In a Little Cabin in the Woods: Alberta Haslett’s Hooking Heaven

Sugaring Off, 27″ x 36″, recycled clothing. Designed and hooked by Alberta Haslett, New Brunswick, Canada, 1995.

STORY BY SANDY ORAVEC/PHOTOGRAPHY BY THE ARTIST

Alberta Haslett lives New Brunswick, Canada, in a cozy cabin in the woods that she built, in large measure, herself.

“I have one big bedroom and one big main room, and I have my fireplace in the room. And off on the other end is my little dining room and kitchen. I burn wood, so I have the woodstove going, and it’s very nice. It’s lovely in the winter.”

If you think this sounds like a rug hooker’s dream retreat, you wouldn’t be far wrong. It’s a busy life, filled with care of extensive gardens much of the year. But evenings when she can, and always during the winter, you’ll find Alberta hooking rugs. She averages one rug a winter, and last winter’s rug marked the end of an era for her.

“I have macular degeneration, so my eyesight is going quite fast. I can’t see the shading anymore,” and relying on others doesn’t seem like the best option. “Somebody else’s idea of what is pink and what isn’t may not be the same as mine. If I say to a person, ‘Is that a dark pink or a light pink?’, they might say, ‘Oh, it’s a medium!’”

But she’s not giving up rug hooking—no, indeed. 

“I think what I’m going to do is go toward the primitives. That way I can see what I’m doing; it’s not detailed. Do you know what I mean? You don’t have to do any shading with primitives, you can just do the poor little duck or toad or whatever you want to do. Either I’ll go to the primitives or make a hit-or-miss rug. I’ve got so much material—it’s all cut. It’s all different sizes, but it’s always in the same general area: It’ll either be a #3 or a #5 or a #6. I’ve got enough to make another two rugs—just bags and bags of little pieces of strings.”

Alberta considers that she came to rug hooking late in life; she dates her early rugs from the mid-1990s. Her first rug was lost in a fire in an earlier cabin on the property. She still regrets that she wasn’t taking pictures of her rugs at the time.

Another early rug, Sugaring Off, is her favorite. 

“Sugaring Off was done completely with rags. No wool. It was really just rags. And I really enjoy working with rags. Anything. There’s a lot of my father’s old flannel shirts in that. The smoke in that rug was a bandana I had that was different shades of gray. I just kept turning it until it just made a circle, and then I hooked it in. I really do enjoy working with the rags. I like cutting them. I like seeing what they do. But now it’s just easier for me to work with the wool. So the rugs I’ve done in the last five or six years have all been wool—with maybe a bit of cotton in between.”

She buys her wool from Sandy Dunning, whose River Gallery in Glenwood, New Brunswick, is a source of local supplies, and also orders patterns and wool from W. Cushing & Company, Kennebunkport, Maine. “They are absolute treasures. I can call down to Jillian and tell her what I need, or what I think I need, and she will send it up. And I have never had a piece that did not work out right. They’re perfect like that.”

Alberta hooks some purchased patterns, mostly Pearl McGown and Joan Moshimer designs, but her inspiration also comes from greeting cards and photos. Sugaring Off, for example, was inspired by a card she had enlarged at a local copy shop (in the days when it could only enlarge in black-and-white), transferred to red-dot fabric, then traced on the burlap backing she uses for all of her rugs.

The inspiration for her latest rug, a pair of skaters—she calls them “the twins”—came from a card sent by her closest rug hooking friend and adviser, Judith Hill, in Hampton, New Brunswick. “As soon as I saw it, I thought, ‘Oh, what a pretty rug!’” It’s her first rug in which faces were a significant element.

“I sat here, I’m telling you, for a whole week and I did those faces. I’d do two little stitches, and then I’d think, ‘Oh, that’s not right. I’ll put the other one up there.’ I was so taken with those faces. I had never, ever done them, and I was scared to death to even try. I kept looking at it and looking at it and looking at it, and finally one morning I just decided, ‘I’m going to try it, and if it doesn’t work out, well, I won’t do it.’

“I knew I had to start the faces first. I was doing the shading in the face, and I couldn’t see well. So I said, ‘You’ve got to do the faces. Even if you never do the rug, do the faces right now.’ So when the sun was shining in the window, I took the rug and sat here and did the two faces. I certainly did not know how to do them, but when I got them done . . . little girl is cranky; oh, she’s a cranky thing. But the little boy is a sweetheart.”

Alberta’s mother and grandmother hooked rugs, so she had an early introduction to the basics, but she has learned mostly on her own. She credits Judy Hill for what she knows about technique.  She also counts on Judy as a sounding board for works-in-progress. For instance, on that Pond Hockey rug, she asked for advice. As she began tackling the rest of the rug, but she wasn’t happy with it.

“I did a pretty good job on the water. Well, I thought, I’ll do the same thing with the boy and the girl. It didn’t turn out. I took it over to Judy, and we looked at it and looked at it, and she said, ‘It’s too busy, Alberta; you’ve lost your little boy and girl.’ If I go over and ask Judy, she will tell me the truth.” 

“I had put in too much color, and I should have left it white. But I didn’t have white at the time, and I thought that blue-y color in Pond Hockey would work. But once I put it in, it didn’t work. So, my winter project was to take out the blue and put in all white. I think it’s going to be lovely when it’s done.”

Some of Alberta’s rugs are with her three daughters, but about 15 of them are in plastic bags under her bed. “I can’t put them down on the floor, because I have a dog. And as soon as you put one of those rugs on the floor, the dogs and cats are right on top of it.”

Two of her daughters have picked up rug hooking, so far in a more casual way, and she’s happy to see it.

“It’s a very relaxing hobby, and if it doesn’t turn out right, it’s only you who’s going to see it. I think people are scared when they look at rugs because they think it takes a terrific amount of artistic talent. It doesn’t take actually any kind of talent; all you’ve got to do is put your hook down there and put up the little piece of material. When they do that, and they see they can do something with those little loops . . . I think that’s terrific.”