Rag Rug Hooking

A few years ago I saw someone demonstrating rag rugging. I decided back then that I'd like to try. Well, on Saturday, at The National Trust Back-to-Backs in Birmingham, I got the opportunity to try at a two hour class in the front room of one of the houses. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of being in the setting and learning a traditional technique. For some totally unknown reason I decided to draw my poppy with three petals instead of four. Oh well, I'm more interested in learning a technique than in what I made.

Materials

The base material used was common 10 ounce hessian. This is the hessian used for upholstery.Cheap hessian is too loose, and other hessian can be too stiff. Originally, old sacks were used.

The red and black material is t-shirt fabric, cut into long thin strips (approximately 1.5-2 cm wide and as long as possible).

Tools

We used a very sturdy crochet hook like tool which has a sharpened tip for bodging through the hessian. Originally something like half a sharpened dolly peg would have been used. I don't know how that would work without having the hook to pull the fabric through the material.

Technique

Following a pattern drawn onto the hessian, you work on the right side of the design, pulling loops through from the reverse of the fabric. The reverse of the piece is tight, the front is loopy. On the back of my piece you can see there are the ends of the strips where I ran out and needed to use another piece, and also in some places where the fabric was cut a bit wide/rough in places.