I love camelids, which include llamas and camels, and we also have a lot of little goats. They’re so cute. At one time, I was breeding and showing llamas and doing a lot of shearing. I love textiles, and laughingly I’ve said that working with textiles and llamas is my agriculture.

I’ve become a farm artist using textiles, and the power of my own selection of textiles and being able to create what I want to create with fleece has been a strong interest of mine.

I create rugs, story rugs, about my family and these are shown at expositions and fairs.

For example, in this rug you can see a couple sitting on the show box, and my husband John and I met at a fair at the fairgrounds. Also pictured is my great Aunt Carol Andrews who was very active in the town of Spencer, along with my great grandmother Barbara Adams. They used to run the dairy desk at Spencer Fair, so that’s them pictured on the rug. My daughter is also pictured with the llama at the fairground showing her animal, and my husband is pictured with his wonderful Ayrshire calf.

The beginning story is quite dramatic, it’s the one that says 1938 Big E. My grandfather was a herdsman for Alta Crest Farm here in Spencer, and he was traveling with his Elder brother-in-law, who was the head herdsman. They had a show string that was travelling the country in a custom Pullman car with the herd from the eldest and the end of the season at the Big E, and they were there in 1938 in the brand newly constructed Mallory Arena, when a hurricane traveled up the Connecticut River Valley and hit them about high noon n the Fairgrounds, picking up the brand new huge seating for the races, which was packed with people, sending thousands in a panic as the seating moved like matchsticks. A huge gust of wind hit the building and blew all the glass out of the end wall of the building of the Mallory Arena and knocked it all over the cows and the people in the barn. The eye of the storm came, then another hit of bad wind, breaking more glass. A fireman came to the door of the building and he said the river’s coming up, get out while you can. He intended them to leave all the animals and some of the guys, but a few of the herdsmen decided they were going to try to save some of the animals, so they strung all the animals together in big long lines and walked them to a bridge over the river and it was high enough to avoid drowning in the water that was still rising. They spent two nights on the bridge praying they wouldn’t drown. They had to milk the cows, jammed together leg to leg, while waiting on the bridge because if they hadn’t the animals could have gotten sick and died. They strapped themselves to the railings of the bridge to sleep because there was nowhere else they could lay down on the ground with so many animals all around them.

When I started making this rug, I wanted to know more about this story and researched old newspaper articles, finding two articles that mentioned the heroic efforts of these men that saved some of the animals. So this isn’t just art… it’s history, and it’s fascinating. Even now, to this day, it’s important to have animal evacuations in emergency situations.

MY PROCESS
First thing I do is sketch out my rug design with colored pencils, or I paint a scene to get the color ideas and proportions that I want. I move that to the fabric with a cartoon sketch, then I go right from that to pulling loops - to get the idea I’ll lay out some of the colors. I do a lot of my own dying of the wool so I can get the colors that I want. I do this all on my own schedule, and I love it because it’s on my own schedule.

With farming, if you’re late it’s probably not going to happen… you have to do it on a time schedule and it’s very driven by that time schedule. But being able to do something that you love that’s not on a strict time schedule, that’s really nice for me. When you don’t have time constraints it goes from being stressful to actually a stress relief.

I learned how to create these rugs from my great, great grandmother, Edith Kenward Adams. She did rug hooking and I grew up seeing this. Her work was bought whenever she finished it and she was quite an artist. Then my grandmother on my Dad’s side did rug hooking, then my mother-in-law was a fabulous rug hooking artist. The funny thing is, I can’t remember any of them ever sitting and showing me how to rug hook, but I felt that somebody must have when I was a little child. Because the first time I ever sat down and said “I’m going to try to do this”, I almost felt like it was instinctive, I knew how to do it right away. They all followed patterns that were pre-printed, and I wanted to create something from beginning to end that’s all me. Even the dying of the wool is important to me because I can make the colors I want. So there is a lot of family influence in the type of rug hooking that I do.

HISTORY
In Colonial Amerca, most Americans didn’t have the ability to find something as luxurious as an imported rug. They didn’t have the money to buy imported tea, so they surely didn’t have the money to buy imported rugs. And this feels like a high-end Persian carpet. In particular, in the Massachusetts colony and along the coast of Maine, and across New England, this craft was popular with women. There were several shops that were run by men that were affordable for the common people of the time. Wool and cotton were the two main textiles of the time and they’d use every little scrap with rug hooking. You take little scraps of wool and you can cut them up and pull those little scraps from the back of the rug through to the front and leave them looped on the top and that’s what became the craft. I also belong to a Guild that loves to teach the craft.