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The first thing Jackie O'Connell tells me about rug hooking is that it's not something you can do without making a mess. "The lint gets all over you," she says, brushing errant bits of wool from herself on instinct. There's not much lint in evidence in the tidy Charlottetown apartment where she cares for her mother. There's plenty of evidence of productivity, though: a work in progress (a sheep design), baskets of wool in bundles and strips, a blanket box full of near-completed projects, and finished mats on the walls and floor.
Jackie has been hooking rugs for eighteen years now, learning from teachers, summer schools, and other rug hookers. She's a long-standing member of the Nova Scotia Rug Hooking Guild and meets regularly with its Island branch, Island Matters. Within the group, rug hookers share ideas and barter for patterns and wool. The sheep design that Jackie is currently giving wool back to is a design by group member Gail Snow. The lines of the pattern are markered onto linen, scattered with arrows as reminders of direction. The sheep is emerging from the middle, against a patchwork quilt backdrop with colours chosen "so the eye moves around the rug." "You want the eye to travel all the way around," Jackie says.
Jackie's craft also connects her to a grandmother and a great-grandmother who made rugs by necessity, to take the coldness out of the floors and to use up fabric scraps. Her mother didn't hook rugs; "I guess it skipped a generation," Jackie laughs. But in the community of rug hookers, she has regained access to tradition and has added contemporary twists. She talks about the old "hit or miss" rugs women made by hooking whatever piece of wool they happened to haul out of the basket, then shows me a hearthrug with a richly-coloured background with nothing hit or miss about it. Its background shows twelve different kinds of wool that were "married in the pot," or overdyed all together. The background's swirls and squiggles are mostly blue-green, but they somehow seem purple. "People tell me they can pick out my rugs because of purple. I always seem to use a pinch of purple," she says, and points out purple in the mats on her walls.
While Jackie is quick to remind that her rug-hooking is a hobby, it's a hobby she takes as seriously as any art. She works hard to make her designs and ideas her own, though she insists she's no designer ("I'm a great cut and paste girl," she claims). She believes it's important to sign and date her work, and she doesn't believe in underselling ("If you put in 300 hours of work, you can't ask for just $300," she says). She calls her rugs craft, but her rugs don't look out of place alongside the art in other media on her walls. Her most challenging rug, a finely-done pictorial of primroses, hangs left of lilies by Brenda Whiteway. A barnyard scene by Lindee Climo hangs kitty-corner to a fat dinner pig surrounded by fruits (a hard-bartered pattern based on an 17th-century New England rug). A line of Elaine Harrison's wary cats stand beside Jackie's rug of a snowman-sized cat with a cat-shaped snowman (part of a series she calls "cats for all seasons").
These days, Jackie completes two or three rugs a year. "I've always been a caregiver, so I haven't always had enough time for my rug-hooking," she says. Her hooking hand is slung in a brace since 1995 surgery for carpal tunnel syndrome-a condition that has slowed but not stopped her. "I sometimes freeze my hand with ice to hook-but I'll still do it," she admits. "I get lost in it, sometimes. The supper might need to get cooked or the housework might need to get done, and I might still sit with my rug for hours and not notice," she says. Hooking rugs brings a pinch of purple into Jackie O'Connell's apartment, a pinch she's happy to share with anyone who sees her whimsical, finely-crafted rugs.