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HERITAGE COLLECTION OF CENTURY OLD YARN MAKING ARTIFACTS GIFTED TO HOOKED RUG MUSEUM PROJECT
Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Picture a little seven year old girl with a tiny glass-ribbed scrub-board cleaning sheep’s wool and picking out “burrs” from the tangled fleece while standing alongside her beloved grandmother in Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia some 65 years ago and you have a fleeting image of the heritage of talented rug hooker Beatrice Mason.

The MicMac traditions of by-gone days are reflected in her love for the great outdoors and the preservation of rug hooking history to which she has just made a unique heritage gift.

She is just one of many amazing rug hookers who are demonstrating unselfish support for the Hooked Rug Museum of North America project being a charter member and contributor to the renowned “At Grandmother’s Knee “ Garrett rug replication program which has just preserved fifty one 1892 circa hand-drawn rug designs for future generations to enjoy. The geometric rug hooking design she selected to create reflects the warm earth colors of a heritage very important to her and her early life in Nova Scotia woods.

It was her grandmother, Lottie Beatrice Harnish (formerly a Snair or Schnare) who was born in 1879 (deceased 1958) who gifted her with that child’s sized wash board - a mini-sized replica of a larger one that grandmother Harnish also used for cleaning dirt from the raw sheep’s wool after shearing. Both of those wash-boards along with many other historic vestiges of the tools of rug making have just been donated by her to the Hooked Rug Museum of North America for the future displays.

Dating back more than a half century from the grandmothers passing, they are only a small part of the package of cherished memories of the early days of rug hooking that Beatrice Mason recently presented to the Hooked Rug Museum in memory of her two grandparents and her mother Eileen Mae (formerly a Jollimore) of Queensland.

It was Bea’s grandfather, the late William Thomas Harnish ( 1873-1956) , who during his lifetime was a cooper and who also adored the beautiful seven year old black haired child and took her on many ventures into the lush woodlands behind their home to cut woods for his barrel making .

Together they transported the harvest out of the woods in winter on a hand-hauled sleigh built from barrel staves and fitted with iron runners. She also helped him cut fence stakes, and bean poles and loved to peel the bark from the logs while seated on a long bench armed with a double handed cutting knife designed for that purpose. Because of her tiny size she to this day remembers crawling inside the barrels to water-proof the interior of the staves so the barrels would not leak.

Bea remembers her grandmother and the ancestral skills of rug making she passed along to her and her and mother so many years ago. . It was her grandfather who made a wool winder with an amazing thread carved entirely by hand . Such a tool was a vital necessity in the pioneer manufacture of raw sheep’s wool to a finished product for rug making and knitting . She inherited that one of a kind artifact when her grandmother passed away half a century ago. Designed somewhat on the style of a cooper or cobbler’s bench, the winder features hand-cut wooden cogs . One of the original winders remains intact, several others have snapped off over the century of moving from place to place and require repair. It is of unique historic significance- quite possibly amongst the oldest of rug hooking antiquities in the Museum’s collection.

Her grandmother’s old spinning wheel on which she had been taught to spin was also saved by Beatrice for a behalf century along with a pair of raw wool carding paddles and a spool for winding the yarn , all of which have also become part of the significant contribution. ( Bea Mason specializes in hooking rugs depicting events in Chester ‘s boating history. Her ability to capture the action in sailing scenes makes her hooked rugs unique and rare. Her student in the Grandmother’s Knee program was Linda Fraser of Chester whose artistic creation was a sailing scene in wide-cut which was of amazing quality for a first rug. Bea herself, had to redirect her rug hooking skills under this program to hook a non-marine scene from an old Garrett pattern. She was assigned a difficult design and pondered long on how to hook it. Her outdoor experiences and inherited culture resulted in a rug hooked in tones which harmonized with nature creating both a unique look at how a Garrett pattern might have looked a century ago and a reflection on her cultural heritage.)

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