ISSN 2207-001X 11th December 2025
The Annual International Rug Hooking Day is held on the 4th December. Usually Aussie rugmakers’ greetings show up first on social media as we see the new day before those in Europe and the Americas. This year Wink Lindsay from Western Australia was right on time, sharing greetings and an image of her latest design ‘Grounded’ at 6am on the 5th of December, Australian Western Standard Time, which would have been 6pm on 4th December on the East Coast of the USA & Canada, the home of so many large groups of rug hookers.
Wink says, “This wonderful craft helps me stay ‘Grounded’ and the beautiful Australian Bushland is a constant inspiration.”
Walks in the Jarrah Forest near her home inspired this work, hand hooked using up-cycled fabrics and yarn on Hessian backing. I particularly like the way Wink has included her footprints, as in life, to blend into, not disturb the leaf litter design.
The Wanneroo Rugmakers missed celebrating International Rug Hooking Day this year – busy with their entries for the Wanneroo Agricultural Show, held the last weekend of November. Think “State Fair” if you’re reading this in the USA. Here are some of the winning entries.
“Waratah” by Anna Rodriguez. This piece took 1st Place in the rug hooking category and Best Exhibit in Textile Craft. It was designed in 2019 by Leslie, a dearly missed group member who passed away on 5th June 2022.
This image shows Leslie drawing up the design on the library floor, Anna sitting by sharing her ideas. 
Changes to the original design were discussed with the group members over time and Anna decided to eliminate the original border design of leaves with abstract flowers in the corners, replacing them with lines of colour drawn from the central motif.
Fabric used was all recycle clothing from Anna’s closet. The edge of the piece was rolled and whipped
with a textural novelty yarn incorporating the colours of the stripped border. “Waratah”, started in 2019 – became a UFO for a few years, and was bought to the fore again in 2025 to be entered in the 2025 Wanneroo Agricultural Show.
Remembering International Rug Hooking Day 2021; coming out of COVID isolation, a hands-on rug hooking demonstration and exhibition which featured Anna’s partially finished Waratah wall hanging, along with a couple of her locker hooked rugs with crocheted finishes.
Second prize in the “rug hooked” category at the Show was also taken out by Anna with a SEMCO pattern which she found in an OP Shop. It came as a kit complete with design and all the yarn needed and a strange looking old fashioned punch needle. Anna discarded the tool and hooked the design printed on a reasonably good looking backing using a traditional rug hook.
Fortunately, Anna’s hooking style is low and close, so there was enough of the various colours of heavy rug hooking wool yarn that came in the kit to complete the work – well almost. Sometimes with hand-me-down projects like this that have languished unfinished in a bottom drawer, some of the original yarn is used for other projects. There wasn’t 3 full balls of the sand colour, so when Anna could see she wouldn’t have enough she rearranged the colours in the background. 
You may have noticed the finished piece is in the reverse of the package image, that’s because it was intended to be punched hooked from the back and Anna used the traditional rug hooking method, so the back became the front. I learned this lesson of reversing images the hard way when making up a proddy/proggy piece with lettering on it. All the animals in the kit picture were shown with “blank” eyes. Anna deviated from the image and gave all but two of the animals coloured eyes.
How do you hook animal eyes? I knew I’d seen articles on hooking animal eyes in Rug
Hooking Magazine, so searched my old copies. It was a mammoth task; I’ve kept copies of RHM since the late 1990s. Then I remembered a resource page on the website of the Canadian Ottawa Olde Forge Rug Hooking group. Under Resources – Inspiration you can search all the articles and patterns in Rug Hooking Magazine from its beginning in 1989. Contents can be searched and sorted by name, title, pattern, year and issue, as well as by selected categories of interest. A separate subject index is also available.
Special thanks to Jane Thacker (librarian) and Norma Elliott (webmaster) of Ottawa Olde Forge Rug Hooking who developed this resource page and have made it available not only to their members but to rug hookers worldwide.
Also listed on YouTube were videos by Cindi Gay showing how to hook cats’ eyes. In the end Anna came up with her own version of animal eyes.
In the Proddy category, these rugs by Tricia Thacker who hails originally from the UK, took out 1st and 2nd place. I’ve just realised I’ve mentioned a rug hooker with the same last name in Ottawa; just to make sure I didn’t have a typo I checked the Ottawa website – all good.
I must thank Tricia for permission to use her Waterlilies rug as the banner image for [The History of Rug Hooking] on this website.
This image of Tricia’s Hit & Miss doesn’t do it justice as the purples and pinks in the image are not deep enough – they should be the same colour as those in the Waterlilies rug.
Kath’s Show entry, a commercial design, received an Honourable Mention; it was a piece that had been started and then donated to the group along with some wool but no picture to go by. Kath decided on a colour plan that worked with the wool that was available. It was obvious that the beige colour was for the background but again, not enough to cover the original rectangular design. Giving the piece an irregular border solved that problem. The finished piece was approximately 22inc x 15.5inc (56cm x 40cm)
Kath, like several members of our rug hooking group also crochets – her most recent work another crocheted cow – this one unlike the previous baby rug, hangs over the arm of a couch or chair with handy pockets – no more – “where’s the remote!”
Below – Linda and Tricia admiring some of the hooked blocks made several years ago to spell out the name of a fibre festival, which is no longer being held, so the blocks were being sorted and will be used again in several ways.
The block size is approx. 6 inches (15cm) square, I hooked the letters using T-shirt yarn and members of the group designed the images and
finished them off with crochet, stitch and hooking.
This was the pattern for the blocks. I’d seen this used before to cover a brick as a door stop.
Kath hooked a literal image while Tricia created 6inc works in stitch to embellish the side panels before they were stitched over a cube of dense foam.
Anna chose to hook a tree for this T block – it was the first block finished and hooked completely with T-shirts. 
Here are a few of the 20 blocks created for the festival.
Our group of 7 core members can all teach a variety of rug hooking techniques which comes in handy when community members stop by our Saturday morning sessions at the library. Some visitors are interested to see what we’re working on, and reminisce about family members doing this traditional “craft” way back when. Others want to learn one or more of the different techniques and go off to teach family members or school art classes and some join in for the comaraderie while learning something new.
In the last 15 years over 50 people have participated in the Saturday morning sessions. Which gives us a feeling of satisfaction to be passing on at traditional craft and making people aware of the amount of clothing that can be saved from landfill and at the same time having fun!
As it’s fast approaching the end of 2025, I’d like to send greetings from the Wanneroo Rugmakers for a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and all the best wishes for the New Year.
Signing off today with a picture of Kath and Anna at one of our past events
Happy Hooking and Best Wishes to all,
Jo Franco