Lilly in the Field: Sepia Photograph Rugs

This is an older rug, Friends, hooked over several months leading up to its completion in 2013. I had been hooking for 5 years at that time. This is a special rug for me, and Cathy Stephan was my teacher. I'll include several other sepia photograph rugs here too, but I'd like to tell the story of "Lilly in the Field," a tribute to my mother and her difficult young life.

This is my "Lilly of the Field." The gospels of Matthew and Luke say that God takes care of the lilies of the field, who don't have to toil or spin. My mom's name is Lilly, and she certainly did toil. She had very little in her younger years, but ultimately survived her difficult childhood and led a well-lived life. She turned 88 last week.

This rug involved adapting an old family photo of my mom and making a composite of other photos of cotton fields. Mom came from a very poor family in Arkansas, working people who would never have wanted photos of themselves in the field. The best photo I could find showed Mom when she was about eleven (1949), standing in front of a nice car. Does anyone remember that, the days when people took a photo in front of a car? It was not Mom's father's car, but probably someone who had come to visit them in their tar-paper shack out in the hicks of eastern Arkansas. Mom came from a large family, nine surviving children (three of twelve children died, including my mother's twin sister). They were sharecroppers, allowed to live in a shack for as long as they worked in a certain owner's fields. They moved often.

I found photos online of cotton fields and cotton sacks to make my composite pattern of Mom standing in the field. I believe I sent all the photos to Cathy Stephan, who drew this pattern. Mom's dress would have been made from flour sacks of that time. The manufacturers printed flour sacks with patterns. People of little means made their daughters' dresses out of these flour sacks (kind of like the way rug hookers of the past would use rug patterns printed on feed bags). I made a tear in the hem of her dress.

This is "O Captain, My Captain," Cathy Stephan's beautiful portrait of President Abraham Lincoln in the last years of his life.

In 2013, I wrote an article for Rug Hooking Magazine about this type of rug. I titled it "Forty Shades of Brown," and I'm proud to say that it included about 10 beautiful rugs of this type by Liz Marino, Marilyn Becker (who is no longer with us, bless her), Lyle Drier, and others--incredible rugs!

From the RHM article: "The word “sepia” comes from the Greek and means "cuttlefish," a mollusk that secretes dark brown ink.  In early photography, a gold toning bath would cause a brown tint to occur in photos, which eventually faded into the reddish-brown colors we call sepia." Nowadays, we can use photoshop and other apps to get the sepia effect on any photo.

Here's Cathy Stephan's Lincoln portrait above, and you'll find more sepia-colored rugs below.

Many times, I have listened to my mom and her relatives, especially my late Aunt Ann, talk about the nearly unbearable heat of an Arkansas cotton field, and that after their long days were done, they would come home to their shack. They didn't have air-conditioning in 1949--we all know that. But they didn't even have a window fan. Mom said often, they didn't have screens in the windows of these houses where sharecroppers were allowed to live. Eventually, Mom's brothers would tack screens over the windows, but until they did, my grandmother would stay up all night to keep mosquitoes off of the baby (and there were many babies.)

Mom in Oregon. Ann had just served her a nipple of Venus, and she got a big laugh out of that!

I once read a poem about the daytime moon, waiting off stage for her moment to shine, and I hooked that sliver of moon into Lilly in the Field, because that was Mom's girlhood--waiting for better times. Twenty-five percent of her siblings didn't survive their childhoods. But at 16, Mom moved to Iowa and became a waitress. Dad dined in her restaurant, and they married and raised four kids. She loves to laugh and is the most generous person I know. Some people would call her early life traumatic, and while she acknowledges how hard it was, she hasn't let it define her. She shines.

More beautiful sepia rugs below, friends, and thank you for reading my Noodlings today. Wishing you beautiful loops!

"Mary Me, Mary" was designed and hooked by the late Marilyn Becker of Wisconsin. Marilyn adapted a family photo. This was when her father proposed to her mother. Notice the run in her mother's stocking. Marilyn loved to include important details.

Liz Marino adapted this old family photo, "Martellotti Family Picnic Circa 1928." Hooked in a 4-cut, the detail is amazing. Everything Liz hooks is incredible. I've been a fan for decades now.

John Flournoy of Rehoboth Beach, MD, hooked this image of steelworkers. You might be familiar with his adaptation of an old postcard of a convent-turned-hotel in Rehoboth Beach--I need to look that up and remember the title.

One Crow, Sorrow--designed and hooked by Tammy Pavich in 2013--adapted with permission from a photo, "Her Graveyard" taken by Donna Snyder.

Lilly Phillips and Tammy (Phillips) Pavich at Bella's wedding.