The Tree of Life that Lives On

Tree of Life 4, 21" x 36", #4-cut wool on burlap. This is the second replica Mom made of the original rug. Hooked by Mary Jarrell, Dover, Delaware, 2018.

Several years ago, my wife, Lynn, was at a local consignment auction. It was nearing the end of the auction and she did not want to go home empty handed. She bought a pile of miscellaneous items for $33.00. One of the items in the lot was an old hooked rug with the “tree of life” design. It was dirty, frayed, and had several areas where the wool and backing were completely missing. She took it to her hooked-rug expert Mary Jarrell, my mother, who was 99 at the time. Mom loved the rug and wanted to see it restored, but 
because of its size, 34"x 58", thought it was too large for her to manage.
 

That was when the sad, old rug showed us it still had life. Mom decided to hook a replica of the rug herself. Through digital imagery, she had me scale the rug to a more manageable size of 21" x 36". I then traced the pattern onto a piece of burlap, ordered the wool from Dorr Mill Store, cut the wool, and shook the lint from the work-in-progress. But she did all of the hard work: the hooking itself.

She finished the project before she turned 100. My sister-in-law, Chris, then saw that it was entered in the annual Delaware State Fair needlepoint competition, where it won both a blue ribbon and the Superintendent Award (which was presented to her by Governor John Carney).

Since my mother had been brought up to live frugally and was fascinated with the tree of life design, she decided to use her stockpile of leftover wool to make one more. This time she took artistic liberty and used her own creativity with the colors in the rug. By the time she was 101, the second rug was completed and was vibrant and eye-catching with its colors.

But the tree of life was not finished. Mom was also an accomplished artist with needlework, crewel, embroidery, multimedia work, and quilting. She asked her embroidery instructor, Canby Robertson, to design a crewel piece with the tree of life in it, which she completed last spring.

A short time after finishing the crewel piece, Mom passed away at the age of 101½.  Now it was time for the next generation to see that the tree of life continued on. My brother, a retired transplant surgeon, is also an accomplished “blacksmith”—really a sculptor of metal. First, using the rug’s pattern, he crafted the tree of life out of iron, copper, bronze and brass, with hollow forged flowers like bluebells, tulips, thistles, and long-stemmed trumpet flowers. But he too was not content with doing just one rendition.  He had to do another tree of life using the crewel piece as his template, mounting the forged iron on a roofing slate, and coloring the flowers by applying melted crayons to the petals and leaves.

All this time, my wife was not willing to let the old rug die. Could it be salvaged?  My wife thought so, and through an advertisement in Rug Hooking magazine, she shipped it to Pamela Regan at Nutting House Antiques, who did a great job in stabilizing the frayed borders, replacing the missing sections, and giving it a good cleaning. The rug now has new life.

All of this from just an afternoon’s auction.