This hooked-rug picture is one of the first things I see each morning on the wall above my desk. I have even learned to gauge the relative hour of the day depending on how clearly I can see its details in the early morning light when I first wake up. And at least sometimes, I reflect back on my grandmother, Edna Bell Harsha Foote, who created this artwork—and remember what it meant to her—and by extension, what it has come to mean to me at this point in my life.
This picture is built around the theme of a journey to church—and by implication to God. The church here is modeled after Durkeetown Baptist Church, as one approaches it driving across Durkeetown flats, with the hill country rising up behind it. My grandmother took some artistic liberties in composing this picture and placed a covered bridge in the picture (simply because she liked covered bridges) over what is in real life more of a stagnant wet area popularly known as “Dead Creek” (due to the lack of noticeable movement in the water). But the focus of the picture is on the white-frame church, a church where both sets of my grandparents attended while my parents were growing up. Like with every church steeple, this aspect of its architecture was originally designed to direct our attention upwards to God, and to remind us visually that there is more to life than the simple everyday life of a small farming community in upstate New York.
Hooked rugs (for the floor) or hooked rug pictures (to hang on a wall) are something of a lost art at this point—at least I personally am not aware of anyone making one of these in the last fifty years. It is made of countless little strips of wool fabric cut in very narrow strips and woven in and out on a burlap backing, creating a design, or in this case, a rural winter landscape. As a boy, I can remember while this was still a work in process, long before it was completed and finally given to me shortly after Helen and I were married in 1975 and setting up our first home. We have hung it on the wall of every home where we have lived over the years.
I can remember how this picture began as a large piece of light brown burlap with the general design pre-printed on it, almost like a giant paint-by-number set. One difference is that this burlap only had the broad outlines sketched in, leaving it up to my grandmother to interpret how to shade different colors of wool strips to create the desired effect for each section. I also remember my grandmother making some adjustments in the pre-printed design so that it would more accurately reflect what she wanted to convey of her own life story. Like many works of art, this picture was an idealized version of life as she wanted to remember it. For example, despite this being a rural, farming scene, there is not a single barn or animal to be seen anywhere in the entire picture—the realities of rural farm life, like she had known all her life, were not the message she wanted to communicate. She had other priorities.
It was a lengthy process for her to gather the wool for this picture. Back then most people saved worn-out or otherwise unneeded things for possible re-use in new and different ways. Thus, some brown wool fabric came from a worn-out pair of pants of my grandfather’s and bright red from an old wool shirt. Many colors in the finished picture had a special memory associated with them for her, which she could readily recite to an interested observer. To create colors and shades she didn’t have in her pile of wool remnants, I can remember how she dyed other pieces of wool in a large pot heated on her kitchen stove.
Each piece of wool was prepared by being run through a small hand-cranked cutter that clamped onto a table. As the machine was cranked and the fabric fed through the machine, a cutting cylinder—about an inch wide with perhaps 7 or 8 deep grooves in it with sharp edges—would cut the piece of wool fabric into narrow uniform strips of wool. The resulting strips of wool fabric were something like an eighth of an inch or so in width, depending on the specific cutting wheel inserted into the machine at the time.
My grandmother also used a frame, like a giant embroidery hoop—only it was rectangular in shape, maybe eighteen inches wide and four feet in length. The four sides of this frame were made with short stiff wire bristles to grip the burlap, as well as a mechanism to tighten it to maintain proper tension on the picture as it was being hooked. The frame also included a stand that could be adjusted to hold the framework holding the burlap at a comfortable angle and sitting height, enabling her to have ready access to both the top and the bottom of the burlap. She could then weave the wool strips first down one hole in the burlap and then up the next hole until either the color changed or the strip ran out. This process was repeated until every hole in the burlap was filled with color.
Another tool in the project was the “hook” itself—a small steel crochet hook perhaps four inches long with a wooden handle that was cylindrical in shape, but with a flat side on one side of the handle to help her know by feel the orientation of the open part of the hook. This hook was inserted initially into a hole in the burlap from the bottom of the burlap and used to catch a strip of wool and pull it through to the bottom side. Then the hook was removed and inserted back from the top side of the burlap into next hole to pull the wool back through to the top again. My grandmother repeated this process hole-by-hole throughout the entire project. Ideally the loops on the topside where the design would emerge were short, but uniform in height, creating a smooth, even finished surface, whereas those on the bottom side were woven tight against the burlap. As the hours went by, a picture slowly but surely emerged, reminding my grandmother of a life she had known in her earlier years.
Seven Lessons I Learned:
(1) A natural desire for beauty. We all have a natural desire for beauty within us. It’s part of how God has made us in His own image and likeness. I never would have considered my grandmother a particularly artsy person. By and large she never had time for craft projects. Most of her life she had been too busy as the wife of a dairy farmer. I can remember one story she told of how one winter early on in their marriage she had been so busy helping her husband, taking care of their home, and raising their growing family, she had never once left their farm that entire winter. Things quieted down for her as the years went by, and especially by the time I knew them in their later years. But still there were glimpses of a desire for beauty in how she grew gladiolas and other flowers each summer to bring beauty into their home. Other outlets for creativity took place in cooking, entertaining, and writing short articles that were occasionally printed in a farm magazine or other publication. But the first lesson that stands out to me is this natural desire for beauty and creativity God has placed in each of us that shows itself in different ways—especially when the time and opportunity are right.
(2) A desire for rootedness as we reflect back on our past. What originally attracted my grandmother to this design was that it reminded her of the church near where she had spent most of her married life: Durkeetown Baptist Church. The general arrangement of the road leading up to the church in the picture at least approximates real life in Durkeetown, a small community in the eastern section of the town of Fort Edward, but even here she took artistic liberty. None of the houses pictured even crudely match those in that section of farmland. I don’t know how many covered bridges there were in our area when my grandmother was growing up—at present there are none. But I know she was attracted to this design partly because it included a covered bridge. I can remember her telling me specifically that there never was a covered bridge over the only significant body of water on that section of road leading up to the Durkeetown Church—what was locally known as Dead Creek, so named because there was no obvious movement to the water. In actual life it was really more of a wet area or water hole, depending on the season, unlike the flowing stream in the finished picture. As a boy, I can remember ice skating on the frozen water of this creek. The one alteration in the design my grandmother made was that she deliberately accentuated the size of the hills in the background from the original design to remind her more clearly of the hills in the North Argyle area where she had grown up as a child. One advantage of artwork like this is that it can combine different values and images into a single work. But still there is the lesson that we are products of the people and places where we grew up—and for many of us, the past continues to have a certain attraction for us, as it did for her.
(3) The importance of a destination. The road is clearly the main theme of the scene even though there are no people, horses, or carriages pictured here. Life is going somewhere—and by implication, we should too. This picture has two other images that immediately catch our attention. The first is the covered bridge that occupies the front right center of the finished picture. But bridges are a means of going places—and never a destination in and of themselves. The other image that stands out is the church—the one significant destination point in this picture. And again, the inclusion of the church is a key reason why my grandmother chose this design. Church—and by extension, knowing God—had moved from the fringe of her life to an increasingly central place as she grew older.
(4) Life has different seasons. Hooking rugs takes time—in this case, literally hundreds of hours. It is a commitment to a quest for beauty as well as a desire to create something useful and memorable for one’s family. My grandmother never could have pursued something like this in her early years of marriage when she and my grandfather were both working exceedingly long hours to make a success of their registered Holstein dairy farm along with raising their three daughters. Projects like this hooked rug picture came only in her empty-nest years—and especially after they retired.
(5) God has created us for community. My grandmother got together—I think once a month—for a hooked rug “class” with a number of others who were pursuing this same hobby. Here she could receive guidance from someone more experienced as well as spend time with others for mutual encouragement. My sense is that there were also opportunities to exchange different colors of wool with one another and otherwise to help one another in completing their projects. I am not persuaded she would have finished this project apart from this mutual encouragement.
(6) None of us are sufficient in and of ourselves for all things. In my grandmother’s case, her arthritic hands finally caught up with her before she was able to finish this picture. She had completed a number of hooked rugs over the years—a large light gray oval rug with a red flower print design that used to adorn their living room floor and a number of smaller rectangular rugs, but to the best of my knowledge, this picture was her last project and the only one that was a landscape. She was able to complete perhaps two-thirds or three-quarters of the picture—including all the more significant and challenging parts of the picture. When she knew she could not complete the picture, she finally hired another woman to finish the background landscaping portion. God gives each of us our own set of gifts and opportunities to pursue them, but we are still dependent upon the help of others with their gifts and abilities.
(7) The importance of doing all that we can with whatever time and opportunities God gives us. While this picture may not be a perfect work of art in terms of artistic skill, it still accomplishes its goal of reminding us of how life is built around certain values and priorities. We need to take time to reflect on life and focus on what is truly important. May this same great God take each of our labors and use them for His honor and glory.
Why Use a Picture of the Past to Illustrate Spiritual Truths for Today?
One of the primary lessons I see in this landscape is our need for a sense of history to gain perspective in the midst of all the changes that are taking place in our world around us. Those of us living in the twenty-first century are not the first people ever to wrestle with questions of meaning and purpose in life. These same questions have confronted every other generation that has preceded us.
My earliest conscious recollections of life took place in the 1950’s. While there is something nostalgic for me about my childhood, I realize very clearly that the world as we know it today is very different from the one where I grew up. The same is true of this landscape—it pictures a different era. I am going to date the winter scene my grandmother captured in her hooked rug landscape as a nineteenth-century setting. She was born in 1896 toward the end of this period, and she and my grandfather began life together working on a dairy farm without electricity, mechanical refrigeration, automobiles, tractors, telephones, and much that we would consider essential to life today. But the same God who was at work in the world pictured in this winter scene is at work in our world today.
Many things change over the years; thankfully, many things remain the same. Despite all the advances in technology, the vast majority of core issues in life remain unchanged from one generation to another. Regardless of where we live or which generation we belong to, we all face essentially the same trials, temptations, and life struggles. The good news of the gospel remains unchanged. God still speaks into our world the same invitation to turn to Him and trust Him that He has given every generation. His promises are sure and trustworthy because they are based on His character. This is why we are told: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8, ESV). Our hope rests in knowing Him and allowing Him to have the proper place in our lives.
The LORD invites us to hope in Him in Jeremiah 6:16, “Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls…” May the same God who was at work in the past continue to show us His grace by revealing Himself to us in new and fresh ways in our present world.