The Summer of the Stair Runner

Each summer since 2003, the wood staircase in our summer fishing cabin in northeastern New Brunswick beckoned me to create a runner that would tell a story or dazzle with a vintage geometric pattern. Every winter in my hooking class in Toronto with Barb D’arcy, I tossed around concepts for the project: I knew the runner was going to be 15 feet long, and the thought of a project that large forced me back to the drawing table many times. In 2011, the inspiration came to me: why not punch hook the runner?

This style of hooking has intrigued me ever since I had experimented with bunka, a type of punch hooking with a very fine needle-sized hook. Transferring from the tiny punch needle to the hearty punch hook offered me a solution that proved to be fun and speedy, and best of all, I knew I could finish the runner in eight weeks, the length of my stay at our salmon camp in Miramichi, New Brunswick, Canada.

This article is from the March/April/May 2013 issue. For more information on our issues, check out our issues page.