The Cove

The Cove, 27″ x 64″, #3- to 5-cut wool on bleached linen. Designed by Brewster Home Fashions and hooked by The Cove Hookers, Ontario, 2025.

TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY VICKI CAMERON

Rug-hooking retreats are wonderful. Lots of work gets done in an atmosphere of camaraderie. Our group of 14 ladies has been going to the same small inn, The Cove, in Westport, Ontario, Cana-da, for seven years. We fill all 14 of its rooms. The staff provides us with a large hooking room awash in sunlight, featuring long tables and comfy swivel chairs. They pretend they don’t notice when we transform that clean, tidy area into a disaster zone that looks like the bottom end of a rummage sale—with 14 piles of wool, worms, hoops, and frames scattered about. We create a lot of multicolored wool dust and usually manage to track clipped wool bits up the stairs to the restaurant. The room overlooks the lake, frozen when we visit in March, and we watch deer walk across the ice and snowmobilers roar in for lunch at The Cove as we hook.

They bring us coffee and feed us well. In the mornings, they serve us a special, varied breakfast. There is a little sitting area between some of the rooms, which we use for a happy hour, serving our own wine. Dinner at the restaurant—a popular eatery in the rural area—is often accompanied by live music. We preorder meals from the menu so we are served as soon as we arrive at the table.

A Great Notion

Every year, someone would say, “We should make a rug for The Cove; they are so good to us.” Every year, we’d all smile and nod. Yes, good idea. We should do that. But where to start? Should we hook a rug, or something else? A wall hanging? Placemats? What color should it be, and what should it depict? We considered hooking the inn’s logo, but it was too complex to be rendered into a rug. Ideas were tossed around. Chins were stroked. Good idea, but…

The fireplace area before the new rug was added.

Naturally, nothing happened. Until 2024, when the owners of The Cove decided to retire and hand over the business to their son and daughter-in-law, Seamus Cowan and Megan Bomberry. Seamus had been the manager for several years and was an agent of the special treatment we had received. The young, new owners wanted to put their stamp on the place, so Megan decided to redecorate. We arrived for breakfast one morning during our 2024 retreat to find that the previously white breakfast room was now a dusty green color. At lunchtime, a paperhanger arrived and proceeded to paper the section of wall around the stone fireplace. And that is where a good idea became a great idea.

The wallpaper was a pseudo-William Morris design. Lightbulbs went on above several heads. We knew, we knew, what we needed to do: make a hearth rug to match the wallpaper. Someone had a quiet chat with the paper-hanger and acquired a sizeable wallpaper scrap. The next day, two wingback chairs and a mismatched rug had been placed in front of the fireplace. That made our plans official.

Since we didn’t have a tape measure and couldn’t ask the owner if we could borrow one, we bided our time.

A few weeks later, four of the ladies went for lunch at The Cove, and while the staff was busy elsewhere, they measured and decided on the appropriate size for the rug.

The four spearheading ladies took the sample wallpaper and photos of the paper on the walls to a printer.  He printed the design in the size we’d need it, 27 by 64 inches. The colors were off, but we had the wallpaper sample to guide us.

One of our ladies who does dyeing took on the monumental task of figuring out how many colors were needed and how much wool to dye. She produced 12 colors and dyed about 6 yards of wool. She then traced the design onto a length of Red Dot long enough to cover one iteration of the pattern. We had agreed that the zillions of small dots and tiny leaves would be omitted in the name of “too fussy.” She then transferred the pattern onto a long piece of bleached linen, a backing sturdy enough for the type of wear the rug might get in a public setting. She had to repeat the design three times, and by the third round, the Red Dot was saturated with Sharpie, and the design wasn’t coming through clearly. Some of the last few flowers had to be ad-libbed. She came up with a price to cover all the supplies, which we divided among us. By then, it was September—six months after we had decided to make the rug.

The original wallpaper sample (above) and the paper pattern with the wrong colors (below). 

The dyed wool used for the rug.

We knew there would be a confusion of lines when we started putting the rug on our gripper frames. We marked the design off in six-inch intervals and assigned each lengthwise interval a letter and each crosswise interval a number. This made it easier to look at a swirl of black lines, identify it as G3, and look on the paper pattern for that section.

A grid system helped the group keep track of what they were hooking.

We had verbal instructions. Sometimes, these were given to the next hooker in the lineup, sometimes not. Sometimes, the hooker followed the instructions, sometimes not. Since everyone had been hooking for 10 to 40 years, we left large amounts of discretion to each participant.

Putting Hook to Backing

The rug was passed from hand to hand, as everyone was expected to work on it. Since we live in a rural area, there was no opportunity to run across the street to pass the rug along. We each had the rug for a week or longer until an opportunity to hand it off became available.

Working on the rug from both ends.

The rug on a Cheticamp rug-hooking frame.

Each of the first few ladies hooked a large, green leaf and passed the rug on. Some started at one end, while some started at the other. Everyone ignored the middle. Most hooked a ring of blue background around their element to see how it would look. Some hooked high, some hooked low. Some hooked in straight lines, some hooked in the shape of the element.

We were working in a #5 cut—a fact written on the backing to avoid confusion—but sometimes we needed a #4 or even a #3. Worms cut to those sizes were filed in labeled zipper bags. Most of the worms were kept smooth in flower-stem sleeves. Each color was corralled in a fruit bag, especially the ones with a zipper tops.

The whipped edge of this piece was completed before the internal hooking.

The color interpretation went a little sideways in spots. One flower was orange at one end and rust when it repeated at the other end. Some ladies hooked several elements and left the background between them. One hooker made it her mission to fill in all the background.

It was a massive project. In retrospect, we needed twice as much time to do the actual hooking. We were very rushed at the end.

Because we took out many tiny flowers from the original design, we ended with some large expanses of background. Ladies improvised to add some small leaves back in, and it became apparent we would run out of background wool. Our dye volunteer hit the dye pots again and produced another half yard.

After we had completed the rug, we all realized we had forgotten about copyright. The changes we had made to the pattern were not significant, so we couldn’t call it “adapted.” Our tech-savvy member tracked down the wallpaper company and threw herself on her sword, begging forgiveness for having proceeded with the project without permission, and asking permission to use the pattern to make one rug that was not commissioned or requested, and for which no money had changed hands. They graciously agreed to let us make just this one rug.

What did we learn? When you land on the right idea, don’t second-guess it or overthink it. Just do it.

The initial organization, leading us to the point of being ready to hook, took six months. That left only six months for the hooking, and it was a very large piece. There was no sense of urgency at the beginning; there was at the end.

There will be attrition, mostly caused by geography. If you live a six-hour drive from the rug, you are not going to participate in the hooking.

Some of our colors were close in tone. It made a difference whether someone chose the colors for a particular element in daylight or artificial light. It didn’t help that the wallpaper colors were not the same as the pattern colors.

The rug became self-propelled. Every week when it landed back at our headquarters, it was promptly snapped up and taken to the next hooker’s frame.

The most stalwart of hookers carried us through the last three weeks, and the rug was done with moments to spare. The whipped edge was completed before the rug was. There was a large amount of stress being bandied about.

The rug in its proper place.

Delivery

During this year’s retreat, we asked the hotel owner and front-of-house manager if they could come downstairs to our lair for a few minutes. They did. We presented them with the rug with a minimum of speeches, a maximum of smiles, and a couple of surreptitious tears.

The owner and manager were totally surprised and delighted to receive the rug, grinning from ear to ear. Any angst we had experienced melted away in a flurry of hugs.

Was it worth it? Yes. Would we do it again? Nope.  Mostly because we are not moving our retreat to any other inn.