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- [00:00]
A
Foreign welcome to Haptic and Hughes Tales of Textiles. I'm Jo Andrews, a handweaver interested in what textiles tell us about ourselves and our communities, stories that go far beyond the written word and often explore the lives of those who have little or no voice in official histories. Making hooked rugs has been the work of women, and largely women whose names are lost to us. Constructing something new out of something old and worn, making ends meet, covering cold floors, cheaply replicating what they see out of their windows, or perhaps memorializing the family cat in the design. This is the stuff of everyday lives. And yet over time, these mats have become something more. They played a role in defining an American vision of itself as a nation of homespun, self reliant pioneers. They were an economic lifeline for impoverished fishing families from Labrador and Newfoundland. And in Britain, they have never ceased to be a living tradition.
- [01:40]
B
It's never died out. It was always strong in school, Scotland, northeast England, particularly Tyneside, most in rural or fishing communities and also in America. And that's interesting because the Americans took it, as they do, several steps further. They've got much more sophisticated designs and they have examples in all their best museums, whereas here on the whole, old and dirty worn rag rugs was thrown away and just made another one. But in America they're treasured heirlooms and there's a lot of interest there. I'm pretty sure it was taken there by emigrants from this part of Britain. And it's also quite strong in Australia and New Zealand. And most interestingly, a friend went to the Falkland Islands not long ago and brought me back photographs of rag rugs in the museum in Stanley. So I would say it was an Anglo Saxon tradition, but it goes back so far and it's not really documented in wills and inventories and things because people didn't rate them highly enough to put them there. But I haven't done a lot of research on the continent, but what I have has drawn a blank.
- [02:48]
A
Emma Tennant is an expert rag rug maker and has also written one of the best histories of hooked rugs. But before we go any further, we need to clear up some linguistic differences. This podcast is about mats that are hooked or prodded through a burlap or or hessian backing. In North America these are called hooked rugs. In the UK people tend to call them rag rugs. In this episode you'll hear both terms used. And just to be clear, I asked Emma to explain the two main methods used to make these rugs.
- [03:30]
B
Right. There are several different name Vernacular names for these rag rugs. One is the hooky, where you have a longish strip of material, in my case, always wool, because it doesn't get dirty like synthetic fabrics do. And also, I'm lucky, I live where tweed is made and Jerseys are made. You cut it into a long strip, roughly an inch or 3/4 an inch wide, if it's very thick, like a blanket. And you, you hold the long strip under the back of the hessian and you pull it through with your hook and to make a series of loops. And oddly enough, there's no knotting, there's no sewing of ends. It just holds itself together with the tension of the hessian. And that makes quite a well defined pattern. The other technique is to cut it into shorter strips, about two and a half, three inches long. People used to measure off the strip by the standard matchbox. And then you just push it from above with a blunter thing, like a blunt pencil, not a hook. And again, the tension of the frame holds it together, but you end up with a shaggy surface, and that's a proggy. So that makes a less well defined outline if you're trying to do a dog or a cat or a bunch of flowers. It also attracts dirt much more easily. And if you have dogs in the house, it gets very doggy hairy. So I prefer the long hooked line of loops.
- [04:47]
A
In Britain, the peak of rug making was in the late 19th and early 20th century. Emma lives on a farm deep in the border country between England and Scotland, where there was a strong rag rug tradition, one that lasted long beyond those years.
- [05:06]
B
I asked around and sure enough, every family had a frame up in the attic, not been used maybe for a while. And a hook, which was usually handmade by the local blacksmith, with a shank from an old wooden handle tool and a homemade hook. And I was given one of these and also a frame, and I started making a rug. And it wasn't a brilliant choice. It was a very big, dark grey cow. I love cows. And I had an old skirt length of tweed, which I thought would be just the thing. It only went about a third of the way down the back of this cow. That was how I learned how much material you need. You need a great deal. They're very heavy when they're finished because it's a lot of wood. So I eventually finished it and hadn't particularly enjoyed it. But the next winter, I thought, well, hang on, I would like to make another one, maybe a sheep. We have sheep and cattle on the farm to match the cow and from then on, it started slowly, but people asked if they could commission a rug, or people asked to buy one I'd made. And I gradually just got more and more into it. And I found it was the perfect skill for winter evenings. I could sit here at the table, everyone was chatting. I have a bright light over my shoulder and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
- [06:17]
A
But this was originally a craft born of poverty and necessity.
- [06:22]
B
I mean, the communities I've mentioned, farming in southern Scotland, mining and shipbuilding in Northeast, you know, not rich communities, but it evolved into something more. I mean, I've no doubt that the satisfaction of making a rug and throwing it down as people did, sort of some ceremony at the end of the winter, usually putting it in a sort of key position in the sitting room and moving that one to the back kitchen and the old one to the dog kennel. There was a sort of rotation and it was quite a ceremony. And the baby, the family would be the first to roll on it. If there wasn't a baby, the dog or cat would roll on it and they'd make a big do. So I'm sure that out of this very interesting creative art, a lot of pleasure was derived, far beyond just making something to put on the floor.
- [07:22]
A
And for a long time, in the small rural communities of Northumberland and southern Scotland, rag rug making was a social activity too.
- [07:33]
B
Yes. I mean, the world would go rather village. One of the ladies said to me when I asked her. Yes, so. And so is putting up a frame. And most of the old ones were made on a substantial wooden frame, like the ones you use for quilts. So the word would go round and it would be a sociable thing. You know, people would chat like women love chatting when they do something with their hands. Very much so. So I heard a lot of those stories. And, you know, obviously some people were much better at it and nimble with their fingers. Other people didn't enjoy it, they'd rather be out of doors. But it was definitely quite a big thing and everyone was familiar with it.
- [08:05]
A
Certainly men played a role too. They made the frames and hooks and often drew the designs using a burnt stick, like a giant charcoal. But there has always been this link with poverty. A rag rug marked you as being too poor to buy a proper carpet until quite recently.
- [08:27]
B
As soon as you could afford to buy a rug, you bought one. I remember going to Carlisle Station years ago and I had one rolled out onto my arm, something I'd made for someone in London and one of the porters. This shows how long ago it's still porters at the station. He said, oh, you've got a rag rug under your arm. And I said, yes, would you like to see it? I was quite proud of it. Unroll it for him. He said, no, not likely. He said, I saw too many of those when I was growing up. I wasn't allowed out to play until I'd cut so many strips. So, you know, for him it was associated with, with poverty really. As soon as he could go to Buller's in Carlisle and buy a nice rug, he obviously did.
- [09:01]
A
And in Britain, rag rugs tended to be expendable, certainly.
- [09:06]
B
They were just worn and then when they got too dirty they were downgraded, sometimes used to cover the potatoes, potato clamp in the winter or the dog kennel and then thrown away. Whereas in America they were much more highly rated. They were treasured. And there were some of the Metropolitan Museum in America in New York and in other museums in Canada, and particularly on the east coast, which makes me think that they went there with emigrants from this country.
- [09:32]
A
There's no doubt that in the U.S. hooked rugs entered the folklore of American frontier life.
- [09:40]
B
I think one of the reasons for that, which is strange to believe now, is that probably right up to the end of the 19th century, Britain was a much richer country than America. I mean, if you, if your daughter knew those books, Little House on the Prairie and so on. Laura Ingalls Wilder I mean, do you remember the story where the husband went off to the nearest town, which was quite frightening, leaving the wife and children alone in quite a frightening, lonely place. And he came back and his present for the wife, this is like giving her a diamond ring or something, was a pound of white sugar. I mean, that was the ultimate, ultimate luxury. And so that sort of pioneering life meant that people were really poor and they couldn't afford anything. They had to make everything for the house, the children's clothes, they made the house themselves out of these log cabins. It was an extraordinary self sufficient way of life and these rag rugs were part of that. And then sort of slightly higher up the sort of social hierarchy, they copied things they'd seen in museums, quite sophisticated French carpets and things. And that went on as a tradition in America. And as I say, a lot of those are now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York and similar institutions. Whereas here it stayed very much on the kitchen floor.
- [10:53]
A
To understand that difference, we need to turn to someone who's part of an incredible family of five generations of women, each of whom has been involved in one way or another in designing, making and, and repairing hooked rugs.
- [11:11]
C
My mother was a rug hooking teacher, and actually she learned how to hook when she was pregnant with me. And so I sort of felt like I came to it through osmosis, if you will. And then when I was about six years old, she was teaching rug hooking classes, and she would drag my younger sister and brother and me along two classes. And I am the kid that just kind of took it up.
- [11:39]
A
Stephanie Kraus and her daughters now run Green Mountain Hooked Rugs in Vermont. But her rug hooking heritage begins with her great grandmother, Philena Moxley, in 1865.
- [11:53]
C
Well, I can tell you it was a very good business for my great grandmother. At age 19, she bought 500 of those stamping blocks from a gentleman from England. And she started small, just in the back of her apartment, stamping these designs for people. And she made enough money so that she bought a piece of property in Lowell, Massachusetts, and had a house built so that her shop was in the bottom of the building. And she and her mother and her sister lived in the upstairs apartment. So, yes, it was a very profitable business. And of course, she expanded it to include other fancy, dry, good things, as in threads and fabrics and needles and whatever other things that ladies might like of the day. So, yes, it was a good business.
- [12:50]
A
And here's one of the essential differences between America and Britain. In America, rug hooking began as a home craft, but by the middle of the 19th century, much more complex standardized patterns could be bought.
- [13:07]
C
At first they were hand drawing these things. You know, they took those burlap sacks and they hand drew the things that meant something to them. Their flower garden or their special animal. I think perhaps they started doing some commemorative kinds of things, you know, commemorative birthday or an anniversary or it's a wedding rug or something along that line. Edward Sands Frost was an itinerant peddler in the probably 1840s, 50s, 60s, right in there. And he realized as he's going around all these farms, he's realizing that these women are hand drawing many of their designs. And, and he decided that he could create patterns and multiple patterns using tin, a big piece of tin with cutout sections, and then using, and then inking over that tin and have the ink set come through to these burlap pieces of fabric. So you begin to see more stage standardized kinds of pattern making.
- [14:17]
A
Her great grandmother, Philina Moxley, was doing the same thing, using a series of stamping blocks of different elements like leaves and flowers, and then combining them in her own designs. Stephanie still has some of the blocks.
- [14:35]
C
One weekend, my mom was cleaning out her rug hooking supplies in all of her wool fabric, and my dad showed me some of these wooden stamping blocks. I was like, oh, my gosh, I have to design a rug using these wooden stamping blocks, which I did. And I used some of the wool from my mom's stash and created my own, my first rug hooking pattern using great grandma's stamping blocks. So, yes, I still have some of the blocks.
- [15:07]
A
You can see some of Stephanie's rugs from her great grandmother's designs on the webpage for this episode, which you'll find at www.hapdighue.com. tales of Textiles Series 7. These were elaborate designs.
- [15:29]
C
Oh, my gosh, she was wonderful. Absolutely a wonderful designer. Many of them are florals with sort of scroll. Some are scrolls that can be added as an outside border, but primarily florals. And also she designed some with curlicue letters and what have you. She had one that was a horse head. And because my mom was raised on a horse farm and then she ultimately raised horses also, she used that block, that horsehead block, and created a hooked piece using that.
- [16:09]
A
But not all the blocks survived.
- [16:12]
C
So another piece of the story is that there was a coal strike in the 1890s, and so a lot of those wooden, wooden stamping blocks went into the fire. And my grandmother had a memory of, as a young girl, of raking those tin strips out of the fire, out of the grate the following morning after they were burned. However, of the approximately 2,000 stamping blocks that my great grandmother had, about 500 of them survived. Many of the larger ones did not survive. So that's kind of sad.
- [16:51]
A
Many of the remaining blocks were donated to a local museum. And in time, the American hooked rugs looked very different from their British counterparts. It was taken up much more widely, and the patterns developed more. Apart from the ubiquity of the kits and stamped patterns, the subjects for the mats were quintessentially American log cabins, clapperboard houses, and the Stars and Stripes. Some of the American rugs borrowed from patchwork quilts, and others even mimicked Persian and Turkey rugs. What else is different is that by the 1920s and 30s, with the advent of the arts and craft movement, collectors in America began to see old hooked rugs as folk art and Americana rug collecting. Outings became fashionable for New Yorkers. Here's William Winthrop Kent, an authority of the time, on antique rugs, describing an expedition the hunting of the rug goes on daily, he writes. Literally thousands of attics and farmhouses have been searched each year in New England and Canada, and the supply in many places has given out. Stephanie Krauss still sees the results of this kind of rug hunting by collectors in her work as a repairer of hope drugs.
- [18:40]
C
I was contacted about 13 or 14 years ago by somebody who was asking about rug repair. And they said, well, we have about 75 rugs in our collection, and some of them need repair. And I was like, oh, well, okay. This was in Southampton, New York, which is a very desirable place, which I didn't know about. I mean, it was a place that New Yorkers traveled out to in the early 20th century and on through. Even up until now, it's become even more popular. And the homes are very prized. So the ultimately, the people had me fly down, take a look at their collection. And the collection are rugs, all from prior to 1910. Because the house was built in 1928, it was the hunting lodge cottage for this very, very wealthy family. All of these hook drugs came from New England, Pennsylvania, all along the Atlantic coast, and some into Canada. But it was a designer, a home decorator who went around and collected all of these rugs. And sure enough, this whole house was decorated with these beautiful old hooked rugs. So anyway, it's a job that I still have. I go down to their place two to three times a year and I repair their hooked rugs. But it's lovely to see all of these old hooked rugs.
- [20:22]
A
So successful was the revival in North America that people began making hooked r rugs again to feed the appetite for arts and crafts goods. Mats from Labrador and Newfoundland in Canada were especially highly prized. They were made using a finer technique than the American rugs and to different designs. And that's because of a man called Wilfred Grenfell, an English doctor who arrived in the 1890s and set up a mission. Here's Emma.
- [20:58]
B
They were very, very hard up, the fishermen. And Grenville was a doctor. I believe it still exists, the grand formation. There's a lot of tuberculosis. A lot of the men were ill and couldn't work and really hard up. And he introduced rag rug making and got them sold at sort of proper prices. That's to say, not just pocket money, but, you know, useful amounts back in England. And they were very, very fine. If you cut the strips of wool very thinly, you're almost in the world of grospoint tapestry. And you can do fine shading and fine detail. And again, as I do. They got their inspiration from the surroundings, boats, fish, birds and so on. And they are really beautiful. That was a wonderful thing to do. In fact, I met one of the designers, he used to get really good designers from England to help. And she was an old lady living in her home in Chiswick, and she designed wonderful sort of semi abstract things based on fishes and birds.
- [21:59]
A
Stephanie says Grenfell rugs still come to her for repair and they aren't difficult to recognize.
- [22:06]
C
And so I can often tell when I see a Grenfell rug because it has very fine loops, more of a northern look to it, whether it be geese flying or Eskimos, which of course are not in Newfoundland. However, you know, anything that's sort of northern, that kind of thing, but it's the material and the style of hooking more so than anything else. And those are the things that inform me as to where it came from.
- [22:38]
A
Even in Britain, the rug did slowly begin to leave the kitchen floor. There were rag rugs at Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant's house, Charleston in Sussex. And one of the great Bardfield artists, Lucy Aldridge, began making beautiful hooked rugs during the Second World War. But the artists who really saw them was Winifred Nicholson, who lived for much of her life in Cumbria. She was a professional painter, deeply invested in modern art movements. And at the time that included so called naive art. She began to encourage local rug makers to use better design and to see the worth of what they were doing. Here's Emma.
- [23:29]
B
Yes, well, Winifred was a sort of force of nature. I mean, she was a really remarkable person. She was the first wife of Ben Nicholson, the artist. And when they were married, they lived in France and also Switzerland. They were friends of people like Mondrian. They were right at the heart of the art world of the twenties. And when she and Ben split up, leaving her with three smallish children and single mother, she returned to Cumbria and to a house on the Roman wall, where I got to know her because it was not far from where I live. And she was, as well as being, you know, a very good artist in her own right. She also was very interested in local crafts which she discovered were going on around her. And she encouraged them first by selling rugs designed by local people. I bought one or two. I wish I bought more. Some of them were really good. And also by encouraging people, she was very idealistic and she thought that everybody had a sort of artistic spark if they could only find it. And it was better for them to do something that they thought of themselves. But she helped people and she did sometimes design rugs. But she was a force for good.
- [24:36]
A
Emma has a number of the Winifred inspired rugs at her house. One in particular I loved a big fish made using offcuts from the Carlisle company that made covers for British Rail train seats in the 1970s in a particularly virulent turquoise. It looks much better on the fish. With Winifred Nicholson's support, the local museum began to collect them.
- [25:05]
B
She certainly saw them as valuable, something to treasure, something to encourage. I wish she was here now. She'd have a very interesting answer. But I think she'd say as I do, that there's no barrier between art and craft. It's not as if there's a fence or a hard line. There's an overlap and the best of craftsmanship is obviously becomes a work of art. There's a sort of merging. I always think it's like a wood, a forest that hasn't got a fence. Gradually get more and more trees than you realize in your forest when you were in open country before. I think the division between the two, which rather goes back to the way art schools divide things up, is very sad. I mean, I really admire artists like John Nash and John Piper who have a go at everything from stained glass and tapestry to painting and printmaking. I think it's a great pity to divide these things into categories.
- [25:57]
A
Historians say that the origins of hooked rugs are murky, which seems to be code for they haven't a clue. William Winthrop Kent, the American rug expert, thought they went back at least until Tudor times and that they originated in the British Isles. Others though, think that they may have arrived from Scandinavia with the Vikings. If we travel to the far north of the British Isles, to one of the Vikings great waypoints on their journeys, the Shetland Isles, we find another kind of rug sewing new wool into a woven background.
- [26:52]
D
A Tattet rug is actually a pile bed cover. It's a piece of cloth that's made of hand spun, hand woven Shetland wool. It's made really in two parts. There's a woven ground which is made on a very small narrow floor loom. We have one tattered rug from the 1760s. It was made on a warp weighted loom, which is the kind of loom that Shetlanders did use until the very late 18th century.
- [27:31]
A
Carol Christiansen is the curator of the Shetland Museum and Archives and she says that once the ground fabric was made on a loom, it was often fulled in the sea. And then the work of creating the top decoration with wool strands could begin.
- [27:50]
D
So the ground, because it's a tabby weave, it creates a grid for you. And you would put your needle from the top down and then you would bring it up again. And as you go around again, you're creating a loop on the one side. Then you'd go back down again and you'd come up a little distance away and do the same thing over and over. I think they generally did about 15 loops before they had to kind of start again with a new length of yarn. And in this way they could make lots of geometric designs, which they did. And the whole one side of the ground fabric is then covered in these tats. The loops are then cut and this creates your pile.
- [28:38]
A
Because the ground was woven in narrow strips to make a bed cover, two strips had to be joined together. Sometimes to celebrate a marriage, the bride's family would make one half and the grooms the other and they would be joined together before their wedding day and serve for life as the marital bed cover. Often the two halves didn't quite match. A great metaphor for marriage.
- [29:06]
D
Yeah, I think it is a wonderful thing and the fact that it's such an important component to beginning your life together as a couple. And one of the things that I became really interested in was the fact that it's bedding, because we have so little bedding that survives. Okay, There are the really fancy embroidered early pieces that royalty had and all of that. But really the bedding of everyday people really doesn't survive. And all the events that take place, place in a bed which are groundbreaking for a couple. In a way, they are united in that bed. They consummate their marriage in that bed. They have children in that bed, nurse the sick in that bed, and people die in that bed. And all those things were going on under a tattet rug through that whole family's life.
- [30:07]
A
The Shetland Museum has a collection of around 65 Tatit rugs. And because this is a place where the old ways lasted much longer than they did elsewhere, Carol has also heard first hand accounts from the people who slept under them.
- [30:26]
D
I met an old man from the island of Walser who subsequently donated his half of a Tattit rug. The other half was lost. But he told me that he remembered sleeping under this with his brother when they were kids at their granny's house. And this would have been probably in the late 30s. And he said that he really liked the tats next to his body. And he would throw off the sheets, the cotton sheets that she had on the bed because he liked the softness and the warmth of that wool again against his skin. So clearly this was the most comfortable way to use a tattered rug.
- [31:09]
A
By modern standards, though, there was nothing comfortable about a traditional Shetland bed.
- [31:16]
D
Generally it would have been like a wooden board or some sort of pallet sort of board, a shelf along the wall, sometimes a box bed, but not always. But a box bed, again, is just planks of wood. Then you would have straw or some other kind of cushioning substance. And I did find out that in Shetland, people used chaff from grain or dried seaweed. And actually dried seaweed, people like to use that because it kept fleas at bay. And also it's free and it's a really easy material to access. After a while it gets sort of crushed down, but then you just remove it from this sort of sack, mattress sack, and you just fill it up again. And then you would probably be laying directly on that and then you'd have your tattit rug.
- [32:09]
A
Tattet rugs have three main designs on them. Circles, checkerboards, or a scatter of squares and rectangles. And lastly, an equidistant cross, which is not a Kristen cross.
- [32:25]
D
Those three symbols appear over and over and over again on nearly all tattered rugs. They are often used in combination. So, for example, you might have a circle that has a lot of these crosses in the middle of it. But also, if you have a lot of crosses and you put them adjacent to one another, you end up with a checkerboard. So I wanted to find out, what do these symbols mean, you know, what is the point of them and why were they used so commonly on these rugs? Of course, Shetland folklore. In Shetland, it was witches and what are called trows. It's a Shetland way of saying a troll, but it's not the same thing as a troll in Norway. It's the small people that live in the remote countryside. So both trows and witches were considered to be a menace. Potentially really dangerous, sometimes just really annoying. In all cases, you want to keep them away from yourself and your property.
- [33:27]
A
Carol researched Norwegian folklore too. Shetland was part of Norway until the 15th century and its influence remained strong. She found something important.
- [33:40]
D
The Norwegians used a multi part symbol or a multi part object to keep away what was called the mara, which is a creature that would come to you at night and sit on your chest and make it hard to breathe. And one of the symbols that the Norwegian people used to keep the Mara away was the checkerboard, because they believed that the Mara could only count to three. And so a checkerboard, by definition, has to have at least four squares. So the belief was that the Mara would count up to three and then have to start all over again because they could only count up to three. And they would do that over and over and over again. And then they'd get so fed up with not being able to count all the squares, the checkerboard, that they would leave you alone. And the Mara was believed not just to affect humans, but also livestock, in particular horses. And so the Norwegians also would hang a pine branch where horses were stabled, because a pine branch is a multi part object, it has a lot of needles. And so that was believed to have kept the Mara away from horses. So that, to me, gave me some information about what these symbols might mean in tattered rugs. Because the troughs and the Mara, they only visit at night. They're completely nocturnal creatures. And I think it was really telling that you've got a bed cover that's got symbols that's protecting you from creatures that visit at night.
- [35:35]
A
So a Tattit rug was both a warm, practical thing and a magical one, imbued with the power to keep away the menaces of the night.
- [35:46]
D
Yes, because when you're asleep, you're very vulnerable. And the Norse had a lot of beliefs about sleep and about dreams and about dreams foretelling the future and about having difficulty in dreaming bad dreams with bad events that are about to happen. I think it's also telling that the cross symbols, which were one of the main symbols you used to keep trials away from you. A cross symbol is used prior to primarily along the border of a tattered rug, in which case it's the border of your bed. It's the edge of where your bed is and your body starts.
- [36:30]
A
And although we may think of these as folk beliefs that we have long left behind, Carol thinks they still carry resonance for us.
- [36:40]
D
Once you're in that bed, you can consider that space to be a protective space. And we still kind of think of the bed in that way. And we're not feeling well, we go to bed and we feel better for being in the bed. So the bed really has a lot of meaning to it, even in modern times. And the other thing we have to think about in terms of these symbols is that some of them are still used today. So, for example, the symbol that we use to signify a place of help or a place of safety is one with a cross. And I don't mean a church What I mean is a hospital or an apothecary, a chemist, the Red Cross, the Red Cross, they are all about helping, providing safety, providing protection from disease and disaster. And no wonder. It's a symbol of a cross. That symbol is still being used and we still recognize it today as a place to go, a place of protection, of of assistance. So we still communicate in that way with that symbol.
- [38:04]
A
Thank you for listening to this this episode, and many thanks to all those listeners over the months and years who have suggested that we look at Hooked and rag rugs. You asked for it. I hope it meets your expectations. It was a privilege to meet Emma Tennant and to see her rugs, to talk to Stephanie Kraus and to hear about her unmatched heritage in hook rug making and design. And I was delighted finally to talk to Carol Christiansen about Tatit rugs. If you would like to see pictures of some of the rugs we've talked about, then head over to www.hapticandhue.com listen and look for series 7 Haptic and Hue is hosted by Me Chavandra. It's edited and produced by Bill Taylor and sound edited by Charles Lomas of Darkroom Productions. It's an independent podcast free of ads and sponsorship, supported entirely by its listeners who generously fund us through Buy Me a Coffee or by becoming a friend of Haptic and Hume. Friends get access to free text gifts every month and an extra podcast hosted by me and Bill Taylor, where we cover interesting events and the textile news of the day. To join friends, go to www.haptickenhugh.com join. We'll be back next month with a new textile story and we'll be featuring a history of the world in 12 carpets in the next Friends. But until then, it's goodbye from me and enjoy whatever you are making. Sa.