Meet the Maker: Leslie Knight

For early homesteaders, hand-hooked rugs were a way of keeping floors warm(ish) during cold Canadian winters. While city folk could buy rugs, settlers made their own using the materials at hand: burlap recycled from grain sacks and scraps of fabric, often from old clothes. They were guided by sustainability and functionality long before these concepts became catchwords.

Nearly two centuries later, Leslie Knight hooks rugs in her home studio tucked into a log cabin on a family property in Caledon. Although she uses slightly different materials, her process and setting would be familiar to those self-reliant homesteaders.

She starts with a linen backing, an upgrade from burlap, which is prone to drying out. When she first began hooking rugs, Knight sketched her designs on the backing with chalk, which is easy to erase. Now that her strokes are surer, she wields a Sharpie from the get-go.

Her subject matter is unfailingly natural. An avid gardener, Knight finds inspiration among the buds. She also appreciates wilder forms and has made more than five pieces from the same inspiration: a windswept pine near her parents’ Georgian Bay cottage.

Once sure of her outlines, she stretches the linen over a frame and fixes it in place. A backing that is tight as a drum makes it easier to hook fabric through holes in the loose weave.

Knight’s materials are simple: a rug hook and strips of wool fabric. She uses a mechanical cutter to form the strips, although other rug hookers may use hand-held blades or even tear strips manually. Knight counts herself lucky to have a supplier of the materials she needs just down the road in Martina Lesar’s Hooked Rug Studio. In fact, Lesar was her first rug-hooking teacher.

Knight stresses the importance of colour selection. “Rug hooking is painting with wool, but unlike in painting, you can’t just mix your colours to achieve the effect you want. You need a clear vision,” she says. She gestures toward the many pieces of fabric fanned out in beautiful colourways. “This is my palette.”

Knight uses the hook to thread a strip through the backing, with about an inch exposed and the rest dangling below. She pulls up loops from the strip until she has covered the desired area, then trims the strip.

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She repeats this in various colours until the area is totally filled in. “Some of the ‘rules’ of rug hooking say to start in the foreground and work from there, but sometimes I follow these guidelines and sometimes I don’t,” she says. “Often I’ll want to test out my colour choices so I’ll do little bits from each of the sections to make sure it will all come together.” To finish a piece, she turns the edges under and sews them in place.

Although Knight prefers dyed wool fabric, she says anything goes, making her art truly green. “Artists have hooked with old shirts, pants, jeans, leather, sari silk and scraps of wool yarn,” she says. “If you can make a strip, you can rug hook with it.”

Varying the width of the strips helps achieve more painterly effects. “Using smaller strips yields a more realistic effect, and I can use a greater mix of colours in the area – almost like blending,” she says.

Knight’s current work in progress, a gift for her brother, features that same majestic windswept pine on a rocky shore. She loves the subject because it looks completely different depending on the light. This rendering features a moody sky as a storm blows in. The Group of Seven are clearly an influence: “I can’t rug hook the way they painted, of course, but my colour choices for this piece were certainly inspired by their stunning paintings, especially Tom Thomson’s Stormy Weather.”

Knight enjoys walking outdoors and often takes photos to serve as inspiration. During Covid, she hooked a lot of flowers, giving herself permission to experiment widely. “I had a lot of time to make mistakes,” she laughs. In fact, her favourite work is the first she finished. Featuring a beautiful peony, the 24-inch square piece hangs on an upstairs wall.

Many of her other creations are draped on couches, made into pillows, or serve as wall art. But Knight never places her rugs on the floor – at least for now. Harley, her Swiss mountain dog, loves to claw and would make quick work of a rug by pulling out the loops.

After their youngest child left for university last September, Knight and her husband, David, began making Caledon their permanent home. She now spends about four days a week at the cabin and hopes to complete the transition from Toronto this spring.

Last year was a busy one. She sat on the board of an international rug-hooking guild. She and fellow textile artist Yvonne Iten-Scott shared a studio at the Alton Mill Arts Centre and taught a variety of workshops.

The pair also curated and contributed to the travelling exhibit and illustrated children’s book Magnificent Bugs in Rugs, which features hand-hooked rugs depicting bugs by artists from around the world. Her year culminated in a month-long residency in Iceland.

As for 2025? “I’m staying put and we gave up the studio – life was just too busy. I plan to offer some workshops from here, though for now, I want to be still and create, surrounded by my beautiful Ontario landscapes.”