Teacher will contact students prior to class: Yes
Level: Basic – Students must have basic rug hooking knowledge & experience.
Supply fee description: Please see the last paragraph of the Workshop Description for more info.
Students Need to Bring: Basic rug hooking supplies: a frame, scissors, cutter, cutter blades #6 - 8, & hook. Students should also bring a Sharpie marker, notebook, pencil/pen, colored pencils, and any wool or unique materials they may want to consider incorporating into their rug.
Bio: Kathleen Harwood is best known as a long-time appraiser of paintings and drawings on PBS’s popular Antiques Roadshow, and she has enjoyed a successful career in the arts as a curator, auctioneer, appraiser, critic, writer, antiques dealer and teacher. Less well known is her love of and passion for making hooked rugs. Raised by a mother who excelled at most of the fiber arts except rug hooking, Kathleen fell in love with antique rugs through her professional exposure to them, and began hooking herself in 2002. A 6-time Celebrations finalist (Hall of Fame, class of 2018), she hooks mainly original designs and is especially inspired by quilts, has a particular affinity for geometrics, rugs with words and contemporary relevance, and is increasingly drawn to abstraction in the textile arts. If she had to choose one word to sum up the most important thing about rugs it would be COLOR. Easy to see how Duncan caught her attention! An ATHA member, she has belonged to a number of ATHA and McGown guilds as she has lived around the East Coast and has enjoyed belonging to the Green Mountain Rug Hooking Guild (VT) for many years and exhibiting in their wonderful rug shows. Attending conferences and workshops around the US with teachers as varied as Elizabeth Black, Polly Minick, Gail Dufresne, Nancy McClellan, Susan Feller, and Molly Colgrove has been a privilege and a delight, & has helped her to become the hooking artist and teacher she is today.
She loves teaching rug hooking and enjoys sharing her enthusiasm for making rugs almost as much as the process itself. The depth of her unique background in the arts provides a foundation for her ability to encourage students along their individual creative paths & to encourage their imaginations to guide their hooks (no holding back, you can always reverse hook later!). Color and composition come first and second, but she enjoys integrating unusual textures and materials into her rugs, loves graphic stitches (she has been called ‘the beading queen’) and recently has begun incorporating elements of embroidery into mats. She firmly believes that one of the most wonderful things about rug hooking is that anyone can do it, do it well, & have a beautiful result that pleases them.
Raised in coastal Connecticut, educated in Boston, decades a New Yorker, now happily settled in Western Massachusetts, Kathleen has a supportive handsome husband, 2 talented stepsons, 5 brilliant grandsons, several lovable dogs and beautiful gardens. Family and friends near and far, cooking, volunteering, reading (including a crime fiction book club), weeding, embroidery and crocheting (when not hooking) keep her more than busy.
Devin Ryder is a self-taught rug maker, having begun in the early 1970s (ahem, long before the internet or google, so nearly impossible to find a teacher). After gathering burlap, wool roving (yes, roving!), a hoop, and a crochet-type hook with no idea about whether she had the right tools, she designed a large circular rug and worked away on it—clueless but happy. Then an unexpected series of house moves happened and that rug was lost. All hooking stopped. Fast forward to the 1980s: With life a bit more stable, she discovered a hooking supply store on Cape Cod and bought a pattern, some off-the-bolt-wool, and an actual rug hook and frame. Still without a teacher, she muddled through to the finish, producing a truly hideous rug but falling in love with the process. And she kept right on hooking from there. Fortunately, she’s had a chance to study with a wide variety of teachers and at many workshops and rug schools in the intervening years. Needless to say, she has improved. Greatly.
Devin hooks wide cuts in 6 to 8, and her particular interest is in geometrics and patterns adapted from unusual sources, with an emphasis on non-figurative, symbolic designs.
Her rugs have been exhibited frequently at Green Mountain Rug Hooking Guild Shows, and she created and maintained an active rug hooking group—the Wooly Bullies, in the Boston, MA area for twenty years before moving to Western Massachusetts. She has long been interested in punched rugs and became an Oxford Certified Punch Needle Instructor in 2016. Currently she belongs to the Quabbin Rug Hookers in Western MA, the Rug Social group in Vermont, ATHA, and the Green Mountain Rug Hooking Guild. One of her rugs toured internationally as part of the Tarot Rug Project, an invitational exhibit curated by Michele Micarelli and Loretta Scena. (In addition, she read tarot for guests at the opening of the tour.)
Over the past decades, she has explored many of the textile arts: embroidery, hand spinning, woven rugs, beadwork, quilting, dyeing (both wool yardage and yarn), and punch needle embroidery--which is still a favorite way to “test out” ideas for rugs. But it’s her love for traditionally hooked and punched rugs that has been her constant practice. She and Kathleen Harwood recently co-authored an article on McGown’s Duncan pattern for Rug Hooking magazine (Autumn 2022). In her spare time, she regularly teaches mindfulness meditation, keeps a visual journal with writings, drawings and Zentangle® art, and shamelessly devours trashy mysteries.