Description:  Enjoy a bit of history as you draw a design, choose a color scheme and begin hooking your own Folk Art Inspired Geometric.

Students will explore tools, methods and traditional colors as Stephanie shares her knowledge of geometrics. Through her 40 years of repairing rugs, Stephanie has developed a special appreciation for those dating back to the late 1800s and has compiled a collection of designs for students to learn from.

Through class discussion, photographs, and handouts students will be given specific information on how to draw geometric designs that can be started during class. Students may bring or purchase backing from the instructor. Color planning will be developed from the wool students bring and from wool available for purchase from the teacher. We will be working with cuts # 4 - 8.

Supportive, responsive, and skilled, Stephanie creates a free flowing class in which students have opportunities to share experiences and expand their understanding of how to create geometric rugs.

Teacher will contact students prior to class: Yes

Level:  Basic – students must have basic rug hooking knowledge & experience. 

Supply description: Students may purchase backing from the instructor or they may bring backing. Students also have the option to bring or purchase wool from the instructor. More details will be provided when the instructor contacts students.

Students Need to Bring: Basic hooking supplies: a frame, scissors, cutter, cutter blades # 4 - 8, & hook. Optional: Students may bring backing &/or wool, or purchase it from the instructor.

Bio: Stephanie Allen-Krauss was only six when she learned to hook from her mother, Anne Ashworth, a nationally recognized rug-hooking teacher. This family tradition began with Stephanie’s great–grandmother, Philena Moxley, who created and stamped embroidery and rug patterns at her shop in Lowell, Massachusetts from 1865 to1882. As a fourth generation rug hooker, Stephanie took happily to the craft, learning to dye wool fabric as a teenager and then to repair antique hooked rugs in her early twenties.

In 2000, Stephanie opened a retail shop in Montpelier, Green Mountain Hooked Rugs, where she offers a wide variety of supplies for rug hookers, including bolts of wool, hand-dyed fabric, patterns, equipment, and books. Stephanie still repairs rugs and does custom dyeing, and over the past ten years has hooked more than 30 commissioned rugs. When time permits, she offers classes and occasionally travels around the country to teach.

She earned two bachelor’s degrees in education, and has held several offices in local, national and international rug hooking guilds.

In 2010, Stephanie received the Governor’s Heritage Award as best traditional artist in Vermont.

Currently, Stephanie is the President of Green Mountain Hooked Rugs and a board member.

SPECIALTIES:  Design, Color Planning, Technique and Dyeing.