The Yorkshire couple who have saved the folk tradition of rag rug-making - and now have an exhibition at the Ryedale Folk Museum

Louisa describes what she does as ‘painting in fabric’. Her rag rugs often portray animals, cats frequently as she loves cats. The first fabric picture she made, in 1989, was called Rosie In The Airing Cupboard. She cut up some of Lewis’s old shirts for that one.

Other rag rugs capture scenes from the US to Greece to Japan, with many of Yorkshire and Orkney. Some are more abstract; all are bright and evocative, despite humble beginnings as old woollen jumpers or scraps of material.

A few are playful, especially those by Lewis, who had a more cartoonish style. One of his pieces shows a pig and is entitled Streaky Bacon. Lewis is buried in York Cemetery, a graveyard and garden of a controlled sort of wildness, the plants intricately woven. He and Louisa held exhibitions and workshops at the cemetery chapel. Two of the rag rugs in the book are of the cemetery.

Pictures done, we go to a room where the York artist Mark Hearld is waiting, along with a couple of Louisa’s companions. Mark is a long-time friend who has written the introduction to My Rag Rug Life, an art book exploring Louisa’s love of rag rugs published next month. He is also the driver for the day.

At 85, Louisa may have difficulties with her eyes, but she is still sharp and charming, still delighted by making the rag rugs she took up 35 years ago.

She first properly noticed rag rugs at a museum in Nottinghamshire.

“I thought it would be a great shame if the craft died out, and I knew that it was traditional in Yorkshire, and other places of course, too. And I thought with central heating and wall-to-wall carpets, they didn’t need to make their cottages and farm houses so snug anymore.”

The rag rugs that kept homes warm were made on a large frame taken around the cottages.

“They’d all work, they did it communally, they’d circulate around and make a rug for each cottage. That was a very nice sociable thing, and children would often get under the table and be asked to cut up things, but they preferred to play football.”

Louisa works with the material on her lap, finding a frame too cumbersome, and brings the pieces together with a metal hook on a wooden handle.

“The rugs I do are called hooky rugs. You have a hook. You have a strip of material, and you have it underneath the hessian, and you hook it up to the surface. You’re working from the right side, hook up, loop after loop after loop.

“You can draw on the hessian, you make a big design, and maybe plan your colours a bit. But the way I work is very much improvising and exploring the colours as I go along.”

Louisa, who is from York, has shelves filled with scraps of material arranged according to colour.

“I use a great many colours. If I’m doing a sky, for example, I’ll get an armful of blues and maybe some greens, with some greys and a dash of pink. I’ll start cutting them up.”

As she now has difficulties distinguishing colours, she consults friends.

“I’ll ask them is this grey or green, is this grey-green or green-grey. They always have different answers. Everybody seems to see colours differently. I just muddle through really and improvise as I go along, because it’s difficult for me to follow lines now.”

She is always working on a piece and feels something is “very much missing if I don’t have one on the go. Doesn’t mean I am working on it all the time, but it has to be there”.

Louisa was a musician who played the flute in orchestras and small ensembles. With art, she had no formal training but was brought up in a family of artists. About ten years ago, she and Lewis donated some of their rag rugs to the Ryedale museum, and 12 of those pieces are in the show.

As for the new book, Louisa has a relative of particular habits to thank for that, in a sense.

“I’ve got a brother who’s a bit of a nerd,” she says.

Tim Nicholson is thanked in acknowledgements for his suggestion that she should keep good records.

“When I’d made two or three rugs, he wrote out a table to fill in all the details, and then a pocket to put all the photographs in. And somehow I kept to this all these years.”

Louisa ended up with seven lever-arch files, detailing more than 220 rugs, and wondered about throwing them away. Her friend Helena Moore thought a museum might be interested, then had the idea for a book.

“It’s entirely due to her that this book is being made at all. We wrote to a few publishers, and they said no. Then I asked Mark, do you know a publisher who might like to publish this book, and he said try the Rylett Press. It is going to be a lovely book, even if I say so myself.”

She and Mark are long-time friends, and in his loving introduction to the book, he praises the “startling vivacity” of her work, while also saying how “tea and chat is our weekly custom”.

“I’ve known Mark since he was a young lad,” says Louisa, laughing. Mark laughs too, and Louisa adds: “I didn’t know you were there, Mark.”

“Yes, stage left,” he says.

Louisa met Mark, then a burgeoning artist, when he wanted to buy two of her rag rugs. Now he has six or seven, plus a similar number by Lewis.

“I was interested in folk art, and I was interested in the strength of the design and the use of the material,” Mark says.

He’d seen a Christmas card Louisa made, entitled Unknown Birds, and was struck by the colour combinations. She still had those rugs, so he bought the pair, paying in instalments.

“The funny thing is, Louisa has always thought of them as unknown birds, but the minute I saw them, I thought that’s a cock and a hen American robin. And it turns out that they were.”

Louisa chips in: “Some American friends we’d met on tour sent me some muslin cloth, and each piece had a little embroidered bird on the corner, and I thought they were very charming, so I made rugs of them.”

Rugs to cards to a long friendship. One happy chance in a long life of pulling things together creatively.

From Rags to Rugs, Ryedale Folk Museum, Hutton-le-Hole, until July 9. My Rag Rug Life by Louisa Creed is published by Rylett Press on July 1 (£28). Copies can be pre-ordered from Rylett Press. www.rylettpress.com/books/p/my-rag-rug-life