pre-spun yarn or fibre ready to spin and dye them to their liking at home. Many communities in the province boasted a woolen mill which supplied them with yarn. Those mills have all closed except for Briggs & Little Woolen Mills Ltd. in Harvey, NB. On neighbouring Prince Edward Island more mills have survived, and newer, small operations have started up in recent years. Such is also the case in New Brunswick with Legacy Lane Fibre Mill of Sussex, NB, a custom fibre processing facility that specializes in alpaca and merino mixes.

In New Brunswick, the use of défesures has all but disappeared, but old clothing is still being gathered in homes or from thrift stores far and wide to be turned into mats.

On the other end of the spectrum, the beginner or expert hooker looking for an easy project can purchase mat hooking kits. Many mat designers offer a printed or drawn pattern on burlap or linen, a colour picture of the result, and the necessary wool already cut. Some kits even include a small hook.

Depending on the intended purpose of the mat, materials used have changed over the decades. If a hooker wants to make a mat for the floor, she must choose harder-wearing materials, such as wool, cotton and some synthetic fibres. Whereas if the mat is intended for a decorative purpose or to be hung on a wall, the hooker can choose just about anything she wants and hook it into the mat – sari silk, rayon, wire, lace – the sky’s the limit.

Modern mat hookers creating pieces to be mounted on walls, exhibited as sculpture or integrated in multimedia or interdisciplinary arts  have been using unorthodox and original materials, from metal mesh to synthetic fibres, from copper wire to paint and even paper to rusted metal. Anything goes in an artistic creation and mat hooking is an expressive medium limited only by the range of people’s imagination.

Natural and Synthetic

In Canada and the world over, natural dyes made from soil, plants, roots, bark and insects – yielding a full range of colours – have been used since time immemorial. Not all natural dyes are created equal and over the centuries different mordants have been used to ensure colourfastness. There has been much study and testing of plants and other organic matter for effectiveness. In the last 20 years however, most natural dyers have been using only safe mordants to help the colour adhere to the fibre; alum and iron, two that naturally occur in our soils and water, as well as some vegetable mordants such as tannins.

Women passed down natural dye recipes from one generation down to another in New Brunswick, and so it was common knowledge that the sticky outer layer of the walnut husk gave a gorgeous blackish brown; goldenrod flowers and onion skins gave various yellows; and greens could be found in many plants when modified with iron. Various mushrooms and lichen also offer a wide range of colours, though many dyers mention the importance of considering the impact of gathering lichen on its environment before doing so. Early mats had colour schemes limited to the dyes found locally in their surroundings, to which would be added the rare, purchased fabric saved from an old garment. Needless to say, after the First and Second World Wars, the olive-green wool cloth from army uniforms and the darker hues of naval uniforms found their way into many mats.

Once powdered and synthetic dyes became available, most households chose this method since it was quicker and less labour intensive; the dye didn’t have to be extracted or refined before starting the dyeing process. However, some mordants used to set commercial, and even some natural dyes, would be questionable by today’s health and safety standards. These included copper sulfate, sulfuric acid and chrome. But synthetic dyes could be ordered by mail and offered many hues not previously available in natural dyes, a characteristic that explains their popularity. Indigo, derived from plants, was available for quite some time after synthetic or aniline dyes came to market, but by the 1920s was replaced by a synthetic version. Today many dyers use safe acid dyes or natural dyes.

Modern Day Options

Today, the modern mat hooker has access to all these options. More than one company still produces commercial synthetic dyes, like Majic Carpet Dyes and W. Cushing and Co. (founded in 1879). And some experts have specialized in dye recipes and techniques for mat hookers, such as The Wooly Mason Jar in Moncton, NB. Various shops and small businesses sell already-dyed wool cloth and yarn in a full range of colours along with patterns and tools, which they offer at their physical or online shops or at kiosks during hook-ins and fibre festivals.

Dyeing Processes

The dyeing process between natural dyes and aniline dyes differs quite a bit.

Most natural dye stuff can be heated from 60 minutes (leaves and flowers) to several hours (roots, nuts, stalks and bark) to extract the dye. The dye stuff can soak in the water for more time to extract more colour, or it can be strained right away. The dye stuff is either kept for a second, lighter extraction or discarded into a compost pile. As natural dye stuff is only plant material, almost all the processed material can be reused. Once fibre has been set with the mordant (alum for brighter colours and iron for deeper, earthier ones), it can be rinsed and immersed in the dye bath to almost simmer. If the water’s pH is changed to obtain different hues, it is easy to neutralize it with either vinegar or baking soda.

When it comes to acid dyes, the process is straightforward, but some have perfected it to the point of making easy to follow recipes for specific hues and small batch dyeing like Moncton’s Lucy Richard’s The Wooly Mason Jar Color Wheel Dyeing technique. The wool can be dyed right after washing and the dyes are set with an acid, usually vinegar or citric acid. Today, hookers have access to information and products of all kinds and can very easily produce the colours they want for their mats. Dyeing is now often part of the design process. Recipe books on both natural dyes and acid dyes are available, small companies and individuals specializing in acid dye recipes offer in-person and online courses and the sharing attitude that has always been associated with mat hooking persists.

Though aniline dyes came to the Canadian market in the 1850s, thus reducing the use of natural dyes in most homes, the craft and knowledge has seen a resurgence in the last decade. In fact, community groups and small businesses are devoted to it. The Cocagne Country Colours group is relearning and teaching how to grow natural dye plants and extract and dye with them. And artists like Tzigane Caddell are also perfecting the art and science of indigo dyeing, where chemistry and natural processes play a large role.

The hooker will usually start by hooking the outlines of the design elements, filling them in and then the background. Backgrounds have historically been hooked in straight lines, but different options offer varying effects, even if using only a single colour and fibre. One can follow the design elements’ outlines over and over creating a radiating effect, or draw swirls or other shapes in the background and hook them in different directions. Sometimes, the background can be “the making” of a piece, adding movement, colour and contrast to the work, or focusing the attention on the main elements of the design.

Punch Hooking

Punch hooking also creates a similar effect but is made using a needle with a shaft and punching the yarn or fabric from the reverse side of the backing to the front.

Clipping and Sculpting

Scottish women and Acadian women brought the raised method of mat hooking to the new world. There are various names for the raised technique; Riz Rose, Hoven-up, Hoved, Sculpted, etc. The method is the same whether the maker is using yarn or cut wool flannel. The loops in the design, usually flowers, fruit or scrolls, are raised progressively higher from the edge of the motif to the center, highlighting the motif. The loops are all cut and then sculpted to form a high pile in a three-dimensional manner, sometimes as high as three inches. Our American cousins started using the same technique, calling it Waldoboro, named after a village in Maine.