Nancy smiling a welcome at the door of the
house where she runs her rug braiding camp.

Nancy Young was hurrying to her washing machine with what looked like a blanket under her arm. It was a very old and very dirty remnant from a building on the site of a long-closed woolen mill, but for a rug braider like Nancy it might be pure gold. Or, anyway, pure wool suitable for her craft.

Nancy had found the remnant on the site of the Eastland Woolen Mill in Corinna, Maine. The mill closed down for good, after 86 years, in 1996, but half of the mill had burned down in 1951, and Nancy had found her remnant in a part of a building that had survived. She had no idea how old the material was, but it was of blanket weight and she had high hopes for it.

Stacks of woolen material stored
in the basement for Nancy's art.

In looking to recycle her find, Nancy was following a tradition dating back to the early 1800’s, when woolen mills sprang up all over New England and waste pieces and worn articles were recycled into braided rugs. The tradition went westward with the pioneers.

Today, with recycling all the rage, one would think that rug braiding would be all the rage, too. But the woolen mills in the U.S. are virtually extinct, and wool is increasingly expensive. Nancy is one of a relatively small group of enthusiasts (she estimates that there are about 700 rug braiders in the entire country) dedicated to ensuring that the art of braiding and hooking rugs does not become extinct as well.

To that end, Nancy has run the “Watersedge Rug Braiding Camp” in her house in Winthrop, Maine, since 1995, with the help of her husband David, who does the cooking. David also makes the racks on which to hang the rugs during the braiding process, and has made hooked rugs himself.

Nancy in the large basement workroom of her
lakeside establishment in Winthrop, Maine.

The camp provides three-day Weekend Workshops and one-day “Focus” sessions (lunch provided). Students at the workshops have projects to work on as they learn, talk, and, presumably eat and sleep rug braiding. Rugs can be braided according to a previously determined design (some people work them out in advance on a computer), but Nancy likes to encourage a "free spirit" in her students.

Nancy also likes to teach how to
make mittens like those displayed.

The one-day sessions generally focus on a particular technique but sometimes they cover the complete range of skills related to rug braiding. The students come from all over the U.S. and have included two from Switzerland and one from Australia. A few men have taken the course and Nancy says they were quite good.

Nancy has also recently started to work with a few colleagues to organize workshops at various other locations, and has frequently organized group projects in her locality. She assigns a part of the rug to each member of the group and asks the members to make braids at home and lace (sew) them together. The individual parts are brought together and combined (technically, “butted”) in wide bands and then laced to the rug.

The groups make large braided rugs to raffle off for charity or for certain buildings. The largest project of this sort that Nancy organized produced several rugs for an historic inn in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Another such project is on view in the Charles M. Bailey Public Library in Winthrop.

For this project, Nancy organized a group of 12 women who used wool from the Carleton Woolen Mill in Winthrop (it closed in 2000). They worked for a year to make a rug measuring about 6’ x 9’ that gives warmth and color to the library’s front reading room. A plaque in the library attests to the fact that the rug was completed in June 2002.

Nancy's group made a rug that gives a warm
and gracious look to the library reading room.

The task that Nancy and others have set themselves to help prevent the art of rug braiding from following the woolen mills into extinction is made somewhat easier by the fact that satisfactory woolen braided rugs can be made with wool blends. So long as the material is at least 70 percent wool, Nancy can live with it for braiding, though not for hooking, woolen rugs. In fact, she has found that a bit of nylon in the mix prevents wear in the rug. The high percentage of wool is essential, however, for the qualities in wool that she loves—its resiliency, chiefly, but also its fire-retardant nature and its resistance to water and stains.

Nancy has worked with other materials besides wool, including denim, and once made a 12’ x 17’ rug for a customer out of old denim jeans. (Nancy continues to make small braided rugs on commission.) She has also worked with polar fleece and cotton.

Recently, she bought cotton-blend athletic socks (at $4.50 for half a dozen), cut them in spiral strips, and taught a group how to make a rug out of them. She recommends this as a simple project for children. Nancy likes to work with children on various sorts of projects. A friend brings her young daughters to Nancy on days when there is no school to make wool mittens. Recently, Nancy added button making to the mitten making, so that the children go home with hand-crafted buttons on their mittens.

Button making is a recent addition to the skills
Nancy teaches mitten makers in her classes.

Nancy likes to recall a project she and a colleague once took on for a sixth-grade class at a school in Augusta, Maine. The children had decided that they wanted a project they could all work on and a rug they could all sit on. For three months, Nancy and her friend went into the classroom for two hours every week and showed the children how to braid and then lace the braids together. They made an 8’ x 10’ rug, out of coat fabric and blanket material.

Nancy’s braided rugs and at least one hooked rug made by her husband David are in evidence in their Winthrop house. A series of small, connected oval rugs makes for a striking hallway rug. Even more striking is the 9’ x 12’ rug in the living room that Nancy made 20 years ago. It shows no signs of wear or loss of color–on either side. Nancy turns up a corner to demonstrate.

A series of small, connected rugs
makes for a striking hallway rug.

There is no place in the house, though, for a rug that Nancy calls “Big Red.” It is 10 feet in diameter, and she made it 48 years ago, when she and David were first married. Nancy recalls that their children (they have a son and a daughter and three grandchildren) learned to crawl and walk on that rug. Currently, the rug is on loan to Nancy’s brother, unless and until a member of her own family decides to claim it. To her deep regret, her children prefer Oriental rugs.

Nancy was born Nancy Penniman in Canton, Ohio, in 1932. She grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where her father worked for Bethlehem Steel. She went to Liberty High School there, and graduated, with a Phi Beta Kappa key, from Gettysburg College, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1954. Two years later she married David. While he was away in the Navy during the Korean War, she lived in Winthrop, where her father was born. Nancy, who had one young child at the time, helped her widowed mother run 13 lakeside cottages on land her father had bought in the 1930’s. Her house in Winthrop was built on the site of one of the cottages.

During that time, Nancy read an article about rug braiding in Good Housekeeping Magazine that inspired her to learn to braid rugs, which she did, from reading books on the subject and, eventually, taking a few lessons. After moving with her husband to Quakertown, Pennsylvania in 1965, she got a Master’s Degree in Education from Lehigh University, in Bethlehem, in 1968, and then taught mathematics to students at a vocational school in Upper Bucks County, Pennsylvania for 21 years. The students were learning skilled trades requiring them to take measurements of various sorts, and Nancy taught them the math they needed to take them.

Nancy shows a rug braiding work in progress
in front of her fireplace in Winthrop, Maine.

While Nancy held that job, her daughter moved into an apartment after graduating from college, and Nancy brought her a braided rug named “Lavender Blue,” after the song. Her daughter’s friends saw the rug and wanted one, so Nancy braided some more. By the mid-80’s Nancy was teaching rug braiding in evening adult-education courses offered by high schools and community colleges.

She also fine-tuned her skills at this time, she says, by searching out people whose techniques she wanted to learn, and became a juried (selected) member of the Pennsylvania Guild of Craftsmen.

After her retirement in 1990 from her job at the vocational school, Nancy received invitations to teach rug braiding at various institutions, including the Museum of Folk Art in New York City (which has sold some of her rugs), and the Brookside Crafts Center, in Brookside, Connecticut.

Nancy does what she can to keep the art of rug braiding alive and well, and to see that attention is paid by museums to rug braiding and the important part it played in the lives of women in New England.

For more information about Nancy’s rug braiding camp and the workshops she helps to run at other localities, click on www.rugbraidingcamp.com.

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