Wanderlust and Wool: The Rugs of Sharon Smith

Aboriginal, 33″ x 37″, #8-cut wool on linen. Designed and hooked by Sharon A. Smith, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 2010. Copyright Off the Hook Wool Rugs, 2010.

What do a Russian village, a grouping of Moroccan pots, and a woman riding a chicken have in common? All these images have been hooked into rugs by world traveler, Sharon Smith. In Australia, Sharon became enamored with aboriginal artwork and bought fabric with their symbols and designs. From these images, she made a large square rug, capturing the energy of the outback with hand-dyed wool.

Rug hooker and designer Sharon Smith always wanted to travel to faraway lands. Born and raised on a farm near Jordan, Minnesota, she collected stamps as a child and fell in love with the foreign countries they revealed to her.

“I was curious about worlds with names like Fuji and fascinated with stamps that had exotic pictures of tropical flowers, weird animals. . . . This and reading books started me on a lifelong passion for really immersing myself in other cultures,” she said.

Now in her early sixties, Sharon has traveled to some 80 countries in the past 30 years. Surprisingly, Europe ended up being one of her last destinations. She was first drawn to places with more unusual cultures: Egypt, Peru, Guatemala, Russia.

To earn a living and support her travels, Sharon worked as a freelance graphic designer until computers took over this field. Then she made a drastic career change and became a clinical psychologist. She worked at the University of Minnesota with people of many different nationalities. Most recently, working for the Department of Defense, she was sent to work in Germany, South Korea, and Italy.

When Sharon visits these different countries, she doesn’t just sightsee. She scours the outlying villages and markets, looking for folk art and crafts—sometimes textiles or ceramics or masks, sometimes she takes photographs of designs from buildings or carpets—and uses them as inspiration for her rugs.

Many of these crafts come home with her. Her home is filled with souvenirs from around the world—Indian baskets and Guatemalan weavings, Middle Eastern robes and Turkish necklaces, Russian dolls and Polish ceramics. Sharon is drawn to the charming, the colorful, and the quirky.

Even the walls of her house are painted in rich colors: the kitchen a deep scarlet, a study in ripe pumpkin, chartreuse in the dining room. These exotic colors both enliven her living space and set off her collections of travel memorabilia beautifully.

As a young girl, Sharon always did handwork, first embroidery and later quilting. In the 1990s, she started knitting and doing punch needle, often creating her own designs. In 2008 she published a book called Punchneedle on a Grand Scale. She moved on to hooking rugs after she was introduced to it at a hook-in in Stillwater, Minnesota.

“For me it was always the tactile contact with cotton embroidery floss, fabrics, wools, and all the implements used in handwork that feels important and creative,” she said.

She has only been hooking for a little over two years but already has hooked over 35 rugs and counting, many of them large, some up to 50″ x 70″. All of them have been her own designs.

“I would like to hook someone else’s pattern but then I come up with another idea for a rug and I feel compelled to start my own rug,” she said. I have even purchased one pattern from another designer. Perhaps some day.”

Asked how she knows when she’s inspired enough to do a rug from some image, she explains that she just keeps thinking about it: “Like the markets in Marrakesh, the colors of the vases and vessels. They kept running through my mind. Or the Russian domes . . . the onion domes elipses which typify that Russian style. What I’m really trying to capture is the atmosphere of a place or a piece.”

Some of her other international designs include Moroccan vessels, a Russian village surrounded by the Cyrillic alphabet, and Mexican masks. But she doesn’t just create pieces inspired by foreign crafts.

While Sharon continues to be very influenced by her travels, she also has a great love of nature and has done rugs of grasshoppers and dragonflies. One of her most popular designs is a field of poppies. Another design is geraniums growing out of a Folgers can. Again, inspired by something she has seen on her travels—this one very close to home.

“You don’t have to travel to other countries to be inspired. I love seeing women doing rugs of their dogs, their flower gardens. All you have to do is draw something that resembles what you love; it doesn’t have to be perfect. Think of the charm of a child’s drawing.”

Because of her work as a graphic designer, she has a clear vision of what she wants a rug to become and how the colors will work together. This clarity gives her rugs a very distinctive look—a sometimes surprising color palette—and new ways to do backgrounds that are unique to her.

“I adore slipping that first hook into a rug. Everything else in the world disappears and I’m totally focused on the color, the shape, and if the fabric is working for the design as I planned. What’s important is that it is becoming what I imagined it would be. . . . I often try many, many, many wools before I get the effect I want. Other times, the first try is a winner.”

Sharon recently moved to California to be closer to her father and sister. What influence this move will have on her rugs will be fun to see—possibly surfboards, redwoods, or vineyards. Her rugs become the visual memories of her trips throughout the world. She travels with a passport and her imagination. And often a hook.

Sharon has her own website: offthehookwoolrugs.com, and is also featured on several other rug hooking websites. She will be offering workshops in her new home in California.