It started innocently enough. Deanne Fitzpatrick and three of her sisters decided to sign up for a two-day mat hooking seminar. Deanne and her husband had just bought an old farmhouse in Amberst, N.S. and she needed floor mats. Her older sister Donna wanted a weekend away from her husband and kids. They all thought it would be fun and it was something they knew their mother was familiar with. She had to hook mats when she was a child in Newfoundland and considered it a chore of poverty. It is a traditional Newfoundland craft, hooking old cloth into a pattern drawn on a piece of brim. Something one had to do if the family didn’t have enough money to buy mats or rugs to cover their cold floors.

A year after that two-day seminar, Deanne did something surprising. She announced she was going to quit her day job as a counselor and take up mat hooking full time. Her mother could not believe that Deanne with a Masters degree and a good job would walk away from that to try to make a living hooking mats. She believed she would never make it.

Deanne, however, surprised them all including herself. It took a couple of years, but people convinced Deanne that her mats were works of art. When she saw her mats hanging in art galleries and how people were responding to them, she accepted that she had succeeded in lifting a humble “chore of poverty” to an art form.

What makes Deanne’s mats stand out is that she hooks a personal story into them. She wasn’t happy when she moved with her parents to Nova Scotia in 1981 and says she’s never far from her birthplace, Freshwater, Newfoundland. The sea and fog and good memories she has from those early years are woven into her mats telling stories of what life was like then. Her mats portray the people she knew there and how they made their living. Finding themselves as topics for Deanne’s mat is something that makes her old friends feel very proud and gives a great joy to those who end up hanging them on their walls