Punch Needle Rug Hooking Around the World

Australia: Clare Thornley

1. Clare Thornley is the owner of FeltFine, a family-owned Australian business that supplies raw materials and tools to fiber artists and offers fiber processing services. A knitter at heart, she enjoys all of the wool-based fiber arts. Clare is American-born, holds a PhD in Historical Musicology from New York University and now lives on the New South Wales Central Coast with her husband and two sons.
   
   IN HER OWN WORDS:
   I own a small fiber arts business and supply raw materials and tools to fiber artists. I love all of the woolly fiber arts. I enjoy working with natural colors as well as dyed fibers.
   
   I come from a lineage of craftswomen and, as a young child, I learned how to knit and crochet from my mom and her mom. But it wasn’t until I became a fiber arts business owner and surrounded myself with amazing fibers and colors that I finally began to discover my creative self. Now I love to experiment with color combinations and explore how different fibers work together to make new, beautiful creations.
   
   I first heard about punch needle rug hooking from a customer who saw it online and thought we should stock the Oxford punch needles. Since then, we’ve worked with The Oxford Company to bring the tools to the Australian market. We also stock a range of backing fabrics, hand-dyed rug yarns (dyed by a local indie dyer), and rug punch frames (designed and made by my husband, aka Mr. FeltFine).
   
   I am constantly inspired by the creativity of my customers, who use fibers we stock in the most amazing ways. I also find inspiration in the creative work of my children, who have no fear of color or design. 
   
   I am fortunate that my role as a fiber arts business owner places me in the middle of a nexus of creative crafters. I belong to our local fiber arts guilds and enjoy crafting with friends at fiber arts camps and retreats. Australia has a strong tradition of craft guilds and, due to its geographic isolation, strong local crafting communities. Working in collaboration with my customers and local groups, we are building on these traditions in an effort to keep these organizations active and relevant for a new generation of fiber artists and hand crafters.

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Canada: Ingrid Hieronimus

1. Unlimited Boundaries – Ingrid’s certification rug with mainly punch hooking, scrolls in regular rug hooking, and some ribbon as embellishment.

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Chile: Soledad Navarro and Serena Marchant

1. Ese Textil was created by Soledad Navarro, a graphic designer with a marketing degree, and Serena Marchant, a yoga instructor, friends since 2000. With combined experience in all forms of textiles, including crochet, sewing, screen printing, and embroidery, they began teaching punch needle rug hooking in January 2018.
   
   IN THEIR OWN WORDS:
   We create pieces of art, experimenting with new materials, creating our own modern and colorful designs.  
   
   We both studied graphic design, always expressing ourselves through the crafts with different techniques and our own styles. We started with beads, recycled clothes, textile screen printing, always nourishing each other.
   We saw a @bookhou video on Instagram showing how to embroider with the Oxford needle. Our biggest influences are Bookhou, Rose Pearlman, Julie Weaves, Andrea Miller, Studio Myome. We also got inspiration from Bauhaus textiles, especially those made by Gunta Stölzl. 
   
   We are supported by small companies  that make wooden frames, needles, and fabrics—all made in Chile. We’ve created a small community of students who have taken our workshops and are always interested in sharing their creative experiences.

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Germany: Kelly Wright

1. IN HER OWN WORDS:
   D.K. Wright Construction may seem an odd name for a crafts company, but really, we’re all about helping our incredibly friendly and talented customers create a warm, self-constructed home environment, and balancing things that seem incompatible: crafts and technical things, city and country, impulse and structure. Raised half on a farm with lots of sheep in Missouri, half in the metropolitan New York area (aka Jersey!), I’ve been hooking and braiding rugs since I was 6 years old. I moved to Berlin, Germany, in 1990, and wanted to share some of this knowledge with my new friends and neighbors.  I wanted to combine a little bit of North American crafts with European sensibilities and D.K. Wright Construction was born (or reborn, to be precise—my Dad started it in 1962 and he really did do heavy construction. I’m just carrying on the tradition in another way.).
   
   I combine American traditions with European sensibilities. My approach to rugmaking is very much like how I would approach a canvas: either illustrative elements or color elements have to take center stage and I like adding details that have emotional meaning to me: something that makes me laugh (say, a porcupine holding a balloon) or something that recalls a certain emotion (like an embroidery pattern that I adapted from Scandinavian knitting to use as a border around a picture of a king on his horse).
   
   I once described myself as a chronic needle worker with a very strong connection to animals and trees. By the time I was six, my grandfather had taught me how to shoot, fish, and pitch a tent and my grandmother had taught me to knit, quilt, sew, and hook and braid rugs. My whole life was more or less built around making rugs and respecting the environment. I use textiles as a medium to interact with other people and the world around me. That has always been the crux of my creative energy.
   
   I was given a copy of Kathryn Jackson and Richard Scarry’s The Golden Book of 365 Stories: A Story for Every Day of the Year for Christmas in 1974, which I read every night for a year. The story for December 17 describes a mother making a play rug with streets and things out of colored bits of wool for her son. That completely captivated my imagination. I took the book with me the next time I visited our family farm in Missouri in the summer of 1976 and asked my grandmother about it. She disappeared into our farm shop and came out with a box of equipment, including a load of wool, cloth, and a Hubbell punch needle. She handed it to me, saying, “You’re in business.” And I’ve been punching ever since. 
   
   Amy Oxford is a huge inspiration. I love her can-do attitude, her kind spirit, and her pioneer persistence. My go-to braiders are Kris McDermet, Dianne Tobias, and Christine Manges. I love soaking up the vibe in historic family homes, like Sagamore Hill (Teddy Roosevelt’s house on Long Island). Other artistic influences include the pure fun genius of Alexander Calder, the very talented weaving women of the Bauhaus like Gunta Stölzl, the incredibly talented team around the Inaluxe brand, and the paintings of Wenzel Hablik and Martinus Rorbye. 
   
   When I was a kid making rugs, I was cocooned by really lovely older ladies, but rejected by other kids. When I moved to Germany in 1990, I was married to a painter who, together with his friends, dismissed craftsmanship, something they considered inferior to fine art. My work was met with a lot of eye rolling and head shaking, and it destroyed my self-confidence (although thankfully not completely!). When I finally made it to Amy Oxford’s Rug Hooking School in June of 2018, I found my tribe: a group of incredibly funny, talented, and warmhearted women who like to punch. That week of teacher’s training with them changed my life and I like to think of them as true soulmates. Having been a part of that group gives me the strength and the joy needed to go out and spread the word here in Europe and have fun on Instagram.

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USA: Lisa Congdon

1. Lisa Congdon. Photo by Christopher Dibble.

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2. Lisa Congdon's Pillow. Photo by Lisa Congdon.

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International Punch Needle Rug Hooking Day: April 13, 2019

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