Postcards from Newfoundland

Fogo Sunset, 7" x 5", wool yarn and acrylic yarn on rug warp. Designed and hooked by Karen D. Miller, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, 2013.

It was a quiet night in Fogo beside Brimstone Head, known as one of the four corners of the earth. The sun set, the sky turned fiery red, and the flat sea followed suit.

From the very beginning of my adventure with rug hooking, I have enjoyed making smaller compositions. The smallest format I regularly work with is only 5" by 7", the size of a postcard. It is a tricky but enjoyable challenge to capture the essence of a scene or a mood in only 5,400 loops. As I grew as an artist, I came to appreciate the value that each single loop can bring.

Newfoundland is one of my favorite places to visit, sketch, and photograph. In 2013, while I was going through my growing collection of photographs, I had the idea of completing a set of my favorite “postcards” to show and sell in Newfoundland—a kind of “reverse postcard” to Newfoundlanders, scenes of their island through my eyes. In 2015, my exhibit in Corner Brook, Newfoundland, called Postcards from Newfoundland: Rug-Hooking the Rock, included 23 of these postcards.

Karen D. Miller’s work has been featured in RHM and has appeared in A Celebration of Hand-Hooked Rugs. She can be found online at www.marzipanroad.com. Karen lives and works in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

This article excerpt is from the November/December 2016 issue. For more information on our issues, check out our issues page.