Landscape Rug Hooking: A Painterly Approach to Creating the Landscapes You Love

Designer Fitzpatrick (Meditations for Makers) offers a charming guide to creating landscape-inspired hooked rugs. Rug hooking, in which strips of yarn or fabric are pulled through a base material like burlap or linen, can be used to make wall hangings or floor rugs. Fitzpatrick demonstrates how to find inspiration in nature, encouraging readers to take photos or mental notes of landscapes when on walks and draw them on a sketch pad. To give the design a sense of depth, the image should have a foreground (like bushes or a house), a middle ground (like a field), and a background (like trees or mountains). Then, crafters can transfer their design onto their preferred rug backing using pencil or a marker, outline each object in the landscape using a dark-colored yarn, and fill in the designs with the colors of their choice. Fitzpatrick mostly covers design techniques, but she includes basic instructions for rug hooking at the end, showing beginners how to hold their hook and complete stitches. Color photographs of her beautiful finished pieces—from a rustic barn in a field of flowers to rugged cliffs along a bay—appear throughout. Crafters will be inspired. (Nov.)